Tag: President-Elect 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.

America just dodged the Trump bullet — but what did we really learn so that it doesn’t happen again?

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More than 80 million Americans helped the country dodge the bullet of a potential second Trump term, but has one Trump presidency been enough of a lesson for the American people? 

An editorial published by USA Today stresses the importance of remaining vigilant even during the post-Trump era. He warned that the American people must never lose sight of their responsibility to learn how Trump’s behavior was allowed for an entire four years. There should also be accountability for the administrative officials who waged war on America’s democracy.

The favorable outcome of the election does not relieve us from the obligation to try to determine how we allowed the outrageousness of the past four years to take place — how we let our basic institutions of government and society itself to be shaken to a frightful degree. Public accountability, the legislative power of the purse, judicial independence, the United States Department of Justice’s commitment to the law, a respect for a free press, three equal independent branches of government — all being challenged by an administration bent on creating chaos throwing aside democratic norms. 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.

Trump says he’ll leave White House if Biden declared winner of Electoral College

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President Trump on Thursday said he would leave the White House on Jan. 20 if the Electoral College declares President-elect Joe Biden the winner of the election, but indicated he was not prepared to concede defeat.

“Certainly I will. And you know that,” said Trump when asked if he would leave the White House if the Electoral College voted for Biden.

He added, “If they do, they made a mistake.”

“It’s going to be a very hard thing to concede,” Trump told reporters during a press call on Thursday.  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.

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.

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.

Minnesota panel signs off on election results, says voting system clean

Simon finds “no credible allegations” of fraud in vote. 

Minnesota’s top election officials signed off on the results of this year’s vote on Tuesday, giving the state’s process a clean bill of health even as a group of Republicans filed a last-minute legal challenge.

“Our voting equipment is incredibly accurate and the postelection review in front of you proves that,” David Maeda, the state’s director of elections, told members of the five-person state canvassing board led by Secretary of State Steve Simon, which met to make official the outcome of the Nov. 3 vote.

Despite unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic, Maeda reported that a random audit of precincts in all 87 counties failed to show a level of irregularities that would have, by law, triggered a full-county recount anywhere.

That’s never happened since the state began that form of post-election testing in 2006, Maeda added. 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.