| | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM | Presented by Harry's | With help from Myah Ward BREAKING — President Donald Trump issued pardons tonight to two former Republican congressmen who pleaded guilty to felony charges, as well as the campaign operative whose contacts with a Russian-aligned academic triggered the Trump-Russia investigation in 2016. TEACHER APPRECIATION — Joe Biden fulfilled his pledge today to nominate a former teacher to the job of Education secretary. By picking Miguel Cardona, a Latino man, the first in his family to attend college and the father of school-aged kids, Biden reaffirmed his commitment to a diverse Cabinet. Nightly reached out to education editor Delece Smith-Barrow over Slack to talk about how Cardona, Connecticut’s Education commissioner, might influence Biden’s education agenda. This conversation has been edited. Where does Cardona stand on pandemic school reopenings? Cardona was very pro school reopenings for the pandemic, so he will likely back Biden up on that. This is really a source of tension, because the teachers union in CT were not in favor of this. They were very outspoken about teacher safety, etc. And he wants students to take standardized tests in 2021, but there’s been a lot of chatter that it wouldn’t be right to test students at this time because of the pandemic. Do you expect Biden to break with Obama’s education policies? Wasn’t Arne Duncan, Obama’s secretary of Education, more supportive of charter schools and less so of teachers’ unions? Yes, you’re right. The charter stance is very different from Obama’s presidency. Biden isn’t extremely outspoken about charter schools, but in general he doesn’t seem to like them. Especially with his wife being a member of a teachers’ union that is very anti charter schools. We haven’t found much on Cardona and charters, but he doesn’t seem too crazy about them either. In March he reprimanded the director of one of the state’s charter schools and gave them only a one-year renewal. Let’s talk about how Cardona, if confirmed, might break with Betsy DeVos, his predecessor in the Trump administration. There’s the Title IX overhaul , governing sexual misconduct, which DeVos has touted as her main achievement. I think that won’t stand long. With Title IX you don’t need Congress to approve things. When you don’t have to tangle with Congress, change happens quickly. Do you expect “resistance” from career staff that DeVos called for? I don’t think he’ll be necessarily a peacemaker. He’s very pro school reopenings, while so many teachers and school nurses are unsure if it’s safe for them to come back, and we don’t yet know if teachers will soon receive the vaccine. If they are pushed to go back to classrooms unvaccinated, that could cause some challenges for Cardona. In California this is a HUGE fight. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. How did I not know until this year that Fiona Apple recorded the best version of Frosty the Snowman ever? We’ll be taking a holiday break from Thursday, Dec. 24 - Friday, Jan. 1. We’ll be back and better than ever on Monday, Jan. 4. Reach out at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam .
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A convoy of first responders arrives at a children’s hospital as part of Operation Good Night Lights in Valhalla, N.Y. Police, fire and EMS departments convoyed to the Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center to cheer up young patients and health workers during the holidays. | Getty Images | | | MIXING RELIGION AND POLITICS — Former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr.’s decision to spend millions of university dollars on Republican political causes followed an executive order by Trump directing the IRS to avoid whenever possible investigating religious organizations veering into politics, Maggie Severns writes. Trump issued the order in 2017. The following year, under Falwell’s leadership, the university directed more than $3 million to conservative organizations. In 2019, it created a think tank that purchased Facebook ads featuring Trump’s image and the slogan “Pray For Our President,” produced a podcast that amplified Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and recently staged a strategy session for the 2021 elections that featured only Republican politicians. These actions appear to push the boundaries of the university’s nonprofit status, particularly given that the law explicitly bans nonprofits from assisting political candidates under a provision called the Johnson Amendment, named after former President Lyndon Johnson, who sponsored it in the Senate. But Trump’s administration furthered the IRS’ already hands-off approach to monitoring churches and other religious nonprofits to the point that enforcement now appears to be nearly nonexistent, giving Liberty and other groups new opportunities to test boundaries they couldn’t have in the past.
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| | EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT TRANSITION PLAYBOOK, SUBSCRIBE TODAY: A new year is quickly approaching. Inauguration Day is right around the corner. President-elect Joe Biden's staffing decisions are sending clear-cut signals about his priorities. What do these signals foretell? Transition Playbook is the definitive guide to the new administration and one of the most consequential transfers of power in American history. Written for political insiders, this scoop-filled newsletter breaks big news daily and analyzes the appointments, people and emerging power centers of the new administration. Track the transition and the first 100 days of the incoming Biden administration. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | YOU’RE ON A BOARD! YOU’RE ON A BOARD! Trump announced plans today to appoint another slate of top allies to various government boards, yet another sign that his time in office is winding to a close. The president named Hope Hicks to be a member of the board overseeing the prestigious Fulbright scholarship. Hicks has long been one of Trump’s closest confidants outside of members of his own family. The president also nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to serve on the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as well as White House staff secretary Derek Lyons, who notified Trump of his plans to leave the job earlier this month. Trump tapped Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the acting undersecretary of Defense for intelligence and security, to chair the Public Interest Declassification Board. Those individuals were among the more than 40 people named to various “key positions” on panels such as the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Museum and Library Services Board, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
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| | | | | LOLLIPOPS NOT PROVIDED — A cohort of the federal government’s top health officials received shots of the coronavirus vaccine on stage today alongside a half-dozen frontline health care workers. The event was equal parts a public endorsement of the safety of the vaccines, two of which have been authorized for emergency use by the FDA this month, and a celebration of the NIH’s influential role in developing the inoculation created by U.S. pharmaceutical company Moderna. “When we need a medical miracle, we know where to look,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said. “It fills me with pride that the NIH and other parts of HHS played a significant role in developing this vaccine, which will save thousands and thousands of lives and help bring this dark chapter to an end.”
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| BYE BYE BIRX — Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, indicated in an interview today that she would soon retire from government service, suggesting a recent report on her personal travel had taken a toll on her family. Asked whether she would stay on to assist Biden’s pandemic response, Birx told the U.S. news network Newsy that she wants the incoming administration “to be successful,” and that she “will be helpful in any role that people think I can be helpful in. And then I will retire.”
| | Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly’s look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, we provide select quotes from Biden’s remarks today in Wilmington, Del., including his thoughts on coronavirus, insight into his attorney general choice and his reaction to the ongoing SolarWinds hack: On not interfering with the Hunter Biden investigation: “I guarantee you I’m going to do what I said. The attorney general of the United States of America is not the president’s lawyer. I will appoint someone who I expect to enforce the law as the law’s written, not guided by me.” On the attorney general selection process: “We’re looking for a team that will instill the greatest confidence in the professionals at DOJ to know once again that there is no politics, there’s no politics. As you know, there’s been a great debate about, in every single appointment, whether or not there’s enough African Americans, enough Hispanics, enough Asian Pacific Americans, enough people who are new and young. So we’re just working through it. It’s not by design. There’s not an obvious choice in my mind.” On the SolarWinds hack: “The attackers succeeded in catching the federal government off-guard and unprepared. The truth is this: the Trump administration failed to prioritize cybersecurity.” On a bipartisan response to the incident: “I was pleased to see leaders in both parties in Congress speak out loudly and clearly on this attack. It is a sign that with a new administration, we can confront these threats on a bipartisan basis with a united front here at home. That should be encouraging to the American people and a warning to our adversaries.”
| | FROM 33M TO 0 — Biden will have to rebuild the official White House Twitter account’s social media following from scratch after he is sworn in. The company told his transition team it will not inherit the followers from the Trump administration. The move by Twitter, a departure from how the company handled the situation four years ago, has peeved some members of Biden’s team. “In 2016, the Trump admin absorbed all of President Obama’s Twitter followers on @POTUS and @WhiteHouse — at Team 44’s urging,” Biden Digital Director Rob Flaherty tweeted Monday. “In 2020, Twitter has informed us that as of right now the Biden administration will have to start from zero.” In a follow-up message, Flaherty tweeted that transition staff recently fought the idea of having the follower count reset but “were told this was unequivocal.”
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| | TUNE IN TO NEW EPISODE OF GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS: Our Global Translations podcast, presented by Citi, examines the long-term costs of the short-term thinking that drives many political and business decisions. The world has long been beset by big problems that defy political boundaries, and these issues have exploded over the past year amid a global pandemic. This podcast helps to identify and understand the impediments to smart policymaking. Subscribe for Season Two, available now. | | | | | | | HOTSPOTS FOR THE HOLIDAYS — Counties in Tennessee, Colorado, Oklahoma and California have seen the highest rates of coronavirus infection over the past week. Patterson Clark ’s map shows where cases rates are highest as Christmas approaches.
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| | | SOMEHOW WE MANAGED — Joanne Kenen, our health care editor at large, emails: Most of us have come to know the blessings and the curses of pandemic Zoom: A way to stay in touch with friends, family, coworkers. A way to reconnect with old friends, which we seem to crave as we endure this year from hell. (One of my happiest despite-the-pandemic days was a camp reunion over Zoom. It went on forever. People sang. It was the best.) But one of the things that’s been hardest for me — and probably for many of you reading this — was managing over Zoom. For nine years I’ve been leading or co-leading the ever-growing, ever-busy, ever-wonderful POLITICO health team. And trust me, I am one Mama Bear of a manager. I bake cookies. I give brides-to-be workplace-appropriate wedding day advice (“Break in your shoes!”). I’ve been known to burst forth into soliloquies about primary care (sometimes after I’ve fielded a call post E.R.). I walked the walk when my team had a tragedy, an illness, a death.. But managing over Zoom is tough. Really tough. Over the past year, I’ve learned how hard it is to onboard someone trying to figure out a new role alone at home, instead of sitting among a merry band of collaborative colleagues. I hate that I can’t spontaneously start bouncing ideas off a reporter and watch the chain and the creativity grow as others chime in. And when I need to work something through with someone, we can’t just walk down our office hallway and sit down in those big comfy chairs by the window looking out at the Potomac. It’s impossible to pick up the nuances of moods and interactions and team dynamics from a little square on a computer screen, even when you really really try. I’m shifting to a role where I do less day-to-day managing, more writing. So here are my parting words to my team for 2020. Maybe it’s a message that other bosses and managers and mentors can share. I’m sorry this year has been so hard. I hope next year is better. And it’s an honor to work with you.
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