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      Biden attacks Trump's 'rushed and unprecedented' confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett – US politics live

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      1.25am EDT01:25
      Barrett reaction: ‘They have lied, cheated, and compromised democracy’

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      5.42am EDT05:42

      Also on a foreign policy front, secretary of state Mike Pompeo is in India at the moment. He has paid respects at the National War Memorial, and then stated India and the United States are cooperating to take on all threats, including China.
      “Today is a new opportunity for two great democracies like ours to grow closer,” Pompeo said before the talks with Indian foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and defence minister Rajnath Singh.
      “There is much more work to do for sure. We have a lot to discuss today: Our cooperation on the pandemic that originated in Wuhan, to confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s threats to security and freedom to promoting peace and stability throughout the region.*
      The two countries have signed an agreement on sharing geospatial data, which Singh has said is a “significant achievement”.

      Secretary Pompeo
      (@SecPompeo)
      A solemn moment laying a wreath at the National War Memorial in New Delhi with U.S. Secretary of Defense @EsperDoD. We will never forget the brave men and women who have given their lives in defense of the world’s largest democracy. pic.twitter.com/xvwUdgSvlF

      October 27, 2020

      On coronavirus, Pompeo said US companies are making efforts to sell Gilead’s Remdesivir drug to India. India is on course to shortly reach 8 million cases, and has the second highest case count in the world behind the US.
      China, perhaps unsurprisingly, has not taken too kindly to Pompeo’s words. Reuters report that Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a news briefing in Beijing. “We urge Pompeo to abandon his Cold War mentality, zero-sum mindset, and stop harping on the ‘China threat’”.

      5.33am EDT05:33

      A very quick snap here – an American citizen was kidnapped near the town of Birnin Konni in southern Niger in the early hours of Tuesday morning, three security sources and a local official told Reuters.
      The details of the kidnapping were not immediately clear, and no one had claimed responsibility.
      Niger is struggling with a security crisis as groups with links to al Qaeda and Islamic State carry out an increasing number of attacks on the army and civilians, particularly in the west region bordering Mali and Burkina Faso. Birnin Konni is a few hundred miles to the east of that region, near the border with Nigeria.

      Updated
      at 5.51am EDT

      5.28am EDT05:28

      CNN have a run-down on what Amy Coney Barrett can expect to find in her in-tray as she takes her place on the supreme court. They highlight:
      Trump taxes case – the justices are primed to decide soon whether a New York prosecutor will get access to Trump’s financial documents from January 2011 to August 2019, including his tax returns. Last July, the Supreme Court, voting 7-2, rejected the President’s broad claims of immunity.
      Pennsylvania ballot extensions – Republicans in Pennsylvania asked the Supreme Court on Friday to block a ballot receipt extension that would allow them to be counted if they are received within three days of Election Day – even if they do not have a legible postmark.
      North Carolina ballot counting extension – Republicans in North Carolina are asking the Supreme Court to block a nine-day extension of the counting of ballots if they are received by Election Day and reinstate a three-day extension established by the legislature last June.
      Minnesota congressional election date – a Republican candidate for Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District is asking the justices to intervene in a case concerning whether his election takes place on November 3 or on February 9, 2021, after the recent death of Legal Marijuana Now Party candidate Adam Weeks caused the contest to be moved to next year as required by state law.
      Mississippi abortion case – the case pertains to Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, which Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed into law in 2018. The law made exceptions only for medical emergencies or cases in which there’s a “severe fetal abnormality,” but not for incidents of rape or incest.
      Read more here: CNN – Trump’s taxes, election and abortion cases await Amy Coney Barrett in her first week

      5.22am EDT05:22

      Even before Amy Cony Barrett takes her seat, there’s a sign of things to come with judgements over the election, as yesterday the supreme court sided with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots that are received after election day. Maanvi Singh and Sam Levine report:

      In a 5-3 ruling, the justices refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the 3 November election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.
      The ruling awards a victory for Republicans in their crusade against expanding voting rights and access. The three liberal justices dissented. John Roberts, the chief justice, last week joined the liberals to preserve a Pennsylvania state court order extending the absentee ballot deadline but voted the other way in the Wisconsin case, which has moved through federal courts.
      “Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin,” Roberts wrote.
      “As the Covid pandemic rages, the court has failed to adequately protect the nation’s voters,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent that noted the state allowed the six-day extension for primary voting in April and that roughly 80,000 ballots were received after the day of the primary election.

      Read more here: Wisconsin can’t count mail-in ballots received after election day, supreme court rules

      5.12am EDT05:12

      There’s been an understandable focus on the possible impact of seating Amy Coney Barrett on healthcare during a pandemic. But the potential impacts of her ruling on the Affordable Care Act go much further than coronavirus, as Katelyn Burns writes for us today:

      Jack Jimenez tried to obtain private health insurance, only to be denied because of a pre-existing condition – his gender dysphoria diagnosis. Jimenez is trans and him living his true identity was reason enough to deny him coverage.
      It wasn’t until 2014 when the Affordable Care Act (also known as the comprehensive healthcare reform law and as Obamacare) was implemented, that Jimenez was able to get insurance, the specialist treatment he needed, and a diagnosis because the law eliminated exclusions for pre-existing conditions. It turned out he had pseudotumor cerebri, a condition in which spinal fluid leaks into the skull. The symptoms mimic those of a brain tumor, including vision issues, headaches and ringing in the ears.
      “It’s that very first doctor appointment. It’s unbelievable,” he said. “To have people look at you and go, ‘Oh, OK. Yes. I can see why that’s a big concern. Let me write down these three pages of weird symptoms that you’ve been having and let’s do some tests and figure out what the hell is wrong with you,’” he said. “Nobody, nobody had really done that at all.”

      Read more here: As the future of Obamacare heads to the supreme court, so does trans rights

      5.05am EDT05:05

      Here’s what the New York Times editorial board had to say about the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett:

      When she takes her seat on the bench at One First Street, it will represent the culmination of a four-decade crusade by conservatives to fill the federal courts with reliably Republican judges who will serve for decades as a barricade against an ever more progressive nation.
      This is not a wild conspiracy theory. Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader and one of the main architects of this crusade, gloated about it openly on Sunday, following a bare-majority vote to move Judge Barrett’s nomination to the Senate floor. “A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election,” Mr. McConnell said. “They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”
      That’s the perfect distillation of what this has been all about. It also reveals what it was never about. It was never about letting the American people have a voice in the makeup of the Supreme Court.

      Read more here: New York Times – the Republican party’s supreme court

      4.58am EDT04:58

      Away from the election and the supreme court for a moment, California is bracing for another round of fire danger from gusts even as crews battle two southern blazes that have left more than 100,000 under evacuation orders.
      Associated Press report that some of the fiercest winds of the fire season drove fires up and down the state Sunday night and Monday before easing, but they were expected to resume overnight and continue into Tuesday morning. More

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      The Arizona county that could decide the future of Trump – and America

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      For years, Carlos Garcia would grab his bullhorn each afternoon and head downtown to the office of Joe Arpaio, the brash, hardline, anti-immigrant Maricopa county sheriff who became known as “the Donald Trump of Arizona”.
      When Garcia’s protests began in 2007, just a handful of devoted activists joined him. A conservative firebrand, Arpaio was re-elected every four years by the mostly white residents of the state’s most populous county. He was seemingly untouchable.
      But as Arpaio’s crusade against immigrants intensified, the backlash grew. “We literally went from five to 200,000 people,” Garcia said of the protests.
      On 8 November 2016, the same night Donald Trump won the White House, Arizona finally ousted Arpaio. After nearly a quarter-century in power, the sheriff was undone by Latinos, young progressives and white voters who Garcia believes “felt shame over Maricopa’s reputation” as a hostile and intolerant place.
      interactive
      Just as Arpaio’s tenure foreshadowed Trump’s national rise, the same forces that expelled the sheriff in Maricopa county appear to have flourished across the country as the president pursued his own hardline agenda. And now, those forces – catalyzed by the coronavirus pandemic – may seal the president’s fate in next week’s US election.
      “We are a community that has suffered through Trump-like policies for such a long time,” said Garcia, who was elected to Phoenix city council in 2018. This year, Latinos and others are mobilizing to defeat the “Arpaio in the White House”.
      The future of America
      Maricopa county, which encompasses Arizona’s capital, Phoenix, and blossoming rings of surrounding suburbs, has nearly 4.5 million residents and dominates the state politically. One third of Maricopa residents identify as Latino, according to US census data. More

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      Wisconsin can't count mail-in ballots received after election day, supreme court rules

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      The US supreme court has sided with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mail-in ballots that are received after election day.
      In a 5-3 ruling, the justices on Monday refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after the 3 November election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.
      The ruling awards a victory for Republicans in their crusade against expanding voting rights and access. It also came just moments before the Republican-controlled Senate voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett, a victory for the right that locks in a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court for years to come.
      The three liberal justices dissented. John Roberts, the chief justice, last week joined the liberals to preserve a Pennsylvania state court order extending the absentee ballot deadline but voted the other way in the Wisconsin case, which has moved through federal courts.
      “Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not Wisconsin,” Roberts wrote.
      “As the Covid pandemic rages, the court has failed to adequately protect the nation’s voters,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent that noted the state allowed the six-day extension for primary voting in April and that roughly 80,000 ballots were received after the day of the primary election.
      Democrats argued that the flood of absentee ballots and other challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic makes it necessary to extend the period in which ballots can be counted. Wisconsin, a swing state, is also one of the nation’s hotspots for Covid-19, with hospitals treating a record high number of patients with the disease. The supreme court allowed a similar extension to go into effect for Wisconsin’s April election, a decision that led to nearly 80,000 additional votes getting counted in the contest (Trump carried the state in 2016 by just under 23,000 votes).
      Republicans opposed the extension, saying that voters have plenty of opportunities to cast their ballots by the close of polls on election day and that the rules should not be changed so close to the election.
      The justices often say nothing, or very little, about the reasons for their votes in these emergency cases, but on Monday, four justices wrote opinions totaling 35 pages to lay out their competing rationales.
      Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged the complications the pandemic adds to voting, but defended the court’s action.
      “No one doubts that conducting a national election amid a pandemic poses serious challenges. But none of that means individual judges may improvise with their own election rules in place of those the people’s representatives have adopted,” Gorsuch wrote.
      Justice Brett Kavanaugh, meanwhile, echoed Trump in writing that states should announce results on election night.
      States “want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter”, he wrote. “Moreover, particularly in a presidential election, counting all the votes quickly can help the state promptly resolve any disputes, address any need for recounts, and begin the process of canvassing and certifying the election results in an expeditious manner.” He also wrote states had an interest in avoiding “the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.”
      That comment earned a sharp rebuke from Kagan, who said “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted”.
      She noted that the bigger threat to election “integrity” was valid votes going uncounted. “nothing could be more ‘suspicio[us]’ or “improp[er]’ than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night. To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process,” she wrote.
      Kavanaugh cited Vermont as an example of a state that “decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules” due to the pandemic, even though, in fact, the state authorized the secretary of state to automatically mail a ballot to all registered voters this year, in order to make it easier for everyone to vote absentee.
      In a significant footnote, Kavanaugh also wrote that state courts do not have a “blank check” to step in on state laws governing federal elections, endorsing conservative justices’ rationale in deciding the election in 2000 between George W Bush and Al Gore.
      Two decades ago, in Bush v Gore, the supreme court decided – effectively – that Bush would be the US president after settling a recount dispute in the swing state of Florida. Back then, three conservative justices – William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas – said that the Florida supreme court “impermissibly distorted” the state’s election code by ordering a recount of a close election, during which voting machines were found to have issues correctly counting the votes.
      In Monday’s ruling, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch – both Trump appointees – endorsed that view expressed in the Bush v Gore case, a move that could foretell how the court, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority, would rule if the results of the presidential election are contested.
      Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh recently voted to block a deadline extension to count ballots in Pennsylvania. However, with only eight justice on the court at the time, and the conservative justice John Roberts siding with liberals – at tied court ultimately upheld the deadline extension.
      But Pennsylvania Republicans, sensing an ally in Barrett, have asked for a re-do. In making their case, they are arguing that the state supreme court overstepped by ordering officials to count mail-in ballots that are sent by election day but arrive up to three days later.
      Agencies contributed to this report More

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      Amy Coney Barrett takes oath after being confirmed to US supreme court – video

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      A majority of US senators have voted to confirm Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. ‘On this vote, the yays are 52. The nays are 48,’ announced US senator Chuck Grassley. Trump then held a celebratory swearing-in ceremony on the White House lawn. Barrett said. ‘I will do my job without any fear or favour and … I will do so independently of both the political branches and of my own preferences.’ Lawmakers voted along party lines, although Republican Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats to vote against Barrett’s confirmation. Barrett, 48, will secure a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the nation’s highest court. Long term, her appointment could have a major impact on a range of policies governing abortion rights, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights
      Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to supreme court in major victory for US conservatives – live More

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      CBS releases footage of Trump walking out of 60 Minutes interview

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      US president halts recording after question about his use of social media and name-callingUS politics live – the latest updatesFootage of the US president abruptly walking out of a CBS 60 Minutes interview has been released by the network, in a row that has been rumbling since the interview was taped on Tuesday.Donald Trump had already posted clips on his own social media, in an effort to show he had been mistreated by the interviewer, Lesley Stahl. He had called the segment “fake” and “biased” in advance. Continue reading… More

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      Joy to the Polls: the group performing for Americans as they line up to vote

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      Non-partisan group aims to bring ‘a feeling of safety and a feeling of joy’ amid voter suppression, virus fears and long waiting times As hundreds of people queued to vote early in Philadelphia this weekend, a group of performers had a special tactic to keep people’s spirits up.A collective of artists and activists have being performing on line while people wait to cast their ballots, hoping to bring a little joy to an election season which looks to be rife with voter suppression, intimidation tactics and long waiting times. Continue reading… More

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      Trump insists US ‘rounding the corner’ as Covid cases surge across country

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      Cases are rising rapidly, with more than 8.5m cases and a death toll of 225,000, as battleground states see surging case numbersUS politics – live coverageA day after his own chief of staff said the US had effectively surrendered to the coronavirus, Donald Trump told reporters his opponent in next Tuesday’s presidential election, Joe Biden, had “waved the white flag on life”. Related: ‘The system is broken’: Americans cast their vote for better healthcare Continue reading… More

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      How Texas went from low voter turnout to nation's top early voting state

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      “Donald Trump needs to be goin’ bye-bye,” Ann Wolfe said as she approached one of Austin’s Holiday Inn hotels, now doubling as a polling place.
      Although the man in the White House claims he’s pro-life like her, she said, “under his watch, over 200,000 people are dead”. So while Wolfe was open to candidates from both parties down ballot, she planned to throw her support behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who she thought was at least “a normal human being”.
      “It seems like it’s the most important vote that we’ll ever have to have in this lifetime,” she said.
      [embedded content]
      In a tidal wave of political engagement, more than 7 million Texans have already cast a ballot during the general election, the vast majority in-person. The numbers are propelling what is historically one of the lowest voter turnout states to the top of the nation’s leaderboard in terms of the sheer number of people who have voted thus far. That groundswell of participation is even more striking in context, as democratic hurdles remain ever-present at the polls while fears of Covid-19 also loom large.
      “What we’re seeing is that Texans will crawl through broken glass to be able to make sure their voices are heard this election,” said Abhi Rahman, communications director for the Texas Democratic party.
      In the midst of the early voting period, extended by Governor Greg Abbott amid the coronavirus pandemic, approximately 43% of registered voters statewide had voted as of Sunday, logging more than 80% of the total turnout from four years ago with over a week left in the election.
      “It is really quite something that people are turning out in the numbers that they are. And that they’re standing in line for hours when this is early voting, this is not Election Day, and many Texans have never done that before because it is such a low voter turnout state,” said Brittany Perry, an instructional associate professor in political science at Texas A&M University.
      In Harris and El Paso counties, more than two-fifths and roughly a third of registered voters respectively had cast ballots by Sunday, despite sometimes encountering three-hour-long waits, according to Election Protection. Broken machines thwarted residents in Travis and Fort Bend counties on the first day of early voting, yet both have already experienced turnout around 50% of registered voters as of last weekend. And, while there have been curbside voting issues in Bexar and Hidalgo counties, that hasn’t stopped more than 600,000 people from participating in the electoral process, long before 3 November.
      Donald Trump and his broader agenda are likely at least part of what’s driving so many voters to the polls, said Emily M Farris, an associate professor of political science at Texas Christian University. “Trump’s path to the White House is basically impossible without winning Texas’ 38 electoral votes,” she said.
      And the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis is weighing on people’s minds in the state, where cases persist and 17,700 people have died. “Obviously, the way, you know, this whole pandemic has panned out, I think it’s important for us to have support from our government. I just don’t feel that,” said Ileanna Mercado, a school counselor on her way to vote for Biden in Austin. “I just would like for our country to go in a very different direction.” More