POLITICO NIGHTLY: How to swear in a pandemic president

BY RYAN HEATH AND THEODORIC MEYER Presented by With help from Renuka Rayasam and Myah Ward WHAT TO DO WHEN THERE’S A CALL — Joe Biden is on the precipice of the White House. He holds narrow leads in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Head to POLITICO’s 2020 election homepage for the latest results. WELL, SOMEBODY WILL GET INAUGURATED — The winner of the presidential election hasn’t been called, but one thing about Jan. 20, 2021, is all but certain: We won’t see the largest Inauguration Day crowds in the history of the National Mall. If Joseph R. Biden is declared president-elect in the coming days — to repeat, still not a certainty — the ceremonies aren’t likely to match the massive inaugurations when Biden was sworn in as vice president in 2008 and 2012. What might the day look like? Here’s the view from eight inauguration experts who spoke to Nightly over the past few days: There’s no constitutional requirement, except for an oath of office. But since 1901, a congressional committee — the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies — has planned a swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the committee’s chair, said Wednesday that senators are still trying to figure out how to hold an inauguration during a pandemic. “I’ve decided that one of the things we’d do is plan for a big inauguration,” Blunt said during an online event hosted by the law and lobbying firm BakerHostetler. The committee decided June 30 to conduct the swearing-in ceremonies of the next president on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, its traditional site since President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981. But even that plan is provisional. “It’s easier to scale back,” Blunt said, “and then do our best to meet the expectations of both the Congress and maybe more importantly on that day the person being sworn in as president. What do they want that day to look like and how do we do that as safely as we can?” For a West Front ceremony to happen in January, construction on the massive 10,000 square feet wooden platform needed to start from scratch on Sept. 21. So it did. Even so, “due to the ever-changing circumstances, we are constantly assessing the situation,” said Paige Waltz, a committee spokesperson. The Department of Defense, too, has 1,000 inauguration employees getting ready for Jan. 20. U.S. Army Colonel Robert Phillips, director of communication for Joint Task Force - National Capital Region, which coordinates the military’s inaugural support, said his team had been “planning pretty hard since August.” His message was stability and continuity: “The conditions may change, but that’s why we plan.” But inaugurations can be simple and small: In 2013, because Jan. 20 fell on a Sunday, President Barack Obama took the oath for his second term in the Blue Room of the White House surrounded only by his family and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. The Jan. 21 public ceremony was just for show. Biden could choose to repeat that setting, livestreaming it, or go for some other smaller scale inauguration. With the presidential race still uncalled, a potential inauguration hasn’t been top of mind for Biden’s team. A Biden transition official said all inaugural planning would be handled by the Presidential Inaugural Committee, which hasn’t been set up yet. Clues are on the menu: Inaugural uncertainty shows in little details, like a non-committal answer on whether the traditional Inaugural luncheon at the Capitol would take place. “The JCCIC is committed to planning inaugural ceremonies that are as traditional, safe, and inclusive as possible,” is all Waltz would say. The luncheon would ordinarily include the outgoing and incoming president and vice president, the House and Senate leadership, Supreme Court justices and incoming cabinet nominees. A lunch like that seems unlikely. Other recent events at the Capitol, such as the funeral of John Lewis during summer’s coronavirus surge, operated at less than 20 percent of the normal occupancy. The Biden campaign’s current strict Covid protocols include everyone submitting to testing within 36 hours of being near him, everyone wearing N95 masks, no hand shaking, and no touching. That’s very difficult to manage in a traditional inaugural setting and scale. “The optics of having the inaugural be deemed a super-spreader event would tank the credibility of a new president who has vowed to tackle the virus head-on on day 1,” said one organizer of Obama’s 2013 inaugural. The biggest wild card is President Donald Trump’s role, were he to lose reelection. Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, said successful transfers of power “start at the top.” In Chertoff’s case, he said, “President Bush wanted it to be well executed and it was.” A small Biden inaugural could conceivably reduce or remove Trump’s role. Five outgoing presidents have skipped their successor’s swearing-in: John Adams (1800), John Quincy Adams (1829), Andrew Johnson (1869), Woodrow Wilson (1921), and just-resigned Richard Nixon in 1974. Bad weather can also wreck the best-laid plans. It sent Reagan’s 1985 ceremony into the Capitol Rotunda and William Taft’s 1909 ceremony to the Senate. What scope does a president-elect have to alter the arrangements? The Presidential Inaugural Committee, which forms after a new president is elected, can essentially take charge of events that occur outside of the Capitol complex, like parades, balls, and other celebrations. On the official ceremonies at the Capitol, Waltz predicted “vigorous discussions” with the president-elect and promised to “work to accommodate to the extent possible,” any requests of a new president. Given the Biden campaign’s obsessive Covid-19 safety planning, multiple big inauguration events per day seem unlikely, according to two senior Obama supporters involved in the 2013 inaugural. If Biden is inaugurated in January, don’t expect a big concert in front of Lincoln Memorial, or anything designed to attract millions of visitors for multiple days. Sign up for POLITICO Transition Playbook to track the appointments, the people and the power centers of the next administration. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out at rheath@politico.com, tmeyer@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @politicoryan, @theodoricmeyer and @renurayasam. A message from Care in Action: Right now, children are crying for their parents, because our government said “we need to take away children” - cruelly plotting to separate babies from their parents. How do we explain to our kids that families were separated on our watch? We need to reunite every family. Now.   Gabriel Sterling, Voting Systems Manager for the Georgia Secretary of State's office, answers questions during a press conference on the status of ballot counting in Atlanta. | Getty Images COVID-2020 IT’S STILL GOING — Biden seems to be closing in on a victory. But he’s staring at a deeply divided nation — and an opponent who may refuse to accept the results. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, national correspondent Natasha Korecki breaks down how Biden is preparing for what would be a rocky transition. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast ‘SCAPEGOAT’ — Trump’s gains in South Texas among Mexican Americans and with Miami’s Cuban American population have raised alarms among many Democrats. But while Democrats are taking stock of their losses in those states, some are warning against pinning the blame on Latino voters, write Laura Barrón-López, Sabrina Rodríguez and Nightly’s Renuka Rayasam. “The overall fixation on Latinos is a scapegoat,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told Laura. Biden’s share of Latino voters across the country matched Hillary Clinton’s four years ago. In the Rio Grande Valley and Miami, however, Trump’s Latino outreach yielded tens of thousands of new Republican voters. Some Democrats say the losses signal that the party needs to rethink its long-term messaging and strategy for Latinos — one more tailored to the unique experiences of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Venezulans, Cubans and more. “I do think unless the Democratic Party as a whole really begins taking seriously this flight of Latinos from Democratic Party to the Trump party we could lose folks for a generation,” said Democratic Rep. Veronica Escobar, who was reelected on Tuesday in her El Paso district.   NEW EPISODES OF POLITICO'S GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS PODCAST: The world has long been beset by big problems that defy political boundaries, and these issues have exploded in 2020. Are world leaders and political actors up to the task of solving them? Is the private sector? Our Global Translations podcast, presented by Citi, unpacks the roadblocks to smart policy decisions and examines the long-term costs of the short-term thinking that drives many political and business decisions. Subscribe for Season Two, available now.     ON THE HILL SPEAKER SPEAKS UP — Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants another two-year term running the House, cementing her role — for now — as the most powerful woman in Washington, John Bresnahan, Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris write. The 80-year-old Pelosi is coming off a disappointing Election Day, where her party lost at least five seats so far in the House, but the California Democrat intends to stay in the speaker’s chair during the 117th Congress, according to letters sent to her colleagues this morning. Pelosi has served as the Democratic leader since 2002, and the vast majority of her colleagues have never known anyone else running their caucus. Pelosi also pledged to work closely with, in her words, “President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris,” who are now leading the race for the White House. House Democrats will formally begin choosing their leaders on Nov. 18. No challenger to Pelosi is expected to emerge, and none could defeat her, although a small number of disgruntled House Democrats want a change atop her caucus.       NIGHTLY NUMBER 638,000 The number of jobs U.S. employers added in October, a solid pace though far fewer than needed to regain most of the jobs lost to the pandemic recession just as new viral cases are setting record highs. PUNCHLINES WONDER WHAT COMEDIANS ARE TALKING ABOUT THIS WEEK? After giving you the recipe for a Pink Trumptini, Matt Wuerker, in the Punchlines Weekend Wrap , takes you through the latest in political satire and cartoons on the election. PALACE INTRIGUE OUTFOXED — Not all marriages of convenience end up in divorce court, but when they do, it’s easy pickings to find the forensic evidence that doom awaited the relationship, senior media writer Jack Shafer writes. And so it is this week, as Trump and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel all but finalized their own conscious uncoupling, that we can see that the two weren’t really falling apart as they were never really together. It’s true that Fox propped Trump up when other networks were treating him as a novelty, reliably televising his stemwinder speeches and letting his proxies spin away his blatant untruths and off-the-cuff insults. And it’s true that Fox was proud to have the president as Viewer Number One, taking his calls and often seemingly broadcasting directly to his bedroom TV. The truest thing you can say about politics and the entertainment business is that eventually, every political career grinds to an ugly end and every show gets canceled. For the longest time, it seemed, the Trump show on Fox was looking at a four-year renewal. But audiences and voters — like husbands and wives —can be a fickle bunch.   KEEP UP WITH THE PEOPLE AND POLITICS DRIVING GLOBAL HEALTH IN GLOBAL PULSE: This year has revealed just how pivotal it is to keep up with the politics and policy driving global health. Our Global Pulse newsletter connects leaders, policymakers, and advocates to the people and politics making an impact on our global health. Join the conversation and subscribe today.     PARTING WORDS GEORGIA ON MY MIND — Clayton County, south of Atlanta, is one of the keys to Biden’s tenuous lead in Georgia — and, therefore, to his lead in the race for 270 votes in the Electoral College. Renu grew up there. She emails us this dispatch about her childhood home: My parents, who grew up and got married in South India, settled in Jonesboro, Ga., in 1979 in a community built around a man-made lake called Lake Spivey. This is the southern part of Clayton County. It shared more similarities with Macon, about an hour south, than with the northern part of the county, which is part of John Lewis’ former congressional district and is a 25-minute drive away. In the 1980s Jonesboro residents had two things to brag about: Gone with the Wind was set in a fictionalized version of the area and Burt Reynolds filmed Smokey and the Bandit there. My brother and I still point out the house that Reynolds owned when we take friends out on our parents’ boat. As a kid, I was tasked with handing out the okra my mother grew in the backyard to our Southern neighbors, some of whom had Confederate flags flying on their doorsteps. My first Cabbage Patch Kid had blonde hair and blue eyes. Forty years later my parents still live in Jonesboro. We talk more about how rapper T.I. owned a home (and carried out his house arrest) on the lake than we talk about Mr. Burt Reynolds. Over the summer Slutty Vegan, a very popular Black-owned meatless burger joint, opened up a Jonesboro location. There are plenty of Black professionals, and no Confederate flags, in the neighborhood where my parents live now. These days Jonesboro feels more like an Atlanta suburb than the rural outpost of my youth. Still it came as a shock to me this morning when I woke up to see national reporters tweeting about Clayton County. Growing up in the 1980s, Jonesboro felt so far from the center of anything important that I fled the first chance I got. Clayton County’s change from a white, rural area to a majority Black Atlanta suburb, from a county that voted for George H.W. Bush in 1988 to one that could deliver Georgia to Biden, seemed like a slow transition. But looking back, it happened really fast. It’s not the kind of fast-growing suburban transformation that typically gets attention in a presidential election year — it was just Black families leaving New York and other expensive places for areas with cheaper housing. A lot of white families left to move farther South to build a different bubble. I saw it happening in my own lifetime, but I somehow missed its significance. Riding around the roads where I learned to drive, I remember the (sometimes traumatic) moments of my childhood. I see an area that suffers from poverty, unemployment and neglect. I missed other changes that have turned out to have national significance. But, today, voters in Clayton County may have proved what my mom has been trying to convince me of for years: There’s something happening in Jonesboro. A message from Care in Action: Right now, children are crying for their parents, because our government said “we need to take away children” - cruelly plotting to separate babies from their parents. “I always tell my kids to treat others the way you want to be treated. How do I explain to our kids that families were separated on our watch?” We can make this a nation we’re proud to leave our kids. We need to reunite every family. Now.   Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam Chris Suellentrop @suellentrop Tyler Weyant @tweyant Myah Ward @myahward   FOLLOW US

POLITICO, LLC 1000 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA, 22209, USA