As we keep an eye on the White House during Donald Trump’s final full day in office, there also important hearings happening on Capitol Hill today.
Five of Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees will receive confirmation hearings today, before the Senate votes on whether or not to confirm them.
Alejandro Mayorkas, who would lead the department of homeland security if confirmed, is already testifying before a Senate committee, and hearings for Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary nominee, and Avril Haines, who was nominated to serve as director of national intelligence, are also underway.
Hearings for Anthony Blinken, Biden’s nominee to lead the state department, and Lloyd Austin, who would become defense secretary if confirmed, will also take place later today.
The president-elect will host a virtual memorial service this evening to honor Americans who have died of coronavirus.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will participate in a lighting around the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to honor coronavirus victims. The reflecting pool will be surrounded by 400 lights, representing the nearly 400,000 Americans who have lost their lives to the virus.
Biden and Harris are expected to speak at the event. They will be joined by Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington; Yolanda Adams, a well-known gospel singer; and Lori Marie Key, from the Saint Joseph Mercy Health System in Michigan.
Some of America’s most iconic buildings, like the Empire State Building and the Seattle Space Needle, will also be lit up tonight as a tribute to coronavirus victims.
“The inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris represents the beginning of a new national journey — one that renews its commitment to honor its fallen and rise toward greater heights in their honor,” Tony Allen, the CEO of the presidential inaugural committee, said in a statement yesterday.
“In that spirit, it is important that we pay tribute to those we have lost — and their families — and come together to unite our country, contain this virus, and rebuild our nation.”
Donald Trump is hardly unique in his controversial use of presidential pardons, which have been a sometimes sordid feature of US politics for well over two centuries.
In his final hours in office, Trump is expected to pardon more than 100 people, including political allies, friends and cronies. He has already granted clemency to principal figures from his 2016 campaign.
In seeking to promote his self-interest, Trump is merely following in the footsteps of White House predecessors. Under article two of the US constitution, presidents enjoy broad and unchallengeable powers to pardon individuals for federal crimes. This right is “without limit”, the supreme court has ruled.
This is Joan Greve in Washington, taking over for Martin Belam.
Today is Donald Trump’s final full day in office, and Washington is waiting in nervous anticipation to see what he will do before leaving the White House tomorrow.
There have been reports that the president will issue a flurry of pardons and commutations before leaving office tomorrow. Trump has also reportedly considered preemptively pardoning himself to avoid prosecution after exiting the White House, but it’s unclear whether such a move would hold up in court.
The blog will be keeping an eye on that today, so stay tuned.
Chris Kenning at the Louisville Courier Journal has been interviewing Republican supporters in three rural Kentucky counties where nearly 90% voted for Trump, and has been hearing that the president’s election fraud claims have sunk lasting roots, and that Joe Biden’s appeals for national unity may face an uphill struggle. He writes:
“Anybody who would stop and use the common sense that God gave them would realize the election was stolen. There’s no doubt about it. Too many irregularities. Too many things that just don’t happen by chance. And mathematically impossible,” Kentucky pastor John Isaacs said.
While few said they felt driven to join far-right groups such as militias or to march on state capitols in protests, many cited uncertainty about the future. Some vowed to stop participating in elections, while others promised primary payback against disloyal conservatives, reflecting the challenges ahead for establishment Republicans in a brewing internecine party battle with Trump’s more far-right followers.
“I don’t trust my government after all this crap. I was blind, but my eyes have been opened,” said Dotti Johnson, who wore a cap reading “Armed Infidel” in her McKee S&T general store.
Outside of Inez, in the unincorporated community of Tomahawk, hairdresser Gina Patrick, 60, said she grew up with a father who was a local reporter.
“They’re a communist party. They have radicalized to where they make no sense,” she said of Democrats.
“If somebody told you that if you didn’t see eye to eye with them they were going to take your kids away from you and put you in a concentration camp, and your children, have you reprogrammed, would you want to join with them?” she said. “That’s what the talk is. So, does that sound like unity to you?”
When Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Wednesday, he plans to trigger a range of executive orders aimed at solving two of the biggest crises facing the country: the economic downturn and the coronavirus pandemic.
The president-elect’s team has been floating its ideal scenario for how Biden’s first hundred days in office will go. That includes almost a dozen executive orders and pushing for a massive $1.9tn coronavirus and economic stimulus plan. The Biden team is also planning another proposal aimed at reinforcing the economy.
The executive orders concern fighting climate change, battling Covid, pausing payments on student loans, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, and ending the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries. He also plans to quickly take steps to change the country’s criminal justice system and expanding healthcare to low-income Americans.
“President-elect Biden is assuming the presidency in a moment of profound crisis for our nation. We face four overlapping and compounding crises: the Covid-19 crisis, the resulting economic crisis, the climate crisis, and a racial equity crisis,” Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, circulated in a memo the campaign released to the public over the weekend.
Klain added: “All of these crises demand urgent action. In his first 10 days in office, President-elect Biden will take decisive action to address these four crises, prevent other urgent and irreversible harms, and restore America’s place in the world.”
On immigration, Biden is aiming to end some of the hardline immigration policies of the Trump administration. He plans to unveil proposals that will offer a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and foreign aid to countries in Central America. At the same time, however, a Biden official cautioned to NBC that did not mean the next administration would grant entry to all asylum seekers coming to the country.
In laying out his agenda, Biden has worked to frame it as more of a moment for the nation to rally and forget partisan divides. “It’s not hard to see that we’re in the middle of a once-in-several-generations economic crisis with a once-in-several-generations public health crisis,” Biden said during a press conference over the weekend.
“Unity is not some pie-in-the-sky dream, it’s a practical step to getting the things we have to get done as a country get done together.”
Former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder attempting to evade Flint water case on location technicality
Attorneys for former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder have told prosecutors that the Flint water case should be dismissed because he was charged in the wrong county.
Snyder was charged last week with two misdemeanor counts of willful neglect of duty. He was indicted by a Genesee County judge who sat as a grand juror and considered evidence presented by prosecutors.
“Neither of these allegations of non-feasance, or failure to act, occurred while the former Governor was in the City of Flint. At all times set forth in the Indictment, our client was the presiding governor of the State of Michigan with the Executive Office of the Governor located at the Romney Building in downtown Lansing,” attorney Brian Lennon said in a letter to prosecutors.
Associated Press report that the letter was attached to a request for documents and other evidence possessed by prosecutors, a typical step by the defense in a criminal case. Lennon indicated in the letter that he soon would formally ask Judge William Crawford to dismiss the case against the former Republican governor.
Snyder was one of nine people charged in a new investigation of the Flint water crisis. The catastrophe in the impoverished, majority-Black city has been described as an example of environmental injustice and racism.
The city, under Snyder-appointed emergency managers, used the Flint River for drinking water in 2014-15 without properly treating it to reduce corrosion. Lead from old pipes contaminated the system. Separately, the water was blamed by some experts for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, which killed at least 12 people in the area and sickened dozens more.
By the way, aside from the expected issuing of a list of pardons – including to rapper Lil Wayne – the total extent of Donald Trump’s official diary engagements for his last full day in office reads: “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.”
It is the same precise wording that has been used for pretty much every single day in January so far.
Uganda accuses US ambassador of seeking to subvert African nation's presidential election
One problem that will immediately land in Antony Blinken’s in-tray is the US-Uganda relationship, which has been tested this week in the aftermath of last week’s Uganda’s disputed election.
Reuters report this morning that Uganda accused the US ambassador in the country of seeking to subvert the presidential election by trying to visit the main opposition candidate at his home, which has been surrounded by security forces since the vote.
Troops prevented pop star-turned-legislator Bobi Wine from leaving his house shortly after he returned from voting in Thursday’s presidential election, in which he ran against incumbent Yoweri Museveni. On Tuesday Wine said he and his wife had run out of food, and milk for her 18-month-old niece.
The US embassy said late on Monday that Ambassador Natalie Brown had been stopped from visiting Wine, who it referred to by his real name, Robert Kyagulanyi, at his residence in a suburb in the northern outskirts of the capital. The mission said Brown wanted to check on his health and safety given that he was effectively unable to leave his home.
Government spokesman Ofwono Opondo said Brown had no business visiting Wine, who the army says is being held to prevent potential unrest breaking out in the wake of the result. “What she has been trying to do blatantly is to meddle in Uganda’s internal politics, particularly elections, to subvert our elections and the will of the people,” he said. “She shouldn’t do anything outside the diplomatic norms.”
Opondo said, without providing any evidence, that Brown had a track record of causing trouble in countries where she has worked in the past. The government was watching her, he said.
The US embassy has said last week’s vote was tainted by harassment of opposition candidates, suppression of media and rights advocates and a nationwide internet shutdown. “These unlawful actions and the effective house arrest of a presidential candidate continue a worrying trend on the course of Uganda’s democracy,” it said in the statement.
The public rebuke to the United States from the Ugandan government is relatively unusual as the two nations are allies. Washington supports Ugandan soldiers serving in an African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia and has donated about $1.5 billion to Uganda’s health sector in the past three years.
