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      Scramble on to replace Neera Tanden after nomination met perfect storm

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterNeera Tanden’s decision to withdraw from consideration to serve as Joe Biden’s budget director marks the first major loss for the still young Biden administration, and sets off a scramble between various political factions to push through a new nominee.Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress thinktank, decided to withdraw her candidacy on Tuesday, in the face of a lack of support among senators needed to advance her through the confirmation process.“Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities,” Tanden wrote in a letter to Biden released by the White House. Tanden added that she appreciated “how hard you and your team at the White House has worked to win my confirmation”.Tanden was the first of Biden’s cabinet nominees to fail to make it through the confirmation process. New presidents don’t usually see all of their cabinet picks confirmed.But Tanden’s path was always more precarious than the rest. She is well known throughout the Democratic party as a combative figure who often engaged in Twitter fights and criticized both Republicans and Democrats. After her nomination she deleted over 1,000 tweets and in her hearings she said she regretted those criticisms, which included calling Senator Susan Collins of Maine “the worst” and tweeting that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz”, the Republican senator from Texas.But Tanden, a staunch Hillary Clinton ally, had also warred with prominent members of the progressive wing of the Democratic party and once allegedly punched Faiz Shakir, who would eventually become Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign manager. Tanden has said she “pushed” him.Sanders, the chairman of one of the committees charged with handling Tanden’s nomination, also questioned large corporate and foreign donations to the Center for American Progress.But the lion’s share of critical questioning by senators was about Tanden’s various attacks.“Of course, your attacks were not just made against Republicans. There were vicious attacks against progressives, people who I have worked with, me personally,” Sanders said during the hearings.Tanden did have her fair share of support. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said the White House was “fighting our guts out” to get Tanden confirmed and the US Chamber of Commerce backed her as well. Behind the scenes, Democratic officials continued to lobby senators to support her, even after Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, announced his opposition to Tanden, citing her tweets and past conduct.Manchin has emerged during the Biden administration as, at times, the deciding figure on matters before the Senate. Other conservative Democrats, like Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, held back from announcing how she would vote. That decision did not inspire confidence in Tanden’s chances and illustrated the influence any senator – especially a conservative one – has in a Senate split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.Republicans at moments seemed to revel in highlighting Tanden’s past tweets. Tanden’s allies argued that they were motivated by a mix of extreme hypocritical partisanship (where were they, Tanden’s allies grumbled, when Trump was tweeting?) and racism. Tanden was born to immigrant parents from India.But those senators also expressed eagerness to support one of the potential replacements – Shalanda Young, a veteran Hill staffer who is Black.“You know I’m going to vote for you,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the ranking Republican on the Senate budget committee, said on Tuesday during Young’s hearing to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. “You’re highly qualified and I’m going to support you,” Graham added before pressing her on immigration policy.Similarly John Kennedy of Louisiana, one of the Senate’s more bombastic members, said at one point “you may be more than deputy. You may be the sheriff. I don’t expect you to comment on that.”Democratic senators stuck to their support of Tanden during Young’s hearing but after her nomination was pulled lawmakers began lobbying for Young.“We have worked closely with her for several years and highly recommend her for her intellect, her deep expertise on the federal budget and her determination to ensure that our budget reflects our values as a nation,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, majority whip, Jim Clyburn, and majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Her leadership at the OMB would be historic and would send a strong message that this administration is eager to work in close coordination with members of Congress to craft budgets that meet the challenges of our time and can secure broad, bipartisan support.”Other names have been floated as possible OMB nominees and the Senate budget committee is now waiting for the White House to pick someone else. The names floated include Sarah Bianchi, a former director of policy for Biden; Gene Sperling, a former director of the council of economic advisers; Ann O’Leary, the former chief of staff to Governor Gavin Newsom of California.Whoever the White House nominates is poised to have an easier confirmation process than Tanden. More

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      FBI views Capitol insurrection as domestic terrorism, says Christopher Wray – video

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      FBI director Christopher Wray has said the bureau views the Capitol insurrection as a clear act of domestic terrorism. Speaking during a Senate hearing on the 6 January riots, Wray said: ‘That attack, that siege, was criminal behaviour, plain and simple, and it’s behaviour that we, the FBI, view as domestic terrorism’
      FBI director Christopher Wray testifies over Capitol insurrection – live More

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      The Guardian view on the return of Donald Trump: plotting a hostile takeover | Editorial

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      In the United States, the Republican party has been unmistakably corrupted by power. Its leadership did not call out Donald Trump for his “high crimes and misdemeanors”, his savage politics, his cruelty, his lies and his conspiracy theories. Voters had to wait until Senate Republicans had refused to convict Mr Trump of impeachable crimes before their leader, Mitch McConnell, would speak truth to power. By then, the question was not whether there was a war over the soul of the party but whether Republicans had a soul worth fighting for.At the weekend Mr Trump revealed that there would be payback for Mr McConnell and other Republican lawmakers for their “disloyalty”. In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Mr Trump flirted with running again in 2024 and took swipes at the Biden White House. But he reserved his punches for his own side – targeting “Republicans In Name Only” who voted to impeach him and criticised his incitement of the mob that stormed Capitol Hill in January.Mr Trump has radicalised the base of his party to a troubling degree by restricting and distorting their view of the world, patterns of thinking and value systems. In a forthcoming paper, Professor Gary Jacobson of the University of California San Diego, writes that Republican politicians who humoured the former president’s “seditious urgings put protection of their own futures within the party above concern for that party’s collective future if devotion to Trump remains its defining feature”.Nationally, Mr Trump’s a vote loser. There’s no question that Republicans would be better off without him. Polls suggest a majority of Americans want him convicted and barred from holding future office. But he has a vice-like grip over the party rank and file. A recent survey by the American Enterprise Institute found that 79% of Republicans view Mr Trump favourably; two-thirds agreed with his disproven belief that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate; a majority “support the use of force as a way to arrest the decline of the traditional American way of life”; and almost a third sympathise with the QAnon conspiracy theory that insists Mr Trump was fighting a global child sex-trafficking ring.Mr Trump, perhaps more than any other post-war US leader, has been helped by a rightwing news media that trades in contrived alternatives to unwelcome truths. Governing becomes almost impossible without adherence to norms such as truth-telling. Mr Trump’s would-be successors peddle a populist narrative of fears and grievances aimed at consolidating support in a predominantly white evangelical base. They are building what appears to be an extreme rightwing political party in plain sight.The Republican leadership has for decades given a monstrous politics a thin veneer of respectability. But Mr Trump is a monster they could not contain. No doubt some think that without his Twitter megaphone and facing lawsuits Mr Trump might give up. Teasing the voters with a 2024 run suggests this is a forlorn hope.Republicans may come to their senses. US demographics point to a more younger and diverse population, while Trumpism festers in shrinking parts of the electorate. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are not long-term strategies to win. Mr Trump aims to be a force within the party. Republicans have a good chance at retaking both the House and the Senate in 2022. Failure in two years’ time might spell the end of the Trump insurgency. A victory might spark its rebirth. However the Republican leadership responds, it reveals them – with consequences not just for the US but the rest of the world. More

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      Raising the US minimum wage: what just happened and what comes next?

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      It was a major plank of the Democratic plan to “build back better” – raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour as a way of boosting the economy during the pandemic and tackling poverty and income inequality. But on Thursday the much-vaunted plan hit a roadblock in the US Senate, which has knocked the proposal sideways.So what happened, and is this game over for the $15 minimum wage?What happened?The idea of pushing up the minimum wage in stages to $15 in 2025 was included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus package that seeks to support vaccine distribution and an extension of unemployment benefit among other pandemic provisions.The minimum wage element of the bill was a very big deal. It would increase the incomes of 27 million Americans, with almost 1 million people lifted out of poverty, according to the Congressional Budget Office.The Democrats have decided to fast-track the bill as a way of avoiding Republican opposition through a channel known as “budget resolution”. That would provide for a simple majority vote in the Senate, avoiding the dreaded filibuster where 60 votes have to be attained – an impossible task given Republican intransigence within the new evenly split 50-50 Senate.The snag is that budget resolution is subject to strict limits on how it is applied, designed to prevent political leaders packing the bill with all sorts of goodies entirely unrelated to federal revenue or spending. The unelected keeper of those restrictions is Elizabeth MacDonough, the grandly titled Senate parliamentarian, who announced on Thursday that in her reading of the rules the $15 minimum wage was extraneous to budget legislation and thus had to be removed.How did that go down?Advocates of raising the minimum wage were incensed. Bernie Sanders, a longtime champion, said he strongly disagreed with the decision, which he blamed on “archaic and undemocratic rules”. Elizabeth Warren and many others said it was time to end the filibuster so that the provision could pass the Senate regardless, while the idea of firing MacDonough was also floated.By contrast, the top Republican on the Senate budget committee, Lindsey Graham, said he was “very pleased” by MacDonough’s intervention.Would it have passed in any case?There were some doubts that the stimulus bill would have passed with the minimum wage increase contained in it. Two Democratic senators on the right of the party, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, had both put up resistance, and even Biden himself openly expressed skepticism that the provision would “survive”.The irony is that a $15 minimum wage is hugely popular among Americans of all political persuasions, with two-thirds supporting it, according to a 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center. Take Florida – the state voted for Trump in November, but it also backed by 60% a ballot initiative raising the minimum wage to $15 over the next five years.So what’s next?There are several directions in which the tussle could now go. Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate and the final arbiter on the chamber’s rules, has the authority to overrule the parliamentarian. But such a power has not been wielded since Nelson Rockefeller in 1975, and, besides, the White House has indicated that the vice-president will not take that route.An alternative “plan B” is emerging whereby the Democrats would replace the minimum wage provision in the stimulus bill with a tax penalty on large corporations paying workers less than $15 an hour. Democratic leaders think that such a tax mechanism might be more resilient in meeting the requirements of budget resolution.Working against that will be the desire of the White House to pass the stimulus bill quickly and not experience any further delays. A crunch deadline is fast approaching – on 14 March the existing jobless benefits start to expire and the Biden administration is keen to prevent unemployed workers falling into even greater hardship.Amid the plethora of possible next steps, one thing is certain: the fight for $15 is not over. In the past eight years the push for a decent minimum wage has snowballed across the US and around the world into a formidable movement, and no number of objections from unelected rules-keepers will hold it back for long. More

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      'We need $15': US minimum wage ruling a personal blow for millions of workers

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      Bill Thompson, 50, has worked in food service in Independence, Missouri, for over 30 years. He currently works at Burger King, making $10.30 an hour. With his current wages, he avoids seeking medical care because of the costs, and explained his family has struggled to afford basic necessities.He’s one of many low-wage workers around the US who have been organizing and fighting for a $15 minimum wage at the federal level and at local and state levels since the Fight for $15 and a Union movement began in 2012.In a setback for the movement, on 25 February the Senate parliamentarian ruled the minimum wage increase as written currently cannot remain in the coronavirus relief bill under Senate rules, and the White House noted Kamala Harris, in her role presiding over the Senate, will not attempt to overrule the parliamentarian.For Thompson – and millions of American workers like him – the news is a personal blow.“If we made $15 an hour, that would be a night and day difference. It doesn’t mean I’m going to have savings, it just means I’m going to have more financial resources to afford to have food on the table and my drug prescriptions,” said Thompson. “I have to choose between going to the doctor and buying medicine or putting food on my table, or buying a new pair of shoes.”Democrats have pushed to include a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage by 2025 in the coronavirus relief bill, though Joe Biden expressed skepticism the $15 minimum wage will make it into the final coronavirus relief bill and noted he is open to delaying the phased increase.Workers have criticized the ruling and are pushing elected officials to figure out a way to still pass a $15 federal minimum wage.“We will not be deterred by an archaic Senate process that throughout history has been used to delay or deny progress for Black and brown communities while allowing multitrillion-dollar tax cuts for corporations,” said Maribel Cornejo, a McDonald’s worker and Fight for $15 and a Union leader in Houston, Texas, in a statement.Cornejo added: “Winning elections means talking to voters about the issues that matter to their lives and then delivering on those promises. Voters don’t want to hear excuses about process, procedures or parliamentarians. We want a job that pays us a living wage. We want dignity at work. We want and we need $15.”Cynthia Murray, a Walmart associate for nearly 20 years and United for Respect leader in Maryland who testified in front of the Senate on 25 February, added: “When are they going to stand up and stand for the workers and change the minimum wage? It’s been 12 years.”The president of SEIU International, the leading organization behind the Fight for $15 movement, Mary Kay Henry, argued the ruling was no excuse to delay increasing the minimum wage.“Essential workers have put their lives on the line throughout the pandemic and now elected leaders must meet their demands to be respected, protected and paid,” Henry said in a statement. “Every single healthcare provider, fast-food worker, janitor, security officer and public servant who have kept our communities afloat for the past year needs real Covid relief that includes $15 – and Congress needs to get it done.”In response to the parliamentarian ruling, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders announced his intention to include an amendment in the relief bill to take away tax deductions from large, profitable corporations that do not pay a $15 an hour minimum wage.House Democratic leaders have announced the $15 minimum wage bill will remain in the coronavirus relief package that is expected to pass today and be sent to the Senate.Two-thirds of Americans support a $15 minimum wage according to 2019 polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, and more recent surveys have shown seven in 10 Americans support raising the minimum wage.Republicans and business industry groups have argued increases to minimum wage results in job losses and hurts small businesses, but data over 22 previous federal minimum wage increases since 1938 show there is no correlation between minimum wage increases and job losses. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026 would provide a raise to 32 million workers who otherwise struggle to meet basic living expenses. More

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      Ilhan Omar leads calls to fire Senate official who scuppered $15 wage rise

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      The progressive Democrat Ilhan Omar has called for the firing of the government official who effectively blocked the party’s plans to raise the minimum wage.Democratic plans to include a gradual raise to $15 in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus bill were effectively ended on Thursday when the Senate parliamentarian ruled it should not be part of the package.The decision by Elizabeth MacDonough, who has held the non-partisan position since 2012, dashed hopes of including the raise in the bill – the first increase in over a decade.“Abolish the filibuster. Replace the parliamentarian,” Omar said in a tweet. “What’s a Democratic majority if we can’t pass our priority bills? This is unacceptable.”Abolish the filibuster.Replace the parliamentarian.What’s a Democratic majority if we can’t pass our priority bills? This is unacceptable.— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 26, 2021
      Biden campaigned on a pledge to increase the minimum wage to $15. Low-wage workers and unions have campaigned for a rise since 2012, and its inclusion in the coronavirus stimulus bill had been seen as a major victory.While the proposal faced universal opposition by Republican senators and skepticism from some Democrats, Senator Bernie Sanders and others were confident that it could be pushed through with a simple majority in the Senate, where the Democrats hold a slim majority.In order to achieve this, the proposal would have to be passed by “budget reconciliation” – a mechanism that allows legislation to bypass the 60% vote bills need to get through the Senate.Late on Thursday, MacDonough ruled that the wage increase did not meet the standards for budget reconciliation.The parliamentarian acts as an impartial judge and has only been removed from office once. MacDonough is well respected by many members of both parties, and the Biden administration seems unlikely to push for her removal.Other progressive Democrats have proposed a less drastic solution – overruling her.“The Senate parliamentarian issues an advisory opinion,” congresswoman Pramila Jayapal said in a tweet. “The VP can overrule them – as has been done before. We should do EVERYTHING we can to keep our promise, deliver a $15 minimum wage, and give 27 million workers a raise.”Sanders, one of the most ardent supporters of a minimum-wage increase, has proposed an alternative plan – imposing penalties and incentives to push companies toward higher wages.“I will be working with my colleagues in the Senate to move forward with an amendment to take tax deductions away from large, profitable corporations that don’t pay workers at least $15 an hour, and to provide small businesses with the incentives they need to raise wages,” Sanders said in a statement. “That amendment must be included in this reconciliation bill.”Sanders’ comments come after a Senate hearing on Thursday where he lambasted the low wages paid by McDonald’s, Walmart and others. Sanders pointed to a government report that found nearly half of workers who make less than $15 an hour rely on public assistance programs that cost taxpayers $107bn each year.The American people are “sick and tired” of subsidizing “starvation wages” at these companies, Sanders said. More

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      Trans doctor Rachel Levine faces historic Senate confirmation hearing

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      Dr Rachel Levine, a pediatrician and health official from Pennsylvania, faced a Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday as Joe Biden’s nominee for assistant health secretary. The process could see her become the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the US Senate.If confirmed, Levine, 63, would make history and break several glass ceilings. In a country which still only has a handful of openly trans public officials, she would be the most high-profile, occupying a senior position in the Biden administration with major responsibilities in the pandemic response.Announcing her nomination last month, Biden said Levine would bring “steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get through this pandemic … She is a historic and deeply qualified choice to help lead our administration’s health efforts.”As the confirmation hearing got under way on Thursday Levine faced hostile questioning from some of the Republican members of the Senate. Rand Paul, senator from Kentucky, compared transgender surgery misleadingly to genital mutilation and accused Levine of supporting “surgical destruction of a minor’s genitalia”.Levine replied by saying that transgender medicine was very complex. “If I am fortunate enough to be confirmed, I will look forward to working with you and your office on the standards of care” in this field, she said.Paul was rebuked by the chair of the committee, Patty Murray, for his “harmful misrepresentations”.Levine is practiced in the art of negotiating confirmation hearings. She had to be confirmed by the Pennsylvania senate in 2015 for her first public role as physician general of the state.The following year she told the Washington Post that she succeeded in securing a unanimous confirmation vote after she sat down one-on-one with the state senators. “With very few exceptions my being transgender is not an issue,” she told the newspaper.Since the start of the pandemic she has led Pennsylvania’s effort to combat the health crisis as the state’s health secretary. In such a highly visible role she has been confronted by a rash of hostile and anti-trans mockery and abuse on social media and even at a public fair.Last July the governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, who brought Levine into public office, felt it necessary to put out a statement defending her against what he called “vile acts” and “relentless comments and slurs”. He said she was a “highly skilled, valued and capable member of my administration and transgender”.Biden’s nomination of Levine is one of several moves taken by the new administration to promote LGBTQ+ rights. Last month the president lifted Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the US military.Earlier this month Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay person to be confirmed to a cabinet post as transportation secretary. More

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      SolarWinds hack was work of 'at least 1,000 engineers', tech executives tell Senate

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      Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterTech executives revealed that a historic cybersecurity breach that affected about 100 US companies and nine federal agencies was larger and more sophisticated than previously known.The revelations came during a hearing of the US Senate’s select committee on intelligence on Tuesday on last year’s hack of SolarWinds, a Texas-based software company. Using SolarWinds and Microsoft programs, hackers believed to be working for Russia were able to infiltrate the companies and government agencies. Servers run by Amazon were also used in the cyber-attack, but that company declined to send representatives to the hearing.Representatives from the impacted firms, including SolarWinds, Microsoft, and the cybersecurity firms FireEye Inc and CrowdStrike Holdings, told senators that the true scope of the intrusions is still unknown, because most victims are not legally required to disclose attacks unless they involve sensitive information about individuals. But they described an operation of stunning size.Brad Smith, the Microsoft president, said its researchers believed “at least 1,000 very skilled, very capable engineers” worked on the SolarWinds hack. “This is the largest and most sophisticated sort of operation that we have seen,” Smith told senators.Smith said the hacking operation’s success was due to its ability to penetrate systems through routine processes. SolarWinds functions as a network monitoring software, working deep in the infrastructure of information technology systems to identify and patch problems, and provides an essential service for companies around the world. “The world relies on the patching and updating of software for everything,” Smith said. “To disrupt or tamper with that kind of software is to in effect tamper with the digital equivalent of our Public Health Service. It puts the entire world at greater risk.”“It’s a little bit like a burglar who wants to break into a single apartment but manages to turn off the alarm system for every home and every building in the entire city,” he added. “Everybody’s safety is put at risk. That is what we’re grappling with here.”Smith said many techniques used by the hackers have not come to light and that the attacker might have used up to a dozen different means of getting into victim networks during the past year.This is the largest and most sophisticated sort of operation that we have seenMicrosoft disclosed last week that the hackers had been able to read the company’s closely guarded source code for how its programs authenticate users. At many of the victims, the hackers manipulated those programs to access new areas inside their targets.Smith stressed that such movement was not due to programming errors on Microsoft’s part but on poor configurations and other controls on the customer’s part, including cases “where the keys to the safe and the car were left out in the open”.George Kurtz, the CrowdStrike chief executive, explained that in the case of his company, hackers used a third-party vendor of Microsoft software, which had access to CrowdStrike systems, and tried but failed to get into the company’s email. Kurtz turned the blame on Microsoft for its complicated architecture, which he called “antiquated”.“The threat actor took advantage of systemic weaknesses in the Windows authentication architecture, allowing it to move laterally within the network” and reach the cloud environment while bypassing multifactor authentication, Kurtz said.Where Smith appealed for government help in providing remedial instruction for cloud users, Kurtz said Microsoft should look to its own house and fix problems with its widely used Active Directory and Azure.“Should Microsoft address the authentication architecture limitations around Active Directory and Azure Active Directory, or shift to a different methodology entirely, a considerable threat vector would be completely eliminated from one of the world*s most widely used authentication platforms,” Kurtz said.The executives argued for greater transparency and information-sharing about breaches, with liability protections and a system that does not punish those who come forward, similar to airline disaster investigations.“It’s imperative for the nation that we encourage and sometimes even require better information-sharing about cyber-attacks,” Smith said.Lawmakers spoke with the executives about how threat intelligence can be more easily and confidentially shared among competitors and lawmakers to prevent large hacks like this in the future. They also discussed what kinds of repercussion nation-state sponsored hacks warrant. The Biden administration is rumored to be considering sanctions against Russia over the hack, according to a Washington Post report.“This could have been exponentially worse and we need to recognize the seriousness of that,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. “We can’t default to security fatalism. We’ve got to at least raise the cost for our adversaries.”Lawmakers berated Amazon for not appearing at the hearing, threatening to compel the company to testify at subsequent panels.“I think [Amazon has] an obligation to cooperate with this inquiry, and I hope they will voluntarily do so,” said Senator Susan Collins, a Republican. “If they don’t, I think we should look at next steps.”Reuters contributed to this report. More