| | |  | BY RYAN HEATH | Presented by |  |
|
| With help from Renuka Rayasam and Myah Ward BREAKING — President Donald Trump is considering preemptively pardoning as many as 20 aides and associates before leaving office, frustrating Republicans who believe offering legal reprieves to his friends and family members could backfire. U.N. DISCOVERS COVID — The United Nations General Assembly took nine months to arrange a special two-day session on Covid-19 — which kicked off this morning — leaving nearly everyone scratching their heads and asking, “Why now?” UNGA President Volkan Bozkir, who pressed for the summit, argued today that “the world is looking to the U.N. for leadership; this is a test for multilateralism.” If that’s the case, multilateralism is likely to fail that test — if it hasn’t already. Bozkir’s goal this week is big — to “shake up how things are done” in the global Covid-19 response — but in running a conference that isn’t asking for donations, his means are meager. Take the U.N.-backed ACT Accelerator for Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines: It needs another $28 billion in 2021 to meet its stated objective, a mere drop in the world’s stimulus spending ocean. Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg stood alone at today’s session when she offered another $220 million to the accelerator this year, bringing the country’s total contribution so far to just over $500 million.
| German Chancellor Angela Merkel was the only leader of a major country today who directly urged more funding for the accelerator. In a rebuke of Trump’s “vaccine nationalism,” which he pushed at November’s G-20 summit, and a criticism of the current unenforceable system of international health regulations, Merkel said, “It is patently clear that this global and multi-faceted crisis can only be surmounted by global action.” COVAX, the popular vaccine access facility that pools government resources to ensure every country gets the vaccine, is also short $5 billion. But there’s no plan to get the cash, and no strategy to pressure Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna — which have supplied the leading vaccine candidates so far — to sign up to COVAX. The U.N. at least brought vaccine makers to the table this week. “Maybe these brilliant scientists will announce something, I have no idea,” said Brenden Varma, Bozkir’s disarmingly honest spokesperson. There’s little enthusiasm among national diplomats for this event, and few big ideas. The one novel idea is European Council President Charles Michel’s suggestion for a global pandemic treaty, modeled after the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. His speech, which echoed a push he began at the G-20, cuts across several existing efforts to reform the U.N. system, including ongoing WHO reform talks, an Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response and a committee looking at changes to today’s relatively toothless International Health Regulations. So maybe it’s time to change the subject. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has seen enough of this Covid-19 fragmentation. He’s switching his focus in 2021 to climate, in the wake of the commitments from both the Chinese government and President-elect Joe Biden to climate neutrality. The “central objective of the United Nations for 2021 is to build a truly global coalition for carbon neutrality,” Guterres said in a speech Wednesday. He better move quickly: The United Nations World Meteorological Organization announced today that we’re now roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, meaning the world might smash through the goal of containing the rise to 1.5 degrees, set by the Paris Climate Agreement, as soon as 2024. For more on the world’s weirdest Covid-19 summit, read this story by Ryan and Global Pulse author Carmen Paun. And don’t forget to sign up for Global Translations — the newsletter and the podcast, hosted by Ryan and Luiza Savage. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. A sign of municipal pandemic-related budget woes: My hometown, El Paso, stopped collecting recycling this week. Reach out at rheath@politico.com or rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @politicoryan or @renurayasam.
| |
A message from AARP: More than 94,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19. With cases spiking across the country once again, desperate families demand that Congress take immediate action to save lives. aarp.org/nursinghomes | | | | | INDECISION 2024 — Trump has attacked any Republican who has not fully embraced the false narrative that he won the 2020 election, leaving GOP officials, lawmakers and donors wondering about the repercussions they might face for not immediately endorsing a Trump 2024 White House run. Other Republicans are growing concerned about a scenario in which donors may feel pressured to support Trump right out of the gate — not because they believe he’s the best candidate, but to simply avoid drawing the ex-president’s anger, White House reporter Gabby Orr writes. As recently as Wednesday, the president was mulling the idea of scheduling a campaign announcement on Jan. 20 to counterprogram Biden’s inauguration, according to two people familiar with the conversations. He has also discussed an announcement ahead of Georgia’s two Senate runoff elections on Jan. 5, believing his base’s excitement would increase turnout. Some Trump allies claim the president would help other Republicans, too, by declaring his candidacy almost immediately after leaving office, suggesting it would save the party a contentious primary between Trump-hostile characters and those vying to claim his ultra-loyal base. Other confidants have encouraged Trump to keep the public in suspense, and instead spend the next two years strategically undercutting the Biden administration and lending his help to House and Senate GOP candidates. The result is a party in a holding pattern — one incapable of starting its long-term planning for 2022 or beyond until Trump makes up his mind, according to interviews with 13 current or former administration officials, party operatives and Republican donors.
| 
President Donald Trump speaks about the election after presenting the Medal of Freedom to former college football coach Lou Holtz in the Oval Office of the White House. | Getty Images | | | CAMP AGAINST HEITKAMP/NUDGE AGAINST FUDGE — Lawmakers and industry leaders are pushing new candidates in the race for Agriculture secretary as the Biden transition team seems to be at an impasse between the leading names in the race: former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota or Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio. For weeks, food and agriculture leaders have assumed that the pick would come down to either Heitkamp or Fudge, Liz Crampton, Helena Bottemiller Evich and Megan Cassella write. The Biden transition team was on the verge of announcing the selection of Heitkamp early last week, four people familiar with the deliberations said. But then, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who has been pushing for Fudge, gave several media interviews publicly criticizing Biden for a lack of diversity among his first round of Cabinet appointees, and the race is now considered more open. Now, two other prominent agricultural leaders are being aggressively pushed by allies: Kathleen Merrigan, a USDA veteran who was deputy secretary in the Obama administration, and Arturo Rodriguez, past longtime leader of the United Farm Workers union. Former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a loyal Biden surrogate, is also now a possibility. BARRED FROM BARR — The official who served as Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press. Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was installed at DOJ as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said. DIVINING FROM PROVIDENCE — Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo announced today she has taken herself out of contention to be Biden’s health secretary, health care reporter Adam Cancryn writes. Her decision threatens to scramble Biden’s plans for assembling a health care team to lead his pandemic response. Just a day earlier, people close to the transition told POLITICO they viewed Raimondo as a leading contender for HHS secretary after New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham fell out of favor with Biden’s camp.
| |
| | TRACK THE TRANSITION: President-elect Biden has started to form a Cabinet and announce his senior White House staff. The appointments and staffing decisions made in the coming days send clear-cut signals about Biden's priorities. Transition Playbook is the definitive guide to one of the most consequential transfers of power in American history. Written for political insiders, it tracks the appointments, people, and the emerging power centers of the new administration. Track the transition and the first 100 days of the incoming Biden administration. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly’s look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, cannabis reporter Natalie Fertig dives into Biden and marijuana: With the House voting on a bill to decriminalize marijuana Friday (it’s not going to pass the Senate this year but is expected to pass the House), it’s a good moment to take a look at where Biden stands on marijuana policy: He supports legalizing the use of medical marijuana. He doesn’t want people going to jail for using marijuana. But he does not support full legalization. Biden was one of the chief architects of the 1994 crime bill, which set strict penalties and mandatory minimums for drug possession and sale. He said during the 2020 campaign that the crime bill was a “mistake.” He also said in February that marijuana should be legalized, but his office later walked that statement back. Instead, Biden proposes moving the drug to a less-restrictive category within the federal list of banned substances, in order to make it easier for scientists to research its medical use. He also has said that he wants to decriminalize recreational marijuana (basically you’d get a ticket but not go to jail), legalize medical marijuana and expunge marijuana-related records — all things that would be difficult to accomplish as long as marijuana remains on the federal banned substances list. An act of Congress is the easiest way to remove marijuana from the list of federally-banned substances, but the president also has some executive power over the list and lawyers disagree over how far the White House could actually go in altering federal drug law. The MORE Act — which the House is scheduled to vote on Friday — would not automatically legalize the production and sale of marijuana nationwide. Instead it would remove federal penalties on marijuana and then allow states to decide whether they would allow weed sales. Many advocates believe that threads the needle that Biden has said he’s comfortable with: decriminalization but not legalization. It can’t hurt that the MORE Act’s lead sponsor in the Senate is Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Biden likes the idea of expanding drug courts — a popular policy under President Barack Obama that has support from both sides from the aisle. Drug courts are viewed more negatively by advocates, however, than they were a decade ago. They are primarily designed for dependencies on drugs like heroin or cocaine, not marijuana. Biden has also said he will work to reform the criminal justice system during his administration. While marijuana reform was not part of the House’s police reform bill last summer, the MORE Act is written as a criminal justice reform bill and is intended to intertwine the two issues. If Biden were to ask Harris to take point on criminal justice reform in the administration, she could very well push for marijuana policy changes, given her historical support for the issue.
| |
| |  
| | | | | FAUCI STICKING AROUND — Biden asked Anthony Fauci to stay on in his administration to help combat the coronavirus pandemic, the president-elect said today. Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Biden said he talked with Fauci earlier in the day, asking him to remain in his position leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Biden also asked Fauci to serve as his chief medical adviser and on his Covid team. TWO APPROACHES, ONE PANDEMIC — Trump is virtually silent on the pandemic, while Biden is preparing to take office during the darkest period of the outbreak. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, health care reporter Dan Diamond breaks down how the two leaders’ teams are coordinating — and not — as the transition approaches.
| | | | Nightly asks you: Every December, the news media reflects on the lives we lost this year, and 2020 has been especially deadly. Tell us who you’ll miss the most — a family member, a civic leader, a celebrity — and how you’ll remember them. Send us your answers in our form, and we’ll publish select responses next week.
| |
| | NEXT WEEK - DON'T MISS THE MILKEN INSTITUTE FUTURE OF HEALTH SUMMIT 2020: POLITICO will feature a special edition Future Pulse newsletter at the Milken Institute Future of Health Summit. The newsletter takes readers inside one of the most influential gatherings of global health industry leaders and innovators determined to confront and conquer the most significant health challenges. Covid-19 has exposed weaknesses across our health systems, particularly in the treatment of our most vulnerable communities, driving the focus of the 2020 conference on the converging crises of public health, economic insecurity, and social justice. Sign up today to receive exclusive coverage from December 7–9. | | | | | | | ‘THE CAVALRY IS COMING’ — New York City will receive nearly a half million Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna this month for health care workers in high-risk settings and residents and employees of nursing homes, Mayor Bill de Blasio said today. The vaccines are to be administered by health department staff, medical professionals and volunteers recruited through the Medical Reserve Corps, which was deployed to overwhelmed hospitals during the spring surge, Amanda Eisenberg writes. The vaccines have not yet been cleared by the FDA, though data suggest they are highly effective at reducing or preventing symptomatic disease. As the city’s infection numbers climb back to the days when it was the national epicenter of the pandemic, leaders say relief can’t come quickly enough. “Thank God the cavalry is coming,” de Blasio said at his daily briefing today. “The moment we have all been waiting for is finally here. Vaccines are being approved, vaccines are being shipped. We expect the first shipments as early as Dec. 15.”
| | | |
3.5 The number of years Alyssa Farah served in the Trump administration. The White House communications director quit her position today. |
| | | FRANCE’S PLAN — France’s coronavirus vaccine rollout, starting in early January, will be free and voluntary, deploying 200 million potential doses of six different vaccines , according to detailed plans announced by the government today, Elisa Braun writes. The announcement lays out three phases of vaccinations, in order of priority. During the first phase, a very limited amount of vaccines would be available to residents and staff of nursing homes. Doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab should go to 1 million people between January and February. FAUCI’S BRITISH BRUSHBACK — Fauci criticized the British government’s decision to greenlight a coronavirus vaccine as overly hasty today — contending that the country’s approval process relied too heavily on drugmaker data and lacked sufficient scrutiny. The remarks from Fauci came after the United Kingdom approved the vaccine candidate from U.S. pharmaceutical company Pfizer and and its German partner BioNTech on Wednesday, becoming the first Western nation to authorize a Covid-19 vaccine.
| 
| | | WOMEN’S MUSEUM ON THE MARCH — Women got one step closer to getting their own Smithsonian museum today: The Senate Rules Committee passed the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Act. The bill passed the House in February. It needs full Senate approval and a presidential signature before becoming law. The museum has been a longtime goal of a group of Republican and Democratic women lawmakers, including Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.). Even if the bill made it into law this year, there would likely be another long wait ahead before the museum would be built. It took more than a decade after a bill was passed for the National Museum of African American History and Culture to finish construction. Smithsonian spokesperson Linda St. Thomas said last year that the idea for a women’s museum was great, but that Congress needed first to set aside millions of dollars of funding.
| |
A message from AARP: SENIORS DEMAND ACTION
It is an outrage that more than 94,000 residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have died from COVID-19, representing 40% of all COVID-19 deaths nationwide, even though nursing home residents make up less than one percent of the U.S. population. Cases are spiking across the country once again and Congress must act now to help save lives in these facilities.
Congress must ensure residents and staff have regular and prioritized testing and personal protective equipment (PPE), that facilities are adequately staffed and that residents have access to virtual visits with their loved ones. Additionally, Congress must make sure taxpayer dollars going to nursing homes are spent only on items directly related to resident care, COVID-19 prevention and treatment.
Tell Congress to act now to protect the residents and staff of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. aarp.org/nursinghomes | | | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
|
| | Follow us on Twitter | | | FOLLOW US | | |
| |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.