BY RENUKA RAYASAM AND MYAH WARD
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BEHIND THE VETO THREAT — President Donald Trump’s war against Big Tech turned into a game of chicken today: Congress is forging ahead with a must-pass defense policy bill while ignoring Trump’s threat to veto it unless it repeals a 24-year old law that protects websites from lawsuits. The law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — means that tech giants like Twitter and Facebook (and tech small fry, too) can’t be sued for the user content on their platforms. Many credit it with giving rise to the internet we know and love to hate today.
Repealing it has become an obsession for Trump, one that has escalated in the twilight of his presidency, as Cristiano Lima details today. He mentions it frequently in his rallies without really explaining what it does. Yet President-elect Joe Biden also has said he supports repealing the law, telling The New York Times in January, “Section 230 should be revoked, immediately.” So there’s at least the potential for bipartisan agreement for change — when Congress is off deadline.
Nightly asked a group of experts and insiders whether they think Section 230 should be repealed or amended or whether it should be left alone. Here’s what they said:
“Section 230 is Big Tech’s sweetheart deal. No other companies get the kind of protections that internet giants enjoy. And over and over, we’ve seen them abuse those privileges by censoring and deplatforming anyone who contradicts whatever progressive agenda they’re trying to push on any given day. If Congress can’t get its act together and revise Section 230 to allow Americans to fight back, the whole thing needs to go. Maybe a clean slate is exactly what we need at this point to ensure that real change happens.” — Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)
“It is long overdue to amend Section 230. The whole point of Section 230 was to enlist online service providers as ‘Good Samaritans’ so that they would help reduce the amount of abusive online activity. Congress knew then, in 1996, that federal agencies needed help in curtailing and combating toxic and dangerous online activity and that online service providers were in the best position to help.
“Yet Congress did not condition the legal shield for under-filtering on any behavior at all. This has led to sites enjoying the legal shield even though they encourage, solicit or make money from clear illegality. So revenge porn operators enjoy that immunity — their business model is the destruction of people’s lives. They should not enjoy that immunity. Section 230(c)(1) should be amended to condition the immunity on reasonable content moderation practices in the face of clear illegality that causes serious harm. That would reset the statute to its original purpose — rewarding online service providers that act as Good Samaritans.” — Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at Boston University and a 2019 MacArthur fellow
“Many recent proposals to change Section 230 would make it more difficult for platforms to curb misinformation and abuse, purportedly in the name of free speech. Of course, although Section 230 provides procedural protections, the First Amendment also allows private platforms to decide whether to carry user content. More generally, the interests of free expression are best served by competition policy that ensures there are multiple platforms including those with varying content policies, and by allowing platforms to take steps to ensure they are safe for all users. We support reforms that address platform business practices — for example, to ensure that platforms are responsible for ads they carry, and oppose efforts to use Section 230 to avoid normal business regulation. Any reforms we may consider are part of ensuring that Section 230 continues to be a law that promotes speech online.” — John Bergmayer, legal director for Public Knowledge, a D.C.-based public interest group that promotes freedom of expression and open internet
“We rely on Section 230-protected internet services literally multiple times an hour. Amending or repealing Section 230 likely solves none of the problems that would motivate such changes, while the changes would jeopardize the things we love the most about the internet while entrenching incumbents at the expense of new startups.
“I wish our members of Congress would understand just how much Americans love the internet services that Section 230 enables; and it shows greatly disrespect towards their constituents when Congressmembers threaten to repeal or amend Section 230 as a bargaining chip, as a way of trying to punish ‘Big Tech,’ or to send messages to their ‘base.’” — Eric Goldman , a law professor at Santa Clara University who has co-edited a new book about a key Section 230 case
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Austin’s mayor is the latest example of a political leader not necessarily following his own pandemic guidelines. Reach out at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @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
A man wearing full protective clothing and a gasmask walks through the decorated piazza of Covent Garden in London. | Getty Images
| FIRST IN NIGHTLY |
STILL MIGUK? In Korea, the U.S. is called “miguk”, which directly translates to “beautiful country.” It has always seemed like a fitting name, considering Korea’s longstanding admiration of the U.S. But these days in Korea, TV broadcasters talk about the U.S. with grim faces, flashing to b-roll of lines of Americans wrapped around buildings waiting for Covid-19 testing or graphs depicting an exponential growth of pandemic deaths, writes Catherine Kim from Seoul.
Newspaper headlines question the strength of U.S. democracy above pictures of demonstrators protesting mythical claims of voter fraud. One recent column in the Hankyoreh, a major center-left daily newspaper, was titled, “Covid-19 and the downfall of the U.S.” Another headline, in sisajournal, a popular weekly current events magazine, read: “The surprising election system that make you wonder ‘Is the U.S. actually a democratic country?’” And it’s not just in the news. In boardrooms, in classrooms and in casual dinner table conversations, you’ll hear the same sense of bewilderment: How did the U.S. lose its way?
It’s a shocking development for a country that has, for decades, largely viewed the United States almost like an older sibling — a model of success and progress that Koreans were proud to emulate. Now many Koreans see the U.S. as a failing country, deeply divided and unable to meet basic challenges.
The shift began after Trump’s 2016 win, when many Koreans were shocked to see him claim the presidency after a string of scandals. But the clincher has been America’s bungled response to Covid-19, followed by Trump’s and the GOP’s recent efforts to contest the legitimate results of the 2020 U.S. election. For Koreans, the last year has exposed the deep problems within the American system, from hyper-partisanship and deep distrust in government to a poor healthcare system — issues that have long been familiar to Americans, but not to Koreans, many of whom have maintained the idea of American exceptionalism far longer and livelier than many Americans.
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.
| NEVER TOO EARLY |
YES, 2024’S STARTING — Even in defeat, Trump’s hold on the Republican party remains strong. The president has teased running again in 2024 and while Trump was slow to win party support four years ago, plenty of Republican lawmakers are ready to support his next bid, write Burgess Everett and Melanie Zanona. In a series of interviews today, House and Senate Republicans made clear that the party has no intention of turning its back on Trumpism — or Trump himself. That’s in part because Trump remains an exceedingly popular figure in his party, far more than most congressional Republicans.
The political calculus is also clear. While he will soon lose the Oval Office, he’ll still have his Twitter handle and is expected to still be in firm control of his base. Trump could play a central role in Senate and House primaries in 2022 and create trouble for incumbents who break with him. Future Republican presidential candidates will presumably be eager to court his supporters if he ultimately passes on another campaign.
RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel is inviting roughly a dozen potential 2024 candidates to the committee’s January meeting in Amelia Island, Fla. — the most explicit move she’s made yet to show that the committee will be impartial going forward.
| ON THE HILL |
TEARS ON THE FLOOR — Prior to Sen. Lamar Alexander’s farewell address in the upper chamber, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave a tearful goodbye to the Tennessee Republican. “I myself have leaned on Lamar’s wisdom for many years, but I think I leaned just as much on his optimism, his can-do spirit, his ability to look on the bright side and then discern how some more hard work could make it brighter still,” McConnell said.
HART ATTACK — A Democratic candidate who fell six votes short of holding an open battleground congressional district in Iowa is planning to challenge those results directly with the House, placing the chamber in the highly unusual position of potentially determining the outcome of the race, Sarah Ferris and Ally Mutnick write.
After what appears to be the tightest congressional election in decades, Rita Hart, a state senator, has decided to forgo a legal battle in her home state and will instead contest the election directly with the House Administration Committee. Iowa election officials certified Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks as the winner on Monday after a recount diminished her initial victory margin from 47 votes to only 6 votes.
| TRANSITION 2020 |
LITTLE STATE IN THE GREAT MENTIONING — Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo is now a top contender to be Biden’s HHS secretary pick, according to two people close to the transition, Alice Miranda Ollstein, Adam Cancryn and Tyler Pager write. Raimondo’s rise comes as New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is no longer favored for the role, according to one of those sources and another familiar with the discussions.
FROM TRANSITION PLAYBOOK — A former colleague of Heather Boushey, a top economic adviser to Biden, is publicly airing prior accusations that Boushey mismanaged the think tank she runs and verbally abused her and other subordinates, saying she wants to prevent future White House employees from enduring a similar experience, write Alex Thompson and Theodoric Meyer.
Former subordinates and employees have alleged that Boushey was “phenomenally incompetent as a manager” and had “frequent episodes of yelling and swearing.” The complaints were serious enough that the think tank where she worked hired a management coach to work with her to improve her management style around 2015.
But Dinetta Parrott, who reported directly to Boushey as Washington Center for Equitable Growth’s director of development from 2017 to 2020 before leaving for the Brookings Institution, said the criticisms of Boushey don’t match her experience. “I just don’t think it’s an accurate depiction,” she told POLITICO.
BIDEN’S CARPENTRY — You can’t please everyone, especially when you’re putting together a team to run the federal government. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, Megan Cassella looks at why Biden’s promise to build a Cabinet that “looks like America” hasn’t turned out the way advocates had hoped — and what sort of turbulence his nominees could face in the Senate.
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| BIDENOLOGY |
Welcome to Bidenology, Nightly’s look at the president-elect and what to expect in his administration. Tonight, Andy Blatchford writes from Ottawa about Biden’s relationship with Canada:
The arrival of a Biden presidency is expected to warm up the chill between Ottawa and Washington under the Trump administration.
Trump drove a turbulent NAFTA renegotiation, an undertaking marked by U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, and counter-measures from the Trudeau government on American goods. There were even choice words at the executive level. (Trudeau’s hot mic moment at a NATO conference led Trump to call him “two-faced.”)
While the Biden White House is destined to be more neighborly, some Canadians worry the president-elect’s agenda could hurt cross-border business. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Biden are aligned on a lot of things, like climate policies. But there are trouble spots such as Biden’s pledge to kill the Keystone XL project and his Buy American vows.
Biden and Trudeau have shared very few public moments together. But back in December 2016, a few weeks after Trump’s election win, Trudeau hosted then-Vice President Biden for a state dinner on a snowy night in Ottawa. The guest list included former Canadian prime ministers. Biden gave a speech that touched on his own ties to Canada — and his personal connection in the 1970s with Trudeau’s father, who was prime minister at the time.
The day after the dinner, Biden stuck around to attend a round table with Indigenous leaders and provincial premiers where they talked at length about climate change and clean energy — the two places where Canada and the U.S. are expected to start rekindling their relationship. At the round table, Biden called climate change “the most consequential issue of our generation” and argued the countries could grow their economies while bringing down emissions. He also made the case that Canada and the U.S. could determine their own energy futures and help shape energy trends around the world.
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.
| FROM THE HEALTH DESK |
“If Anthony Fauci tells me this vaccine is safe, and can vaccinate, you know, immunize you from getting Covid, absolutely I’m going to take it.” — Former President Barack Obama, on SiriusXM’s “The Joe Madison Show” in an interview set to be released Thursday, talking about vaccines as candidates have started showing promising signs of effectiveness. |
| ASK THE AUDIENCE |
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.
| AROUND THE NATION |
PADILLA RISING? Sen. Dianne Feinstein publicly threw her weight behind California Secretary of State Alex Padilla to fill Sen. Kamala Harris’ soon-to-be-vacant seat, signaling that Padilla remains a favorite of the Democratic establishment, Andrew Desiderio and Jeremy B. White write. Gov. Gavin Newsom will appoint a replacement for Harris when she resigns to take on her vice presidential duties.
“I have given him my support. I did that quite a while ago. He worked for me at one point, so I know him,” Feinstein said in an interview. “And my sense is that he’s going to represent California very well.”
| NIGHTLY NUMBER |
2007 The first year a large red ribbon was hung in front of the White House on World AIDS Day. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany today falsely attributed the genesis of the towering red ribbon to the Trump administration. |
| THE GLOBAL FIGHT |
BRITAIN GOES FIRST — For once, the U.K. really was world-beating. Boris Johnson will be delighted that British regulators were first over the line in approving a Covid-19 vaccine, delivering global headlines and a welcome bit of good news after a bruising parliamentary rebellion against domestic coronavirus restrictions, Charlie Cooper and Emilio Casalicchio write.
Nearly 1 million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine will be delivered to the U.K. for use from next week. By the end of the year, several hundred thousands more will have been sent to Britain, which has ordered 40 million doses of this vaccine, plus more than 300 million doses of other candidates that have not yet received regulatory approval, including 100 million of the Oxford-produced AstraZeneca vaccine.
For a country whose record on Covid-19 has been among the worst in the Western world, being at the forefront of the global rollout of vaccines has a welcome feel of redemption for Johnson’s government. The prime minister himself was uncharacteristically muted in his celebrations, calling the regulatory approval “unquestionably good news” but “by no means the end of the story” and cautioning citizens, during his weekly question session in the House of Commons, “not get their hopes up too soon” over how quickly the two-dose vaccine could be rolled out.
| PARTING WORDS |
A SETBACK FOR BABE’S FREQUENT FLYER MILES — Your pet peacock may soon not be allowed to fly the friendly skies with you anymore, now that the Transportation Department is tightening rules on “emotional support animals” after a series of high-profile incidents on board airplanes, Stephanie Beasley and Evan Semones write.
Today, DOT said it will no longer consider animal companions used by travelers on commercial flights for emotional support as “service animals,” opening the door for airlines to ban them outright. Passengers who wish to bring their emotional support animals with them when they travel will likely now have to check them as baggage or leave them at home entirely.
The new rule , which updates the definition of a service animal to “a dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of a person with a disability,” was issued following a litany of complaints from airlines and flight attendants alike about people bringing unusual animals — including pigs, gerbils, turtles and birds, among others — on board that they said were for emotional support.
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
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