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      Republicans and Democrats send dueling delegations to US border

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      Republicans and Democrats sent dueling delegations to the southern US border on Friday, in an attempt to frame perceptions of the Biden administration’s immigration policy amid an uptick in recent weeks in border crossings by undocumented migrants.A group of Republican senators led by Ted Cruz of Texas presented their trip as an exposé of dire circumstances, with Cruz sharing video of himself on Thursday night standing in darkness next to the Rio Grande river and falsely warning about a “flood” of human smuggling.A group of Democratic members of the House of Representatives led by Joaquín Castro of Texas described a different vulnerability at the border, that of unaccompanied children held by the US government.The Democratic delegation planned on Friday to visit children at a Department of Health and Human Services facility in Carrizo Springs, Texas, to ensure “that they’re treated humanely”, Castro said.Beto O’Rourke, the former representative from El Paso, Texas, blasted Cruz on Twitter on Friday for what O’Rourke implied was a political charade designed to slow the momentum of Joe Biden, who has presided over a successful coronavirus vaccine rollout, signed an $1.9tn economic relief package and announced plans for a similar big spend on infrastructure.“The truth is, the number of individual asylum seekers and immigrants seeking to come to this country is the SAME or LOWER than it was in 2019 when [Donald] Trump was President (and you were, apparently, Senator),” O’Rourke sniped at Cruz. “This isn’t any more of a crisis today than it was then.”After two election cycles in which the former president’s strategy of fearmongering about supposed pressure on the border produced a Republican rout in midterm elections and then his own defeat, Cruz and colleagues returned to the strategy once again with a two-day, high-profile tour of border areas that included almost one quarter of the party’s senators.One member of the delegation, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, tweeted video from a visibly crowded border detention facility on Friday, claiming the facility was holding almost 10 times its intended capacity.Cruz was trying on Friday to get the hashtag “#Bidenbordercrisis” going on Twitter.Biden said in a news conference on Thursday: “I’m ready to work with any Republican who wants to help solve the problem. Or make the situation better.”But the president sought to draw a sharp line between his border policies and those of his predecessor.“The idea that I’m going to say, which I would never do, ‘If an unaccompanied child ends up at the border, we’re just going to let him starve to death and stay on the other side’ – no previous administration did that either, except Trump,” Biden said. “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it.”Trump enacted a policy of family separation at the border, taking more than 5,500 children from their parents and then failing to keep track of the separated families, ultimately stranding hundreds of children whose parents could not be found, according to court documents.Biden has placed Kamala Harris in charge of addressing the situation on the border. In an interview earlier this week the vice-president said that she and Biden would “absolutely” visit the border in person.“They should all be going back. All be going back,” Biden said of people crossing the border. “The only people we are not going to leave sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children.”Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said a nine-year-old child from Mexico died last week while trying to reach the US border.“US border patrol agents assigned to Del Rio sector’s marine unit rescued two migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande, March 20,” the agency said in a statement released on Thursday. “US border patrol marine unit agents responded to assist three individuals stranded on an island on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande River.”Border agents administered first aid to the three migrants. Two of them, a woman from Guatemala and her three-year-old child, regained consciousness, but the third, a child from Mexico, did not and was later pronounced dead by medical officials.“We extend our deepest condolences to the family and friends of this small child,” the Del Rio sector chief patrol agent, Austin L Skero II, said in the statement.A member of the Democratic border delegation, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, spotlighted the plight of children held in US border detention facilities.“Heading to the southern border with 7 year old Jakelin Caal on my mind,” Tlaib tweeted on Friday morning. “She died in detention, in our care, in 2018. I want to make sure no child dies like this, with conditions that we control.” More

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      Just how severe will America's minority rule become? | David Sirota

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      As everyone from President Joe Biden to the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin to liberal groups now push to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.“Letting the majority do everything it wants to is not what the founders had in mind,” said the Senate Republican whip, John Thune, in a floor speech defending the filibuster this week. “The founders recognized that it wasn’t just kings who could be tyrants. They knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority if unchecked could trample the rights of the minority … so the founders created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives.”But an inconvenient fact undermines Thune’s argument and should set pluralists at ease: even if the filibuster were eliminated and bills could advance on a simple majority vote, the Senate would still be giving a minority of the American population enough Senate representation to block legislation supported by the majority of the country.In the debate over the filibuster, then, the question is not whether you believe the majority should rule. Instead, the question is this: how small a minority should be given legislative veto power over the rest of the country?Back in 2010, the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was not wrong when he said the founders were “quoted as saying at the constitutional convention the Senate was going to be like the saucer under the teacup, and the tea was going to slosh out and cool off”.To that end, the founders created a Senate giving large and small states equal representation. The idea was for the upper chamber to act as a stately bulwark against the more uncouth ideas that could bubble up from the rabble and its representatives in the lower chamber. In the words of James Madison, the Senate’s undemocratic structure was designed as a “necessary fence” against “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the people.In the modern era, the structure of the Senate has often turned the upper chamber into a place that does not merely respect minority rights – it has actually allowed the minority to rule, regardless of the status of the filibuster. As CNN’s Ronald Brownstein recounted last year, “While the [Republican party] has controlled the Senate for about 22 of the past 40 years, Republican senators have represented a majority of the nation’s population for only a single session over that period: from 1997 to 1998.”Maybe you like this undemocratic dynamic, because you believe it represents the founders’ ideals. Maybe you hate this dynamic, because you believe it makes a mockery of democracy. Whichever side you are on, here’s the point that is germane to the renewed debate over Senate rules: even if the filibuster is eliminated, a minority of the American population will still retain disproportionate, outsized power in Congress’s upper chamber, just as the founders desired.That is because under simple-majority voting rules, the majority of the country’s population does not necessarily rule the Senate. Even without the filibuster, the Senate is still a place where the 265,000 South Dakotans who elected Thune get as much representation as the 2.2 million Georgia voters who elected Raphael Warnock. Consequently, a filibuster-free Democratic Senate would still allow a minority of the population’s senators to rule, if they so choose – because the Senate still provides far less than half the country with the 51 votes necessary to stop any legislation in its tracks.To understand how, let’s do some math.Right now, the 50 Senate Democrats represent roughly 61% of the country’s population, according to census data. The 50 Senate Republicans represent just 49% of the population. All of the Republicans plus Manchin (the Democrat most likely to oppose progressive legislation) represent less than half the country’s population. And yet in a filibuster-free Senate, they could still use a simple-majority vote to stop anything pushed by 49 Senate Democrats who represent 61% of the country. (Note: the percentages don’t add up to 100 because six states have one Democratic and one Republican senator.)If you happen to be one of those constitutional originalists worried about preserving the power of small states, don’t fret. The power imbalance becomes more pronounced when you take party out of the equation and just look at states with the least population. A whopping 52 senators from the least populated states currently represent just 17% of America’s total population – but they would still be able to stop all legislation in a filibuster-free Senate under simple-majority rules.A different way to consider the situation is to think of each American being represented by two Senate votes. Right now, 49 Democrats represent 56% of all those votes. The Republican-Manchin caucus represents just 43% of all of those Senate votes. But again, even without the filibuster, conservatives would have 51 Senate votes to stop anything.These numbers actually understate the situation. That’s because while senators technically represent their entire states, they only need half the voter turnout in their states to actually get into the Senate.Filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% of the population to gridlock the governmentThe point here is simple: no matter what is done with the filibuster, the much-worshiped “cooling saucer” is preserved, and every armchair constitutional scholar with a high self-regard will still get to smugly tell others we are a republic, not a democracy.But these figures underscore not just that the filibuster can be safely discarded without trampling minority rights. They also spotlight how insane the filibuster actually is.Using the same aforementioned math, the filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% percent of the population to gridlock the government. Again, considering that it only takes 50% of the vote to get elected, the filibuster means that about 11% of the voting-age population has successfully elected Republican senators who can theoretically block anything that polls show the overwhelming majority of the country might want.Part of what makes the filibuster discourse so confusing is the differing definitions of “minority”.When the founders created the Senate, they aimed to guarantee that the minority of the population still had rights – they didn’t care about the rights of political parties or factions (which many of them hated).By contrast, when Republicans like Thune depict the filibuster as a noble bulwark protecting “minority rights”, he is not talking about protecting a minority of the population. He is talking about fortifying the power of the chamber’s minority political factions, regardless of how small a segment of the population those factions actually represent.That’s a huge difference – and it helps explain the filibuster’s practical application.Remember, the filibuster is not known as the instrument preventing the majority of the population from trampling the rights of racial or ethnic minorities. Quite the opposite: it has in practice empowered an ideologically conservative political faction to both deprive certain minority groups of their rights and block what the majority of the population wants.When it comes to racial equality, Martin Luther King III noted in an op-ed this week: “The filibuster has historically been used as a tool to try to keep segregationist policies in place. In the 1920s, it was employed to stop anti-lynching legislation from moving forward. In the 1950s, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina famously held the longest filibuster on record to delay, unsuccessfully, civil rights measures. And in a failed effort to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern segregationists filibustered the bill for 60 working days.”Similarly, think about the debate over firearm policy in the wake of yet more mass shootings. The Nation’s Ari Berman notes that after the Sandy Hook massacre, “bipartisan legislation requiring background checks for gun sales was supported by 86% of Americans and 54 senators but blocked by 46 senators representing just 38% of the country.”In both cases, we see that Madison’s desire to restrict democracy in order to limit “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the public wrongly presumes that the only way those impulses are expressed is through the passage of new legislation. In practice, blocking legislation has been an equally pernicious expression of such volatile impulses and passions by a motivated but tiny segment of the population. The filibuster allows those impulses and passions to not just influence legislation but to wholly dominate public policy through that minority’s political factions.In light of this history and the math of the Senate, proposals to merely reform the rules with half measures like a “talking filibuster” seem at best unnecessarily cautious, especially since the filibuster is now so routinely invoked to halt legislation.Fully eliminating the filibuster would still allow a minority of the population to wield disproportionate power, because the chamber’s structure has baked-in rights for the minority of the population even in straight up-or-down vote situations.Put another way: even without the filibuster, there can be a Senate majority party whose senators represent less than half the country. There can also be a transpartisan coalition of 51 senators who represent less than half the country and who can stop essentially anything.The filibuster just makes this undemocratic system more undemocratic, in ways that cannot be justified. In the name of preventing a tyranny of the majority, it creates what I have called a tyranny of the tiny minority. It takes a House of Lords-style institution that has been rationalized by glib “we’re a republic, not a democracy” logic and transforms it into a cartoonishly undemocratic weapon of reactionary power.The rationale for that transformation has amounted to vapid paeans to the founders. Everybody seems to have forgotten that Alexander Hamilton admitted: “To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.”Even without the filibuster, the lesser number of the country will have more than enough Senate representation to express many of its political desires. Keeping the filibuster simply lets that lesser number completely rule everything.
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      The Republican party's problem with race: Politics Weekly Extra

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      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Michael Steele, a former chair of the Republican national committee. The pair discuss why he chose to campaign for a Joe Biden victory, and how the Republicans are getting it wrong when it comes to Black and minority voters

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Michael Steele was the first Black chairman of the GOP, but in 2020 he decided to join the Lincoln Project, a group of disaffected Republicans who grouped together to campaign against Donald Trump winning a second term. Still a Republican, he believes his party needs to abandon its recent populist rhetoric and widen the net of potential voters beyond older white Americans. As he explains in this fascinating interview with Jonathan, if it doesn’t do so, the party could rue the decision for years to come. Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Georgia's Republican-led legislature passes sweeping voting restrictions

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      Georgia lawmakers on Thursday gave final approval to legislation to impose sweeping new restrictions on voting access in the state that make it harder to vote by mail and give the state legislature more power over elections.The measure was signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican, on Thursday evening. “Significant reforms to our state elections were needed. There’s no doubt there were many alarming issues with how the election was handled, and those problems, understandably, led to a crisis of confidence,” Kemp said during prepared remarks shortly after signing the bill.It requires voters to submit ID information with both an absentee ballot request and the ballot itself. It limits the use of absentee ballot drop boxes, allows for unlimited challenges to a voter’s qualifications, cuts the runoff election period from nine to four weeks, and significantly shortens the amount of time voters have to request an absentee ballot.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe legislation also empowers the state legislature, currently dominated by Republicans, to appoint a majority of members on the five-person state election board. That provision would strip Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who stood up to Trump after the election, from his current role as chairman of the board. The bill creates a mechanism for the board to strip local election boards of their power.Gloria Butler, a Democratic state senator, said the bill would make it harder to vote, especially for poor and disabled people. “We are witnessing a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era,” she said just before the bill passed.“This bill is absolutely about opportunities, but it isn’t about opportunities to vote. It is about the opportunity to keep control and keep power at any cost,” Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator, said on Thursday.Park Cannon, a Democratic state representative, was arrested on Thursday after knocking on the door of the governor’s office during a protests against the legislation’s signing. Video captured by a bystander shows Cannon, who is Black, handcuffed with her arms behind her back and being forcibly removed from the state Capitol by two officers, one on each arm. She says, “Where are you taking me?” and, “Stop” as she is taken from the building.The legislation comes after Georgia saw record turnout in the November election and January US Senate runoffs, including surges among Black and other minority voters. It has become the center of national attention because many see it as a crystallization of a national push by Republicans to make it harder to vote. Alluding to a measure in the Georgia bill that bans providing food or water to people standing in line to vote, Joe Biden called that national effort “sick” during a Thursday press conference. “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” he said.Facing opposition from top Republicans in the state, Republicans dropped a push to require voters to give an excuse to vote by mail. And amid national outcry, they backed away in recent weeks from proposals to prohibit early voting on Sundays, a day that Black voters have traditionally used in disproportionate numbers to cast ballots. The measure that passed on Thursday actually expands weekend early voting in the state, requiring an additional Saturday and authorizing counties to offer it on two Sundays if they choose.Republicans seized on that provision in the bill on Thursday to claim that they were actually expanding voter access in Georgia. “The bill greatly expands the accessibility of voters in Georgia and greatly improves the process of administration of elections while at the same time providing more accountability to provide that the vote is properly preserved,” Barry Fleming, a GOP state representative who spearheaded the legislation, said on Thursday.They offered little substantive justification for why the measure was necessary after an election in which there was record turnout, and in which multiple recounts in the presidential race found no evidence of fraud. Instead, they said the bill was necessary to preserve voter confidence.The nearly 100-page measure was only formally unveiled last week, when it was abruptly inserted into another two-page bill. While the legislation includes several of the measures lawmakers debated, it included some new ideas that had not been fully debated. Democrats and voting activists have accused Republicans of trying to ram through a bill without fully vetting it.Democrats and voting rights groups are expected to swiftly file a slew of lawsuits challenging the measure.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      in US Politics

      Biden pushed on immigration in press conference but provides no clear answers – live

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      Key events

      Show

      5.00pm EDT
      17:00

      Today so far

      4.43pm EDT
      16:43

      California expands vaccine access to everyone 16 and older starting April 15

      3.56pm EDT
      15:56

      Biden says he expects US troops to leave Afghanistan by next year

      2.42pm EDT
      14:42

      Biden press conference summary

      2.07pm EDT
      14:07

      Biden says he plans to run for re-election in 2024

      1.29pm EDT
      13:29

      Biden announces goal of 200 million vaccine doses over his first 100 days

      12.30pm EDT
      12:30

      Today so far

      Live feed

      Show

      5.44pm EDT
      17:44

      The West Virginia house passed legislation today that would ban transgender students from playing on the sports teams that match their gender, part of a wave of Republican bills across the country that target trans children.
      The bill, which heads to the state’s senate, is one of more than 80 proposed bills so far this year that seek to restrict trans rights – most that would limit youth access to sports and block trans kids’ use of gender-affirming care.
      Arkansas is close to passing legislation that would outlaw affirming-care for youth and punish doctors who treat trans kids, despite the fact that major medical associations recommend this care as the best practice. That state bill would also prohibit health insurance from covering certain care for all trans people.
      Mississippi signed a sports ban bill this month, and the legislatures in Tennessee and Arkansas both sent similar proposals to their governors earlier this week.
      More reading here on how trans children became the target in the GOP’s culture wars:

      And more reading on the proposed healthcare bans:

      Updated
      at 5.52pm EDT

      5.12pm EDT
      17:12

      Hello – Sam Levin in Los Angeles, taking over our live coverage for the rest of the day. My California colleagues Abené Clayton and Lois Beckett, who have been reporting on gun violence for years, have written about all the ways our current gun debate in America is wrong:

      Lois Beckett
      (@loisbeckett)
      Between us, @abene_writes and I have been covering gun violence in America for more than a decade. We wrote about why America’s current gun debate makes us so angry–and why this debate will never make us safer. https://t.co/6bePzC2nc4 pic.twitter.com/xyQp1kq2S4

      March 25, 2021

      The “solutions” offered today would do little to stem the daily death toll. The assault rifle bans and universal background checks reflexively supported by progressives will do little to decrease the bulk of shooting incidents: suicides and community violence. Approaches that have stronger evidence of saving lives, like intensive city-level support programs for the men and boys most at risk of being shot or becoming shooters, hospital-based violence intervention programs, or even more effective policing strategies, rarely get discussed on a national level. Even Democrats seem to prefer fighting a high-profile, losing battle with Republicans over gun control laws, rather than devoting time and focus to less partisan prevention efforts.

      More here:

      5.00pm EDT
      17:00

      Today so far

      That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague Sam Levin will take over the blog for the next few hours.
      Here’s where the day stands so far:

      Joe Biden was grilled on his immigration policies during his first presidential press conference. The president attempted to downplay the recent increase in migrants attempting to enter the US, noting that the country usually sees a seasonal fluctuation in border arrival numbers. However, the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has said the US is on track to record the highest number of migrant arrivals in two decades. Biden said of his immigration policies, “I can’t guarantee we’re going to solve everything, but I can guarantee we’re going to make it better.”
      Biden pledged to administer 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses over his first 100 days in office, doubling his initial pledge of 100 million doses. The Biden administration hit that initial goal on Friday, weeks ahead of schedule, and the US has administered about 2.5 million vaccine doses a day over the past week. “I know it’s ambitious, twice our original goal, but no other country in the world has even come close, not even close to what we are doing,” Biden said. “I think we can do it.”
      Biden said he expected to run for re-election in 2024. “My plan is to run for re-election,” Biden said. “That’s my expectation.” But when pressed on whether he would commit to running for a second term, the president gave himself some wiggle room, saying he could not predict the future.
      The president said he expected all US troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by next year. “If we leave, we’re going to do so in a safe and orderly way,” Biden said. “We will leave. The question is when we leave.” When asked if US troops would be in Afghanistan next year, the president replied, “I can’t picture that being the case.”
      The Boulder shooting suspect made his first appearance in court. The attorney of Ahmad Alissa requested a mental health assessment for her client, who will be held without bail as he faces 10 counts of first-degree murder.
      The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter testified before the House for a hearing on online disinformation. The energy and commerce committee hearing marked the first time that the CEOs – Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter – have testified before Congress since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

      Sam will having more coming up, so stay tuned.

      Updated
      at 5.09pm EDT

      4.43pm EDT
      16:43

      California expands vaccine access to everyone 16 and older starting April 15

      All Californians aged 16 and older will be eligible to receive a coronavirus vaccine starting 15 April, the state’s governor just announced.
      “With vaccine supply increasing and by expanding eligibility to more Californians, the light at the end of the tunnel continues to get brighter,” Democrat Gavin Newsom said in a statement.
      “We remain focused on equity as we extend vaccine eligibility to those 50 and over starting April 1, and those 16 and older starting April 15. This is possible thanks to the leadership of the Biden-Harris Administration and the countless public health officials across the state who have stepped up to get shots into arms.”

      Gavin Newsom
      (@GavinNewsom)
      NEW: CA is expanding eligibility for the #COVID19 vaccine.Beginning April 1, Californians 50+ will be able to sign up for an appointment.Beginning April 15, eligibility will be expanded to everyone 16 and older.The light at the end of the tunnel continues to get brighter.

      March 25, 2021

      Newsom said that he expected California to be administering more than 3 million vaccine doses a week in the second half of April.
      Newsom’s announcement comes on the heels of other states, including Georgia and North Carolina, announcing that coronavirus vaccines will soon be made available to all adult residents.
      Joe Biden said earlier this month that he expected all American adults to be eligible to receive a vaccine by 1 May. During his press conference today, the president set a goal of administering 200 million vaccine doses over his first 100 days in office, doubling his initial promise of administering 100 million doses.

      Updated
      at 5.10pm EDT

      4.24pm EDT
      16:24

      David Smith

      Has the fever in American politics finally broken? After a sickness that lasted four long years, it seems the patient is on the road to recovery.
      That was the impression of Joe Biden’s first presidential press conference on Thursday. For a start, there were no lies or insults or speculations about the medicinal benefits of bleach. Sometimes Biden was earnest, sometimes he was dull, sometimes he offered an avuncular chuckle. He was solid.
      But equally telling were the questions from 10 reporters in the White House press corps. No look-in for the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed half a million Americans. Not much about the fragile nature of democracy except for Republicans’ assault on voting rights – a phenomenon that predates Donald Trump.
      Instead the main focus at the hour-long event were hardy perennials about the US-Mexico border, the war in Afghanistan, relations with China, infrastructure, the next election and the filibuster, a Senate parliamentary procedure unlikely to excite the rest of the world.
      In short, it was another victory for Biden in his quest to snap American political life back to normal and create the perception that the Trump years were a nightmare from which America has awoken. He seeks to replace it with a group yawn. That is why cable news ratings and news site traffic have plummeted since January. That is why people in Washington speak of having weekends again instead of jumping at every presidential tweet.
      It is not that Biden has been idle. His $1.9tn coronavirus relief package was passed by Democrats in Congress without Republican support and is truly historic. But he has done without shouting from the rooftops or trying to dominate every news cycle.

      4.05pm EDT
      16:05

      The White House has formally withdrawn the nomination of Neera Tanden to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
      The White House’s statement comes three weeks after Joe Biden announced Tanden’s nomination would be withdrawn, due to bipartisan opposition in the Senate over her past controversial tweets.

      Joan Greve
      (@joanegreve)
      The White House makes it official: the nomination of Neera Tanden to lead the Office of Management and Budget has been withdrawn. pic.twitter.com/CjD8YExpgU

      March 25, 2021

      Biden has not yet announced whom he will nominate to lead the OMB in Tanden’s place, but many Democrats are pushing him to select Shalanda Young.
      Young was confirmed as deputy OMB director earlier this week, and she is now serving as acting director of the agency until a full-time replacement is confirmed.
      If she were nominated and confirmed, Young would be the first African American woman to serve as OMB director.

      Updated
      at 4.26pm EDT

      3.56pm EDT
      15:56

      Biden says he expects US troops to leave Afghanistan by next year

      During his first presidential press conference, Joe Biden acknowledged it would be “hard” to meet the May 1 deadline to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan, which was set by Donald Trump.
      “If we leave, we’re going to do so in a safe and orderly way,” Biden said. “We will leave. The question is when we leave.”
      When asked if US troops would be in Afghanistan next year, the president replied, “I can’t picture that being the case.”

      CNN
      (@CNN)
      President Biden says it will be “hard” to meet the May 1 deadline that the Trump administration had negotiated with the Taliban to withdraw all US forces from Afghanistan https://t.co/uJ0J3QqO6h pic.twitter.com/Br3al3n89I

      March 25, 2021

      When Biden was vice-president, he said US troops would leave Afghanistan by 2014, as an AP reporter noted.
      Seven years later, that goal appears to finally be coming to fruition.

      James LaPorta
      (@JimLaPorta)
      President Biden as Vice President said in 2012 that we will leave Afghanistan in 2014. 7 years later, we’re still there. Maybe this is an area we should press for more answers? https://t.co/nYLdmFt9Tl pic.twitter.com/beWYO46tUM

      March 25, 2021

      3.31pm EDT
      15:31

      As Joe Biden held his first press conference as president, the House energy and commerce committee continued its hearing with the CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter.
      The Guardian’s Kari Paul reports:

      After a number of hate crimes against Asian Americans in recent weeks, Democratic representative Doris Matsui of California has directly asked Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg what they are doing to address anti-Asian hate on platforms. She also asked why they took so long to remove racist hashtags that promoted blame for the coronavirus pandemic on Asian Americans, citing the recent attack on Asian women in Atlanta as a consequence of these policies.
      ‘The issues we are discussing here are not abstract,’ she said. ‘They have real world consequences and implications that are too often measured in human lives.’
      She also cited a study that showed a substantial rise in hate speech the week after Donald Trump first used the term China flu in a tweet. Matsui suggested revisiting Section 230 protections.
      Dorsey said he will not ban the racist hashtags outright because ‘a lot of these hashtags contain counter speech’, or posts refuting the racism the hashtags initiated. Zuckerberg similarly said that hate speech policies at Facebook are ‘nuanced’ and that they have an obligation to protect free speech.

      For more updates and analysis from the hearing, follow Kari’s live blog:

      3.08pm EDT
      15:08

      Joe Biden sharply criticized Republican legislators attempting to pass voting restrictions after suffering losses in the November elections.
      “What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is,” Biden said during his press conference. “It’s sick. It’s sick.”

      CNN
      (@CNN)
      President Biden compares Republican efforts to restrict voting in many states to Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the South.”What I’m worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is,” he says. “It’s sick.” https://t.co/pMGX9DNjaT pic.twitter.com/zSjb779qZD

      March 25, 2021

      The president also made this confusing comment, comparing the Republican proposals to racial segregation laws: “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.”
      The Guardian’s Sam Levine has more details on Republicans’ efforts to curtail voting rights:

      Seizing on Donald Trump’s lies about fraud in the 2020 election, Republicans have launched a brazen attack on voting, part of an effort to entrench control over a rapidly changing electorate by changing the rules of democracy. As of mid-February, 253 bills were pending to restrict voting in 43 states. Many of those restrictions take direct aim at mail-in and early voting, the very policies that led to November’s record turnout.
      ‘The fragility of democracy has been exposed at levels that I think even white America was blind to,’ said [LaTosha] Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

      2.55pm EDT
      14:55

      During his first presidential press conference, Joe Biden was repeatedly pressed on the situation at the border, where officials have reported an increase in the number of migrants attempting to enter the country.

      Good Morning America
      (@GMA)
      .@CeciliaVega asks Pres. Biden if it’s acceptable that Donna, TX Customs and Border facility is at 1556% capacity, filled with mostly minors: “We’re going to be moving 1,000 of those kids out quickly…that is totally unacceptable.” https://t.co/SAQIOCZmGm pic.twitter.com/Pz8T6ePI6L

      March 25, 2021

      An ABC News reporter noted one customs and border patrol facility holding unaccompanied migrant children is at 1556% capacity. She asked Biden if he considered that to be acceptable.
      “That’s a serious question, right? Is it acceptable to me? Come on,” Biden said. “That’s why we’re going to be moving 1,000 of those kids out quickly.”
      The president expressed sympathy with parents who felt their best option was to send children off on the treacherous journey to the US, and he argued that trend demonstrated the need to address the underlying issues fueling this increase in migration.

      2.42pm EDT
      14:42

      Biden press conference summary

      Joe Biden has just wrapped up his first press conference as president. Here’s what happened:

      Biden set a new goal of administering 200 million coronavirus vaccine doses over his first 100 days as president. The announcement came a week after the White House announced it had already met Biden’s initial goal of administering 100 million doses over his first 100 days.
      The president said he planned to run for reelection in 2024. “My plan is to run for reelection,” Biden said. “That’s my expectation.” But when pressed on whether he would commit to running for a second term, the president gave himself some wiggle room, saying he could not predict the future.
      Biden faced a number of questions about the recent increase in migrants attempting to enter the US. The president attempted to downplay the recent increase, noting that the country usually sees a seasonal fluctuation in border numbers. However, the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, has said the US is on track to record the highest number of migrant arrivals in two decades. At the end of his press conference, Biden said of his immigration policies, “I can’t guarantee we’re going to solve everything, but I can guarantee we’re going to make it better.”
      The president delivered some of his most critical comments yet on the Senate filibuster. Biden reiterated his proposal to reform the filibuster into a “talking filibuster” to discourage its widespread use. But the president then went a step further, telling reporters, “If we have to, if there’s complete lockdown and chaos as a result of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about.” Biden also said he agreed with Barack Obama’s assessment that the filibuster is a relic of the Jim Crow era.
      Reporters did not ask a single question about the coronavirus pandemic. Commentators quickly criticized reporters’ oversight, given that the pandemic has already claimed more than 500,000 American lives.

      The blog will have more analysis coming up, so stay tuned.

      2.34pm EDT
      14:34

      Joe Biden concluded his press conference after about an hour, having taken questions from 10 reporters.
      The final question the president took had to do with the situation at the southern border. A Univision reporter noted that US customs and border patrol has not been notifying migrant children’s family members about their arrival to the US in a timely manner.
      Biden acknowledged that it will take time for his administration to improve communications and processes within the immigration system.
      “I can’t guarantee we’re going to solve everything, but I can guarantee we’re going to make it better,” Biden said.
      Asked whether he would be able to work with Republicans on immigration reform, Biden said, “They have to posture for a while. They’ve just got to get it out of their system.”

      2.26pm EDT
      14:26

      Joe Biden was asked whether he would take executive action to address gun violence, after the recent mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder.
      “It’s all about timing,” the president said of potential executive orders.
      Biden then quickly pivoted to discussing infrastructure, saying that would be his next primary focus after signing the coronavirus relief bill.
      The president is scheduled to deliver remarks on his “Build Back Better” agenda in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, next week.

      2.21pm EDT
      14:21

      Joe Biden was asked about the US-Chinese relationship, and he noted he plans to soon invite an “alliance of democracies” to Washington to discuss matters related to China.
      Biden said that Chinese President Xi Jinping “doesn’t have a democratic — with a small ‘d’ — bone in his body, but he’s a smart, smart guy.”
      The president pledged to continue to highlight human rights abuses in China “in an unrelenting way,” as long as they continue. More

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      Biden holds first press conference and pledges 200m vaccine shots in 100 days

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      In his first press conference as president, Joe Biden announced he had doubled his administration’s vaccination goal to 200m shots during his first 100 days as president.

      “I know it’s ambitious, twice our original goal, but no other country in the world has even come close to what we are doing,” Biden said of his new goal.
      Biden’s decision to make the announcement at the beginning of his press conference represented a clear attempt to at least insulate one piece of news his administration hoped would not fall through the cracks at a briefing where a host of contentious issues were expected – particularly on immigration and the filibuster.
      On immigration, Biden stressed that the situation at the southern border was not a crisis. The president recently appointed vice-president Kamala Harris as the point-person to try to tackle problems there.
      An ABC News reporter, however, noted that one border facility was currently holding unaccompanied migrant children at 1,556% capacity. She asked Biden if he considered that to be acceptable.
      “That’s a serious question, right? Is it acceptable to me? Come on,” Biden said. “That’s why we’re going to be moving 1,000 of those kids out quickly.”
      The president expressed sympathy with parents who felt their best option was to send children on the treacherous journey to the US. And when a Univision reporter noted that Customs and Border Protection has not been notifying migrant children’s family members about their arrival to the US in a timely manner, Biden said it would take time to improve communications and processes in the immigration system.
      But he also reiterated that his administration would not relax laws to increase the number of people coming in across the border, other than minors.
      “They should all be going back. All be going back,” Biden said. “The only people we are not going to leave sitting there on the other side of the Rio Grande with no help are children.”
      Biden was also asked multiple times about his position on the filibuster. He agreed with the critique of Democratic senators that it is a relic of the Jim Crow era of American history designed to defend slavery.
      But rather than offering full-throated endorsement of ending the filibuster, he instead argued that there should only be a “talking filibuster”, where a senator could block legislation as long as they kept talking on the floor of the chamber.
      “I strongly support moving in that direction,” Biden said.
      Biden has increasingly had to take a go-it-alone approach to executing his agenda, despite efforts to win over Republican support. That has helped fuel pressure among rank-and-file lawmakers to try and gut the filibuster or create workarounds for Democratic legislation that faces staunch opposition from Republicans.
      When Biden became president, he had hoped his longstanding relationship with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in that chamber, would help create bipartisan support. But Biden shrugged off that opposition, nottng that he and McConnell know each other well.
      He added: “I have electoral support from Republican voters. Republican voters agree with what I’m doing.”
      The president also noted that despite the gains the country has experienced on the vaccine effort, the impact of the pandemic is still being felt. He reiterated a theme he and his closest aides have been trying to drill into Americans’ heads since Biden signed into law his American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
      “There are still too many Americans out of work, too many families hurting,” Biden said. “But I can say to you, the American people, help is here and hope is on the way.”
      Biden also said he was likely to run for re-election in 2024, which he had not previously addressed. Asked if Harris would be his running mate, the president said: “I fully expect that to be the case. She’s doing a great job.”
      On the war in Afghanistan Biden did not offer a precise timetable for withdrawal but did say that he did not troops to be there by the end of next year.
      “I can’t picture that being the case,” Biden said.
      Mostly absent from the conference were questions about the coronavirus pandemic and the topic of gun control, after two mass shootings in the past two weeks. Biden promised to expand on his gun control actions in the coming weeks. More

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      Senate filibuster reform would produce 'nuclear winter', says Mitch McConnell

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      Mitch McConnell, who was accused of laying waste to bipartisan co-operation in the Senate when he blocked a supreme court pick by Barack Obama then changed the rules to hurry through three picks for Donald Trump, has said that if Democrats do away with the filibuster, they will “turn the Senate into a sort of nuclear winter”.The Republican minority leader, who himself invoked the “nuclear option” to change the rule for supreme court justices in 2017, was speaking to the Ruthless podcast in an episode released on Tuesday.Eyeing major legislation on voting rights, gun control, infrastructure and more, Democrats who control the White House and Congress are pressuring leaders to reform or abolish the Senate filibuster rule, by which a minority of just 41 out of 100 senators is able to block most legislation.Joe Biden saw his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package pass earlier this month by budget reconciliation, a narrowly applied process that sidesteps the filibuster rule and allows for passage by a simple majority. He is reportedly considering further major steps by that route, although key priorities such as voting rights could not advance through reconciliation.But Biden has indicated he may be open to some change to the filibuster.McConnell is not.“I think if they destroy the essence of the Senate, the legislative filibuster, they will find a Senate that will not function,” said the Kentucky Republican, who took his own nuclear option six years after then Democratic majority leader Harry Reid made such a move on lower-court appointments and executive branch nominees, to bypass Republican obstruction.“It takes unanimous consent to turn the lights on here,” McConnell said. “And I think they would leave an angry 50 senators not interested in being cooperative on even the simplest things.”In 2010, McConnell famously said his chief aim was to ensure Obama was a one-term president. Under Trump, he resisted White House calls to scrap the filibuster.Democrats in the 50-50 Senate, which is controlled by the vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, might well retort to McConnell that Republicans have shown precious little interest in co-operation on anything for many years. The Covid relief bill did not attract a single Republican vote.On Tuesday, in the immediate aftermath of a shooting in a Colorado supermarket that killed 10 and a week after shootings at spas near Atlanta killed eight, the Senate will hold a hearing on “Constitutional and Common Sense Steps to Reduce Gun Violence”. The House has passed gun control measures but without filibuster reform, any such steps seem impossible in the Senate.Republicans – and some Democrats, including the conservative Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has indicated he is open to some sort of reform – insist the filibuster protects the rights of the minority.McConnell said filibuster reform “may not be the panacea that they anticipate it would be. It could turn the Senate into sort of a nuclear winter, nor the aftermath of the so-called nuclear option is not a sustainable place”. More

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      Texas ramps up efforts to derail progressive policies

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      Texas has branded itself as an aggressive and litigious arm of the Republican party for years – a rightwing David up against the Democratic Goliath.So, when Democrat Joe Biden took over the Oval Office in January, the state’s conservative leaders were already raring for a knock-down, drag-out brawl.“I promise my fellow Texans and Americans that I will fight against the many unconstitutional and illegal actions that the new administration will take, challenge federal overreach that infringes on Texans’ rights, and serve as a major check against the administration’s lawlessness,” the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, tweeted on Biden’s inauguration day.Just two days later, Texas filed the first major lawsuit against Biden’s administration, successfully blocking a 100-day deportation moratorium that the governor, Greg Abbott, chided as an “attempt to grant blanket amnesty” to immigrants.Far from a one-off burst of hostility, that incendiary case marked a return to Texas politicians’ tried and true playbook of weaponizing the courts to derail progressive policies, a tactic that’s proven surprisingly potent amid ideological warfare with the feds.“They’ve been successful at, like, causing uncertainty,” said Katie Keith, associate research professor for the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “And making a mess of things that I think other folks feel are otherwise settled.”The state’s leadership leaned heavily on the judiciary under Barack Obama’s administration, which they sued at least 48 times, the Texas Tribune reported, tackling issues as disparate and all-encompassing as immigration, environmental regulations and voting rights.Then, in the aftermath of last year’s presidential election, Paxton went so far as to challenge 20m votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in a far-fetched attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat. And right now, Texas is spearheading yet another existential threat to the Affordable Care Act in the supreme court, even as Biden urges the justices to preserve Obama’s signature healthcare law.Because of the high stakes, these cases often capture national attention, and Texas’s ambitious current and former attorneys general have shown a willingness to trade resources and time for newspaper quotes and TV interviews. The court battles give key players such as Paxton a platform “to demonstrate that they are fighters and they’re looking out for their voters”, said Keith E Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University.“These kinds of lawsuits have become very high-profile events” and allow those involved to “grandstand and send a political message to constituents about all the hard work you’re doing to oppose the administration that they don’t like”, Whittington said.Texas’s judicial activism is part of a larger partisan gambit that’s been going on for years. Politicians undo or delay federal policies they find unfavorable or overreaching, while strategically framing the narrative in the press.“They are good opportunities to really try to influence the messaging about how particular policies or particular laws are understood, and what the potential problems with them are,” Whittington said.Both Republicans and Democrats play the game: when Trump occupied the Oval Office, blue strongholds such as California raced to the courts as a first line of defense from federal decisions that jeopardized their more liberal agendas. Now that Biden is the commander-in-chief, Republicans are naturally starting to do the same, with Texas apparently leading the charge.“If the goal is to win, then certainly that affects the kind of cases you bring forward, what kinds of legal arguments you can make, how carefully you have to prepare for them,” Whittington said.“If the goal instead is to get media attention and score political points – and excite voters and donors – you don’t necessarily need to win. You just need to be able to highlight the issue and get public attention. And sometimes you can get that with pretty bad legal arguments.”Texas has garnered a reputation for its casual relationship to sound legal judgment, with cases ranging from potentially successful to downright bogus. When, for example, Paxton tried to overturn the 2020 election results in the supreme court, a legion of lawyers and former elected officials banded together to decry his “unprecedented argument” that made “a mockery of federalism and separation of powers”.“The case … was clearly without merit, and it is difficult to understand why anybody in the attorney general’s office would have thought otherwise,” said Lisa Marshall Manheim, an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Law.Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, similarly derided the state’s challenge to the ACA, calling it “galactically stupid” in an interview with the Texas Tribune.But instead of giving Texas and others a slap on the wrist, federal courts have almost encouraged them by issuing nationwide injunctions that hamstring entire policies as long as cases stay tied up. That stalling strategy can sometimes hand state governments a de facto victory, even if they eventually lose.“There’s a world in which all these specious arguments, everything else, could really be discouraged by the courts,” Keith said. That’s definitely not happening in Texas, where she described the bench as “extraordinarily conservative and ideological”, allowing “these lawsuits to go further than most of us think they should”.It’s one thing to “forum shop”, seeking out courts that could be more amenable to your case. Paxton, however, can seemingly “judge shop”. Between 2015 and 2018, almost half of Texas’s suits against the federal government in district courts ended up in Judge Reed O’Connor’ courtroom, the Texas Tribune reported. A conservative favorite aligned with the Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, O’Connor has handed the state victory after victory – including striking down the ACA.“The law is still standing, but it’s been bruised and battered, right?” Keith said. So “why wouldn’t they sort of use a similar playbook for other issues?”Because of the implications nationwide, millions of Americans are watching these lawsuits play out – not to witness a bitter contest between two parties, but to anxiously await a referendum on their futures.“They’re people’s real rights and real livelihoods and just real lived realities that are sort of hanging in the balance,” Keith said. “It’s sort of frustrating to watch these cycles go in and out, because you know that they do affect real people.” More