Category: Joe Biden

Biden looks to career officials to restore trust, morale in government agencies

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President-elect Joe Biden’s picks for Cabinet posts will face dual challenges upon taking office: implementing policy and restoring morale and public trust after four years of the Trump administration.

President Trump arrived in Washington, D.C., four years ago with a pledge to “drain the swamp.” And while he failed to root out special interests, he succeeded in driving out a number of career government officials or diminishing their influence.

Trump regularly undercut career officials and policy experts during his time in office, and the Biden transition team — staffed with career officials and policy experts — cautioned it would need time to learn to what extent Trump had tried to “hollow out” the federal government. Continue reading.

Biden won — but Trump gave authoritarians a disturbing lesson on ‘how to steal an election’: political analyst

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During the 2020 presidential election, many of President Donald Trump’s critics — from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives — warned that democracy itself was on the line in the United States and that Trump would become even more dangerously authoritarian during a second term. Trump was defeated by President-elect Joe Biden, but journalist Jeff Greenfield — in an op-ed published in Politico this week — isn’t so sure that U.S. democracy came out of the election unscathed.

“That breeze you felt recently was a national sigh of relief that the 2020 election might finally, at long last, be over,” Greenfield writes. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the other close states have, or soon will have, certified the results. Judges have unceremoniously thrown out the dubious legal claims that thousands, or hundreds of thousands or millions of votes should be disallowed….. The guardrails held, right?”

But Greenfield isn’t so sure. Continue reading.

Biden’s Cabinet a battleground for future GOP White House hopefuls

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Republican senators with an eye on running for the White House in 2024 are gearing up to battle against President-elect Joe Biden’s Cabinet picks, setting up a debate within the Senate GOP conference over how hard to push back on Biden’s nominees.

While the Senate traditionally gives a new president deference to fill his administration’s senior ranks, the environment has changed after four years of bitter partisan fighting under President Trump. 

Four Senate Republicans with potential White House aspirations in 2024 have already signaled their opposition to Biden’s picks, setting the tone for a contentious debate when Biden submits his nominees before what is expected to be a GOP-controlled Senate next year. 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Wednesday said Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Biden has tapped to head the Department of Homeland Security, “is disqualified” because of controversy over his role in a decision to provide green cards to Chinese and Thai citizens who pledged funds to a Las Vegas casino. Continue reading.

As Biden administration ramps up, Trump legal effort drags on

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Electoral College meetings will convene next month in state capitals to formalize President elect-Joe Biden’s win. But the fast-approaching Dec. 14 date has done little to deter the Trump campaign from continuing a protracted election-related legal effort that an increasing number of Republicans have grown weary of.

With the transition to the incoming Biden administration now underway, a growing number of GOP members see President Trump’s legal challenges and unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud as a futile attempt to throw sand in the gears of the nation’s transfer of power.

The shifting attitude among some Republicans comes after judges have rebuffed numerous lawsuits brought by the campaign and its allies, at times using blistering language to dismiss the litigation. Continue reading.

Fact-checking Trump’s cellphone rant of election falsehoods

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On Thanksgiving eve, President Trump called into a news conference held by his allies in a Gettysburg, Pa., hotel, yet again falsely claiming that Joe Biden stole the presidential election. The presidential rant lasted less than 10 minutes, but Trump still managed to squeeze in at least 15 false or misleading statements. Here’s a rundown of his falsehoods.

“This was an election that we won easily. … This election was rigged, and we can’t let that happen. We can’t let it happen for our country. … This election was lost by the Democrats. They cheated. It was a fraudulent election.”

Trump lost decisively, with Biden earning 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. That’s the same margin that Trump had when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, in what he repeatedly called a “landslide.” Many key swing states have already certified the results, with Biden’s margin of victory in some key states significantly higher than Trump’s margin four years ago. For instance, Biden won Michigan by more than 150,000 votes, compared with Trump’s margin of about 11,000 in 2016. Continue reading.

Biden calls for nation to unite in COVID-19 fight in Thanksgiving address

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President-elect Joe Biden called for Americans to unite ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday as coronavirus cases surge. 

“I know the country has grown weary of the fight, but we need to remember, we’re at war with a virus, not with one another. Not with each other,” Biden said in his Thanksgiving address from Wilmington, Del., on Wednesday. 

Biden described the U.S. as “a nation not of adversaries but of neighbors,” calling on Americans to love each other.  Continue reading.

‘Flat-out sabotage’ as Mnuchin tries to put $455 billion in COVID funds out of Biden team’s reach

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Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is under fire for attempting to undermine the incoming Biden administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic on his way out the door after his department confirmed Tuesday that it intends to place $455 billion in unspent coronavirus relief funds into an account that requires congressional authorization to access.

Bloomberg reported that the funds, which Congress allocated to the Federal Reserve in March for emergency lending programs to assist local governments and struggling businesses, will be put in the Treasury Department’s General Fund following Mnuchin’s widely condemned decision last week to cut off the relief programs at the end of the year.

Mnuchin requested that the funds be reallocated by the currently divided Congress, and the Fed has agreed to cooperate with the outgoing treasury secretary’s move. Continue reading.

Biden searches for attorney general to restore Justice Dept.’s independence, refocus on civil rights

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After years seemingly at the center of every major political fight in Washington, the Justice Department is about to get new leadership, and President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for attorney general will have to balance competing demands within his party on thorny issues of civil rights, the environment and the department’s traditional independence from politicians.

Most senior Democrats and former Justice Department officials agree a top contender for the position is Sally Q. Yates, the former deputy attorney general whose tenure stretched from 2015 to the early, tumultuous days of the Trump administration. Other names under consideration include Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), former homeland security secretary Jeh Johnson, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and former White House adviser Lisa Monaco.

Behind the scenes, each Democratic contender has a constituency as well as detractors. But whomever Biden picks will have to be confirmed by a Senate that is currently controlled by Republicans, and take command of a department wracked by accusations of politicization. Continue reading.

Pa. and Nevada certify Biden’s wins; president-elect introduces national security team

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NOTE: This article provided to all free of charge by The Washington Post.

Pennsylvania and Nevada, two key battleground states, certified President-elect Joe Biden’s wins Tuesday, even as President Trump continued to fight results in court and insisted that he will “never concede.”

Meanwhile, Biden introduced several foreign policy and national security picks at an event in Wilmington, Del., calling them a team that will “make us proud to be Americans.” Trump made a brief appearance at the White House to tout that the Dow Jones industrial average reached 30,000 points for the first time in history, and later for the annual pre-Thanksgiving turkey pardons. He took no questions at either event. View the post here.

Detroit had more vote errors in 2016 when Trump won Michigan by a narrow margin. He didn’t object then.

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DETROIT — Republican Party leaders who urged Michigan’s state canvassing board to hold off certifying the Nov. 3 election results before it met Monday cited what they described as “significant problems and irregularities” in Wayne County, home of Detroit.

The GOP officials pointed to the number of “unbalanced” precincts, where there were small discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters logged by election workers in the poll books. Party officials unsuccessfully called on the board to conduct an audit before it certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state with a 3-to-1 vote.

“To simply gloss over those irregularities now without a thorough audit would only foster feelings of distrust among Michigan’s electorate,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and state GOP Chair Laura Cox wrote in a letter Saturday. Continue reading.