Amy Coney Barrett faces questions on legal record as nomination hearings continue – as it happened

Along the way as part of his morning Twitter salvo, Donald Trump has again claimed that the administration’s pandemic response has saved two million lives, and also lobbed an insult at Dr Anthony Fauci.

Fauci has objected to the Trump campaign using his words out of context in an ad, but this morning the president has retorted that “Tony’s pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications”.

Two different states, and two different approaches to ballot boxes from the Republicans. In California they are trying to add some in, in Texas they are getting them taken away.

California authorities have launched a criminal investigation into unauthorized ballot boxes the party has placed in several counties, with authorities warning the set-ups are illegal.

The secretary of state issued a memo to county registrars this weekend clarifying that unofficial drop boxes are illegal and ballots must be returned by mail or to official polling places, vote centers or ballot drop-off locations.

Republicans have defended the move, saying that convicted felons and individuals with a criminal history are allowed by the state to go door to door and collect ballots from voters, claiming “The Democrat anger is overblown when state law allows organizations, volunteers or campaign workers to collect completed ballots and drop them off at polling places or election offices.”

Jump across a couple of state lines, however, and it is a very different GOP approach indeed, as Slate report:

A federal appeals court reinstated a Texas order late Monday night that limits the number of ballot drop boxes in the state to one per county. Civil rights groups and Democrats pushing for expanded access to different ways to cast a ballot during the pandemic filed suit in response to Gov. Greg Abbott October 1 order curtailing the number of drop boxes in the state. Last Friday, a federal court struck down the Republican governor’s limit on ballot boxes, which came after a gubernatorial proclamation in July expanding early and absentee voting options. But over the weekend a federal appeals court stayed that decision, allowing the October order to continue to be enforced, and on Monday—the eve of the start of early voting in Texas—the appeals court ruled that Abbott’s order would stand.

Early voting starts in Texas today, and people are already getting in line to vote early some two hours ahead of the Houston voting centre opening.

Yesterday there were more than 10-hour waits and long lines as early voting started in Georgia in scenes that you just simply rarely see in any other major democracy.

An election date for your diary. We’ve got a live online discussion of the US election coming up on Tuesday 20 October at 2pm ET – that’s 7pm BST if, like me, you are based in the UK. It will feature a panel of our leading US journalists.

Senior political reporter Daniel Strauss, political correspondent Lauren Gambino and columnist Richard Wolffe will be chaired by our columnist and Politics Weekly Extra podcast presenter Jonathan Freedland.

There are more details and the ability to book your tickets here: Guardian Newsroom: The US presidential election

Adrian Horton writes for us this morning about Totally Under Control, a project from New York City-based film-makers Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger which recounts the early days of the pandemic in the US, revealing in clinical detail a disastrous federal response to a preventable crisis.

The resulting film is a clinical, point-by-point recounting of America’s preventable slide into the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a damning list of mistakes, foreseeable crises, and political squabbling splayed across a coherent timeline intended to be released just ahead of the election, “so that people could render a judgment about how the federal response had been”, Gibney told the Guardian.

The two-hour film focuses primarily on the early days of the pandemic: the missed opportunities from January through April which led to America’s spiraling coronavirus present, an unending “first wave”. Though there’s plenty of sense still to be made from the pandemic summer – the surge of cases in the US Sunbelt and, more recently, an outbreak within the White House (a title card reveals the film wrapped just one day before Trump announced his positive diagnosis via 1am tweet) – the film-makers generally stuck to their mandate of early-stage diagnostics: forensic re-evaluation of January, February, and March, “because that’s when all the death, all the economic destruction could’ve been prevented”, said Gibney.

“As human beings, we forget things really quickly,” Harutyunyan said. “Especially when you’re living through it, you might forget what happened three months ago.” The film offers a chance to be “reminded about the decisions and actions made by this administration”.

Read more here: ‘They refused to act’: inside a chilling documentary on Trump’s bungled Covid-19 response

Speaking of the coronavirus relief bill, it cropped up as a topic in the TV debate between Mitch McConnell and Amy McGrath who are contesting a Kentucky Senate seat in November, and the Republican senate majority leader attempted to laugh off the criticism. Martin Pengelly in New York writes:

“The House passed a bill in May and this Senate went on vacation,” McGrath said.

As McConnell chuckled, she continued: “I mean, you just don’t do that. You negotiate. Senator, it is a national crisis, you knew that the coronavirus wasn’t gonna end at the end of July. We knew that.”

As McConnell tried to interrupt, still chuckling, McGrath said: “If you want to call yourself a leader … you got to get things done and those of us who served in the Marines, we don’t just point fingers at the other side. We get the job done.”

McConnell blamed the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, saying: “Look, I know how to make deals. I made three major deals with Joe Biden during the Obama era. What the problem is here is the unwillingness of the speaker to make a deal.”

McConnell’s “one job” as Senate majority leader, she said, “is to help America through this crisis right now in passing legislation to keep our economy afloat so that people can make ends meet.

“And instead of doing that, he is trying to ram through a supreme court nominee right now, instead of negotiating, which is what he should have been doing all summer long.”

If you are confused as to what is happening with the proposed coronavirus stimulus, you are possibly not alone. Last night the president tweeted that Republicans “should be strongly focused” on getting a relief package passed.

That was in contrast to his statement from 6 October, when he announced that “I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election”.

That, in turn, had been a total reverse on where the president had stood four days previously. On 3 October, Donald Trump had tweeted:

It’s been a Republican campaign mantra to keep pushing for Joe Biden to answer the question of whether he would ‘pack the court’ if he were to be elected in November.

Biden has refused to rule it out, although last night in Cincinnati he said “I’m not a fan of court packing.”

Speaking to WKRC, he went on to say “The president would like nothing better than to fight about whether or not I would in fact pack the court or not pack the court, et cetera. The focus is, why is he doing what he’s doing now?”

“Court packing’s going on now. Never before, when an election has already begun and millions of votes already cast, has it ever been that a Supreme Court nominee was put forward,” the Democratic party nominee added.

As well as Cincinnati, yesterday Biden appeared in Toledo, Ohio, where he told a drive-in rally in Ohio that Donald Trump ‘turned his back on you’ during the pandemic and its economic fallout.

He questioned why Republicans had time for supreme court hearings but no time to come to an agreement with House Democrats on another economic relief package to help individuals, businesses and city and state governments.

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There’s more on the Biden campaign trail in Ohio from Joan E Greve here: Biden campaigns in red state Ohio, hoping to expand battleground map

Here’s the latest update on the pandemic figures. Yesterday the Johns Hopkins university tracker recorded 41,653 new coronavirus cases and 317 new Covid deaths in the US. New daily cases are running at about 19% higher than they were a fortnight ago.

Stephen Collinson has written an analysis piece for CNN looking at what he describes as Trump’s “potential superspreader sprint” to try and win reelection.

Taken in isolation, Trump’s rally looked like any other big campaign event three weeks before an election day. While some supporters wore masks behind him in the camera shot, many people in the big, outdoor crowd did not.

And despite presiding over a botched pandemic response, Trump claimed he had saved millions of lives. After turning his White House into a superspreader event that caused multiple infections, the president also criticized Biden for holding socially distanced events in which attendees sit in designated circles.

“They only have the circles because that’s the only way they can fill up the room,” the President said, before gazing out at his own large and raucous crowd that contravenes every government recommendation on combating the virus and saying: “These are the real polls.”

But medical experts expressed despair at Trump’s decision to gather huge crowds. “I promise you, the virus is there, whether it is an indoor event or an outdoor event in these large gatherings,” said Dr. William Schaffner, professor of health policy and preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University. He added that the images of Trump’s rally made him “weep.”

“Some of those people will become sick, they will spread it to others when they get home and they will become sick. These are accelerator events that promote the distribution of the virus,” Schaffner said.

Trump’s mockery of his own government’s recommendations – his rallies are almost the only mass participation events taking place in the world right now – came amid fast darkening warnings about the months ahead.

Read it here: CNN – Trump mocks virus as he launches potential superspreader sprint to win reelection

Nina Lakhani has been in Pennsylvania for us, reporting on how the ‘untouched mass power’ of Latino voters could be the secret to a Biden victory.

While polls continue to show Biden leading nationally, analysts agree that Pennsylvania is a must-win battleground state if the Democrats are to reclaim the White House, and the state’s rapidly growing and diverse Latino communities could play a crucial role – if they vote.

“The path to victory is through our communities of colour and the Latino vote is an untouched mass of power that has to be unblocked to win the state, but they’re mostly ignored. Even Biden’s campaign still isn’t taking the Latino vote seriously, there’s been little outreach,” said Maegan Llerena, state director of nonprofit social justice group Make the Road Action.

While Latinos do lean Democrat overall, they do not vote as a bloc and the size and diversity of this electorate means they could be key to victory for both candidates in several important swing states from Florida to Pennsylvania.

Yet one poll found that by mid-September, almost 60% of registered Latino voters nationwide had still not been contacted by any candidate or political party – even though a record 32 million are eligible to vote, making them the largest non-white electorate.

Read more here: The ‘untouched mass power’ of Latino voters could be the secret to a Biden victory

North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis looks like he’ll be appearing at the Senate judiciary committee hearing in person today, following his positive Covid test earlier this month which kept him away from the opening session. He’s released a letter from his doctor Jack Faircloth MD saying that:

I’m happy to report that since you have had such a mild case of Covid-19 and have a strong immune system you are free to return to work without any restrictions.

Tillis tested positive on 2 October, and so his doctor says that because he has carried out 10 days isolation, has been fever free for at least 24 hours, and any symptoms he showed have improved, Tillis was able to leave isolation from 4pm yesterday.