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Dhruv Khullar | Biden's Pandemic Plan Might Just Work
Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
Khullar writes: "The coronavirus is devastating America, and getting worse - but it's not too late for a concerted effort to save countless lives."
t is hard to overstate the scale of the pandemic in America. On many days, a quarter of a million Americans become newly infected with the coronavirus, and four thousand die—numbers that dwarf the deadliest moments of last spring. The country’s COVID-19 death toll has passed four hundred thousand and, according to Joe Biden’s chief of staff, will reach half a million in February; at any given time, more than a hundred thousand Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19, and health systems are running out of space, equipment, and personnel. Meanwhile, a new coronavirus variant, thought to be fifty per cent more transmissible and possibly thirty per cent more deadly than the original, has been discovered in at least nine states. The U.S. has no genome-sequencing or reporting system in place, so it’s impossible to say just how widespread the new variant is, or whether other, more dangerous strains are already in circulation. In any event, the sheer contagiousness of the new version means that the death toll is almost certain to rise further and faster.
Vaccines are a reason for hope, and are already making a difference; nearly twenty million Americans have received a shot. But vaccine distribution has also proceeded chaotically and haphazardly. The problem isn’t strictly one of supply. Doses are being shipped as quickly as they can be manufactured, but only about half of the shots received by states have actually been administered. Meanwhile, four in ten people say that, even if vaccines were more widely available, they would hesitate to get innoculated, because they distrust the government and the approval process. Sixty per cent of older Americans—many of whom are now eligible for vaccination—say they don’t know where or when to get immunized.
It’s a strange moment in our nation’s history—a contest between error and effort. After a year of mismanagement, America is racing to vaccinate the vulnerable; a new Administration is taking over just as a vastly more contagious form of the virus threatens to accelerate the surge. The pandemic is a juggernaut, bearing down upon us. Can Joe Biden and his team stop it?
The new Administration has proposed a wide-ranging, two-trillion-dollar plan to turn things around. The plan includes stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, a minimum-wage increase, and funding to help schools open safely. But its most important component is vaccination. Biden has pledged to deliver a hundred and fifty million shots in his first hundred days in office; he has also announced that his Administration is nearing deals with Pfizer and Moderna to secure an additional two hundred million doses by the end of the summer. Together with the four hundred million doses the companies already plan to deliver, that would be enough to vaccinate every American adult. But distribution is still a problem. The pace has been accelerating; on several days last week, more than a million Americans were vaccinated. Even at that rate, however, it will take a year and a half to vaccinate eighty per cent of the U.S. population. The pace must accelerate further.
The challenges of vaccine distribution are daunting and well known: the need for ultra-cold storage and shipping, the difficulty of coördinating multiple doses spaced weeks apart, an underfunded public-health infrastructure, the politicization of the pandemic, and growing vaccine hesitancy. “The vaccination campaign is going to be among the most complex tasks in American history,” Tom Frieden, who was the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Barack Obama, told me. Still, Frieden believes that, with the right communication, funding, planning, and execution, these obstacles could be overcome. And, because the risk of life-threatening illness is concentrated in certain groups, targeted vaccinations will have an outsized effect on slowing deaths. Nursing-home residents account for some forty per cent of U.S. COVID-19 deaths. Frieden said that, if most of this group were vaccinated by March, “You’ve protected your most vulnerable flank.”
Biden’s vaccination strategy departs from Donald Trump’s in many ways, most fundamentally in the idea that the federal government should partner closely with states to support the rapid acceleration of immunizations. The Trump Administration largely abdicated its responsibility to support vaccine distribution. “They saw their role as getting the vaccines developed, approved, and shipped,” Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public-health professor at George Washington University, told me. “That is no small feat. But they washed their hands entirely of helping with the last mile. And that’s what ultimately saves lives.” Wen continued, “There’s a misunderstanding of the proper roles of the federal and state governments. You don’t want the feds operating clinics. You don’t want them telling you what to do. But you do expect the federal government to ask states, ‘What do you need?’ You expect it to say, ‘These are the metrics we hope to meet—what can you do right now and what can we help with?’ ”
The specifics of Biden’s plan can be divided into four categories: expanding eligibility, creating vaccination sites, bolstering the public-health workforce, and securing production. As a first step, the new Administration will recommend that the states relax their criteria for vaccine eligibility to include all Americans older than sixty-five, as well as essential workers such as teachers and grocery-store employees. Biden’s advisers argue that the initial guidance from the C.D.C., which limited the first round of vaccinations to health-care workers and nursing-home residents, was theoretically sound but practically unworkable: strict eligibility criteria and the limited shelf-life of mRNA vaccines have meant that, in some places, doses sit in freezers or are thrown out, while in others desperate Americans camp overnight only to be denied. (Some medical providers have had to discard vaccines because they couldn’t find enough people who met the eligibility criteria before their doses expired.)
Biden’s plan will use federal resources and emergency-contracting powers to support or create vaccination centers across the country. The federal government will deliver vaccines to local pharmacies and cover the costs that states incur when using FEMA and the National Guard for vaccine distribution. The Administration also plans to launch targeted programs for rural health clinics, community-health centers, and tribal health services, and to deliver vaccines to those living in jails and homeless shelters. This commitment is in accord not just with an egalitarian ethos but with public-health fundamentals: congregate settings are viral hot spots, which, left unchecked, threaten the health of those living in them and nearby.
More vaccination sites will require more medical personnel, but state and local health departments have been underfunded and understaffed for decades. “They didn’t have what they needed before the pandemic, and that’s even more true now,” Wen, who previously served as Baltimore’s health commissioner, told me. Although Congress has allotted some funding for states, it falls far short of what’s needed. “It’s been too little and come too late,” Wen said. “We’re months behind where we should be in terms of bolstering our distribution infrastructure.” Biden has called on Congress to provide funding to hire a hundred thousand public-health workers to support vaccination and contact-tracing efforts. That investment would nearly triple the number of community health workers in the country and set a foundation for a more robust public-health system in the years to come. In the meantime, the Administration will encourage states to relax scope-of-practice laws—which restrict the services that various medical professions are permitted to provide—and waive licensing requirements, so that more clinicians, including retired health-care workers, can administer vaccines.
Finally, the Administration plans to use the Defense Production Act—a law, passed during the Korean War, that allows the government to compel businesses to prioritize activities needed for national defense—to provide the country with enough vials, syringes, needles, and other supplies to effectively store, refrigerate, and transport millions of vaccine doses. In part, leveraging the D.P.A. is important because it helps insure that people who receive the first dose of the vaccine will be able to receive the second on schedule.
The Biden plan is bold and comprehensive; it includes many of the measures that public-health experts have been advocating for months. Much of it—invoking the D.P.A., mobilizing federal resources, erecting emergency vaccination centers, establishing clear guidance on vaccine distribution and eligibility—can be accomplished through executive action or the bully pulpit. But other parts, such as funding public-health workers and supercharging vaccine administration, will require support from Congress and coöperation from states. In any event, Wen told me, an effective vaccination campaign will get us only so far. “Vaccines are not going to get us out of the immediate surge,” she said. “The Biden team needs to set the right expectations. Otherwise, people will say, ‘We’re vaccinating all these people. Why are cases still going up?’ The public deserves clear communication about what vaccines can achieve and when they can achieve it.” She went on, “The immediate trajectory of the pandemic really depends on people’s behavior. It’s unrealistic to expect that, when Biden starts to talk about physical distancing, it will suddenly convince everyone in the country to act differently.”
The need for distancing has never been greater. America’s vaccination effort is unfolding against the backdrop of a vast viral surge. In December, the U.S. recorded more coronavirus infections, hospitalizations, and deaths than in any prior month. Health-care systems are only now beginning to contend with new cases resulting from Christmas and New Year’s get-togethers. Even in optimistic scenarios—assuming Biden makes good on his pledge and then some—the vaccines will come too late for too many: the brutal reality is that, in all likelihood, another hundred and fifty thousand Americans will die of COVID-19 in the first hundred days of his Presidency. “The essence of the problem is that, on the one hand, with the vaccines, we have more rationale for hope than we’ve ever had,” Frieden said. “On the other hand, we have to double-down on protection protocols.” Epidemiological modelling from prior epidemics suggests that, perversely, optimism about the end of an outbreak can lead to its persistence; the knowledge that the vaccines are effective may seem to license risky behavior that will spread the disease.
Distancing, tracing, isolating: these “non-pharmaceutical interventions” fall within the realm of public health. Under the Trump Administration, the United States went without a national, coördinated public-health response. States have had to bid against one another for critical supplies; testing and contact tracing remain inadequate, and public-health agencies are sidelined. The lack of federal support has been incomprehensible and deadly. Now, as new and more contagious strains of the coronavirus emerge, it’s also becoming clear that the country has no surveillance system to track genetic variants. We’re flying blind—unable to detect, much less extinguish, the coronavirus mutants that threaten to upend the depressing equilibrium we’ve accepted to date.
At the center of Biden’s efforts will be a push to harmonize the U.S. response. He plans to create a federal Pandemic Testing Board to oversee the distribution of tests, and his relief plan includes fifty billion dollars for strengthening the country’s testing program, in addition to a call for funds that will create the infrastructure to monitor for new variants. He will ask every governor to issue a mask mandate. The first executive order he signed—the “100 Days Masking Challenge”—requires masks on all federal property; another order requires masks on planes, trains, or intercity buses. He’s called for a “Supply Commander” to work with governors on the coördinated procurement of P.P.E., drugs, and ventilators. He will reëngage with the World Health Organization and other global health agencies.
Curtailing the pandemic’s damage will require not just strategy but stamina. Biden must help Americans find the fortitude to muscle through mandates and restrictions until enough of us get vaccinated. This may take longer than we’d like. “We should expect the pandemic to continue to test America for the entirety of Biden’s first term,” Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown’s public-health school, told me. “Life will be much closer to normal, but there will still be challenges.” Even if vaccines are widely available, and even if the majority of Americans agree to be vaccinated, the virus will find places to thrive. “Herd immunity isn’t a magic light switch that turns off the pandemic,” Jha said. “Certain communities will have low vaccination rates, and you’re going to have outbreaks. They will fizzle, because most people around them will be immune, but they’ll still occur and they’ll still cause big problems.” In some places around the country, hospitals will still fill. The threat posed by possible new strains of the virus, which could be more transmissible, lethal, or resistant to vaccines, will persist.
Looking back on the past year, one might wonder whether America’s decentralized system and political and cultural divisions render the country incapable of contending with a threat like the coronavirus. The United States has become a bitterly partisan nation, and millions of Americans remain skeptical about the virus and the vaccines. Governors have wide latitude in how they manage public-health threats; the country has nearly three thousand public-health departments, and the power to quarantine rests largely with state and local officials. The absence of a national plan has forced states to develop their own criteria for opening schools and businesses. But, even if more federal guidance had been offered, states would still have been free to go their own ways. And, as the virus finds life in one region as it’s suppressed in another, it’s become clear that the sheer scale of the United States also presents a major challenge: the government can impose some restrictions on travel, but American citizens generally have the right to go where they want. It is, as we say, a free country.
And yet it’s not so easy to blame America’s coronavirus failures on its decentralized system. Germany also has decentralized governance, with sixteen partly sovereign states (or Länder) enjoying significant autonomy. But in March, when cases started to rise in North Rhine-Westphalia, the federal government and the German states convened to develop a “uniform approach” to fighting the virus. The common guidelines—which were not legally binding—outlined how localities should mitigate the spread of the virus in businesses, schools, hospitals, nursing homes, places of worship, and other social settings. In April, Winfried Kretschmann, the governor of Germany’s third-largest state and a member of an opposition party, contrasted the German and American approaches: “We can see in the United States that some governors are taking matters into their own hands when there is someone at the helm who at first denied all of these threats. Something like that is completely out of the question here.” After suppressing the virus for much of last year, Germany has recently suffered a surge in COVID-19 infections and deaths; over time, some states have grown more resistant to public-health measures, which has limited Angela Merkel’s ability to respond. Even so, the German death toll is far lower than that of other Western democracies.
German citizens are far from united in their views on the virus. In August, thousands gathered at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate to protest government measures; some claimed that mask mandates were a step toward enslaving the German people. “It’s not like other countries don’t deal with this stuff,” Jha told me. “Protests are not uniquely American. There are large, vocal groups in Germany who think masks are Angela Merkel’s way of stealing their freedom. What’s different is that those people don’t end up having the same purchase on policy that they do in the United States. That kind of crazy, fringe thinking has been infiltrating American policymaking for a while now.” David Gergen, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a senior political analyst for CNN, has served in four Administrations, for both Republican and Democratic Presidents; since he joined the Nixon White House, in 1971, he has witnessed eight Presidential transitions. He’s convinced this one is the most important. “A transition in power isn’t just about legislation and executive orders,” Gergen told me. “It creates cultural and attitudinal change. It’s an opportunity for the country to reset.”
Some patterns are hard to break. Much of Biden’s agenda requires money—and, therefore, the support of Congress. Biden seeks to make huge investments in response to the pandemic’s health and economic damage; he’s called for billions in funding for schools, for health-insurance expansions, for caregiving programs, for paid sick leave, for unemployment benefits, for stimulus checks. Even with narrow Democratic control of Congress, this level of investment will be a tall order. Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, has already signalled discomfort with the idea of more stimulus checks; other Democrats have complained that Biden’s plan doesn’t go far enough. Support from Republicans is unlikely. “It’s going to be very, very hard for Biden to convince Republicans to pass a two-trillion-dollar package,” Gergen said. “They’re going to turn into deficit hawks again.” Without a filibuster-proof majority, Democrats will likely resort to the budget-reconciliation process to pass parts of Biden’s agenda—provided they can hold every senator who caucuses with the party, with Vice-President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote.
Almost certainly, parts of Biden’s plan will be put into practice, whether through executive action or piecemeal legislation. But much of how the pandemic progresses will be determined not by laws but by citizens. “Command and control is never going to work in America,” Donald Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told me. “You have to appeal to people’s values. You need to help them see why it’s important that we act, together, as a country toward a common goal.” Trust in institutions has plummeted in recent decades, amid a sustained assault on the idea of collective action. Biden, the ultimate institutionalist—he arrived in Washington at the age of thirty and spent the next half century serving in the Senate and as Vice-President—insists that he can return the country to a level of political comity that his critics, and many supporters, claim is unrealistic. He campaigned on restoring the “soul of America”; the central theme of his Inaugural Address was unity—“that most elusive of things in a democracy.”
Unlike in other countries, where the pandemic has brought people together, the American experience has further exposed and deepened our divisions. Biden’s task is to educate, persuade, and depoliticize at a moment when the nation’s crises are escalating rapidly. The U.S. economy contracted by about four per cent in 2020, and eleven million Americans are out of work. The country’s democratic norms have been trampled on for four years, and the insidious threat of violent far-right extremism is now coming into view. During the Trump years, we saw what malign leadership could do to our norms and social fabric. The question now is whether constructive leadership can make a compensatory difference in the opposite direction.
Berwick served on the Biden campaign’s health-care task force. In the early nineteen-nineties, he founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement—an organization credited with pioneering the quality-and-safety movement in American medicine—and he has long been considered among the nation’s preëminent health-policy thinkers. In 2010, during a congressional recess, Barack Obama appointed him to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Berwick served for nearly a year and a half but ultimately resigned, when it became clear that Senate Republicans would block his confirmation because he had said nice things about Britain’s National Health Service and committed other ideological infractions.
I pressed Berwick on whether he thought Biden could succeed. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe with strong leadership, and consistent messaging, and honoring of science, and evidence-based plans, and data collection systems that worked, we discover that we’re still just too polarized, our system is too broken. But maybe not. It’s a hypothesis that we haven’t tested yet.” This winter, America will face that test.
Merrick Garland, nominated by then-President-elect Joe Biden for attorney general, delivers remarks at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, on Jan. 7, 2021. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty)
Merrick Garland Wants Former Facebook Lawyer to Top Antitrust Division
Ryan Grim and David Dayen, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Susan Davies has spent much of the last decade working on behalf of major mergers and fending off antitrust enforcement."
s the fight over the direction of the Biden administration’s antitrust policy intensifies, a new figure has entered the fray, scrambling the calculus: Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland. The battle so far has largely been fought out between lobbyists for Big Tech and their allies on the one hand and skeptics of monopoly power on the other.
But according to three sources familiar with the discussions, Garland is hoping to install as the head of the Department of Justice antitrust division a longtime aide who served under him during the Clinton administration and who later was the attorney charged with shepherding his ill-fated Supreme Court nomination. That lawyer, Susan Davies, however, would be a controversial pick for another professional connection of hers: Facebook. The sources for this story are unable to speak on the record for fear of angering the Biden administration, which has not authorized those involved in the discussions to speak publicly.
In 2012, Davies represented Facebook in a lawsuit brought by an advertiser, Sambreel Holdings LLC, that was effectively kicked off Facebook’s platform after the tech giant lured away all its clients and banned users from downloading it. In December, the Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust suit against Facebook, looking to break it into its component parts and ban it from the type of anti-competitive behavior Davies defended as their counsel.
The Justice Department is also suing Google, a case filed just ahead of the Facebook prosecution. The outcome of those twin antitrust efforts will be a major hinge point not just in technology policy but in the power of the government to take on consolidated power centers that are distorting markets across industries. To have the head of the antitrust division recused from one of those cases would create an odd state of play. The rest of Davies’s client roster, meanwhile, is equally worrying to opponents of concentrated power, as she has spent most of the last decade working on behalf of major mergers, fending off antitrust enforcement, and, as her law firm bio puts it, “frequently interact[ed] with regulators and policy makers on behalf of corporate clients.” The ascension of Davies and the intervention of Garland comes at the expense of Renata Hesse, another leading candidate for the top position at the antitrust division.
Garland is a charter member of the Washington legal establishment and is looking to populate the Justice Department with lawyers who’ve beaten similar paths: from the Ivy League to a Supreme Court clerkship to corporate work to government work and back. That’s likely to produce smart and well-qualified candidates and in some areas of the Justice Department could serve the government well enough. But when it comes to antitrust enforcement, the framework in place during the Obama years proved to be insufficient to the task of slowing or reversing consolidation across sectors. Simply installing talented members of the legal establishment will lead to the same failures without a serious rethinking of antitrust policy.
Davies first worked under Garland in the Clinton administration’s Justice Department, where Garland served as a deputy assistant attorney general. Garland was nominated to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton, and Davies left for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, followed by a stretch at the corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP, before returning to the Clinton-era DOJ as a top lawyer in the antitrust division.
From there, she became general counsel and chief intellectual property counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where then-Sen. Joe Biden was a former chair and remained a high-ranking figure. When the Obama administration took over, Davies was put in charge of selecting and vetting federal judicial nominees, a process that resulted in a remarkable tilt toward corporate attorneys. One study found that just 4 percent of President Barack Obama’s picks came from a public interest background. In 2011, she again left for the private sector, becoming a partner at the right-leaning firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP — at one point home to Robert Bork, a conservative legal scholar and rejected Supreme Court nominee; Kenneth Starr, best-known for his role as independent counsel during Clinton’s impeachment and who has now joined Trump’s impeachment team; conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; John Bolton, a former national security adviser for President Donald Trump; Alex Azar, Trump’s secretary of health and human services; and Trump’s Attorney General William Barr — where she defended giant companies against antitrust enforcement, shepherding some of the largest mergers of the past decade and playing a major role in the consolidation crisis that President Biden’s antitrust division will be tasked with unwinding.
Anti-monopoly reformers are still hoping that Jonathan Kanter, a plaintiff’s lawyer who assisted in the cases against Facebook and Google, can get a shot at the position. He’s being talked about seriously enough that Big Tech and its allies have begun working in opposition to his appointment, sources familiar with the planning but unable to speak due to the likelihood of professional reprisal said.
One dark horse may be Jon Sallet, another Obama-era antitrust division veteran who later worked as a top counsel to former Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler. Though a former telecom lobbyist, Wheeler did complete groundbreaking net neutrality regulation, and Sallet helped navigate that terrain. Afterward Sallet joined a think tank and wrote a short paper entitled “Louis Brandeis: A Man for This Season.” Brandeis is something of a patron saint for the nascent anti-monopoly movement, and in this paper, Sallet calls for decisive, Brandeisian action to take on monopoly power.
Several sources working on the nominations described Sallet as a “Janet Yellen figure” who would make almost everyone in the fight somewhat happy despite his connections to some of the disappointing antitrust policies of the past.
At any rate, Sallet doesn’t carry the baggage that someone who worked directly for Big Tech might. Hal Singer, managing director at Econ One, a litigation consulting firm, noted that Biden’s team would have to police monopoly power across the economy, and someone coming out of the tech world may be unwilling to subject a prior employer to that. “Competition policy, properly understood, is more than just beefing up antitrust enforcement. It also entails policing anti-competitive conduct outside of an antitrust courtroom,” Singer said. “President Biden’s picks must not only have expertise in the field but the experience to understand this critical distinction and the willingness to break from the past.”
Meanwhile, even as a Facebook lawyer could take over the antitrust division, one of Facebook’s biggest critics could get a major job of her own. The American Prospect and The Intercept can confirm that Columbia law professor Lina Khan, a prominent Big Tech critic who helped author a scathing House Antitrust Subcommittee report on the tech platforms, is the leading candidate to replace Rohit Chopra as a commissioner at the FTC. Chopra has been named Biden’s nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Capitol Forum, a subscription-based investigative news outlet, first reported the possibility of Khan replacing Chopra.
Though Khan hasn’t held a high-ranking position in the executive branch, she’s been at the top of the field for a while. Before Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, Khan was poised to head up Clinton’s transition team for the antitrust division. She also was a legal fellow at the FTC in Chopra’s office in 2018, and before that she was a summer associate when Chopra served at the CFPB. For the past year-plus, Khan has been a primary force behind the House Antitrust Subcommittee’s investigation into Big Tech.
The FTC shares jurisdiction over merger policy with the antitrust division of the Justice Department; each agency takes on mergers in different sectors. The FTC also has a substantial consumer protection portfolio and can write rules under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act that would prohibit certain anti-competitive practices, like worker noncompete agreements that ban employees from taking a job with a competing firm in the same industry.
Putting Khan in this role would maintain the anti-monopoly beachhead that reformers achieved at the commission with Chopra’s ascendancy as a commissioner in 2018. Despite being in one of two Democratic slots on a majority-Republican commission, Chopra was able to use the position to articulate a different strategy at the agency and even win substantive victories, pulling forward what has for decades been a moribund enforcer of antitrust and consumer protection laws. Keeping that energy up with Khan, a visionary legal mind in the field, would cement that mindset in place. Even if Khan somehow doesn’t get the job, the other potential names, including Khan’s Columbia colleague Tim Wu (who coined the term “net neutrality”) and the Open Markets Institute’s Sally Hubbard, would carry forward the banner of strict antitrust enforcement.
There are not one but two open seats for Democrats on the FTC, however. The fear from some reformers is that the Biden administration would offset the “antitrust seat” at the FTC with a pro-business counterpart. In an effort to preempt that, some Democrats are stressing the need for a “consumer protection seat” to pair with the antitrust seat to best tackle the FTC’s dual mandate.
There are several names out there, should Biden go that route. Alvaro Bedoya worked for former Sen. Al Franken on privacy issues; he now directs the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University. Privacy is a key issue at the FTC. Nicol Turner Lee, who covers a similar set of issues for the Brookings Institution, including algorithmic bias and racial equity, has also been mentioned.
On the flip side, a couple of the names that have been thrown out for the remaining FTC slot are more aligned with big business. For example, Travis LeBlanc, a former FCC enforcement bureau chief who’s now a corporate defense attorney with the firm Cooley LLP, could be in the running, though he also may be tapped for an FCC position.
The working assumption is that Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, the former aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and current FTC commissioner who was made the acting chair by the Biden administration, would continue in the chair’s role. The only reason that would change is if Terrell McSweeny, a top Biden adviser and former FTC commissioner, would want the chair. However, the rumored White House “antitrust czar” position is said to have been designed to give McSweeny a landing spot in the administration, should she decide to take it. Slaughter has already begun filling out senior staff at the agency; none of those positions require Senate confirmation.
Sen. Mitch McConnell. (photo: Getty)
How McConnell Derailed Trump's Impeachment Trial Before It Started
Alexander Bolton, The Hill
Bolton writes: "Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell on Jan. 13 announced to colleagues that he was open to voting to convict President Trump for inciting an insurrection, but since then he has taken steps behind the scenes to throttle the Democratic impeachment effort."
On Tuesday, 45 GOP senators voted in support of a motion from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) declaring Trump’s second impeachment trial unconstitutional on the grounds that Trump is no longer president.
The vote made it clear that there will be no Senate conviction of Trump, since at least 17 GOP votes would be needed to secure the 67 votes necessary in a 50-50 Senate.
“Just do the math,” Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), one of five Republicans to oppose Paul’s motion, remarked to reporters after the vote.
McConnell was described by associates as “furious” over the mob attack on the Capitol, and he has continued to say he will keep an open mind to legal arguments presented during the trial.
It seems clear he is more than open to the party moving on from Trump, particularly after the former president was widely blamed for the GOP losing two runoff elections in Georgia that cost it the Senate majority.
At the same time, McConnell likely wanted to avoid an intense fight within the caucus over a Trump conviction. And he’d seen the blowback in the House, where Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and other Republicans who voted to impeach Trump have come under furious criticism from the former president's supporters.
Over the last several weeks, McConnell made a series of moves in the lead-up to the vote on Paul’s motion that GOP senators said made it highly likely that the motion would succeed.
And the effect of those moves and Paul’s motion were to quash the Senate trial before it even begins.
“How the pieces fell together, I don’t know, but they did fall together and Mitch is pretty shrewd,” one GOP senator who spoke to The Hill said.
McConnell’s leadership team informed Senate Republicans on a Jan. 21 conference call that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts would not preside over the trial.
Roberts did preside over Trump’s first trial a year ago. His replacement is Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the Senate president pro tempore and senior Democratic senator.
That revelation “crystalized” for Paul the idea of challenging the constitutionality of the whole proceeding given that a Democratic senator would be presiding.
The timing of the Paul vote was also curious.
The Senate voted on Paul’s motion immediately after GOP senators heard a presentation from George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, an outspoken critic of the Democratic impeachment effort against a former president.
A second GOP senator who requested anonymity said the surprise vote immediately following the presentation at lunch boxed in many GOP senators.
“That was kind of sandbagging us,” the lawmaker said.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), another one of the five GOP senators who voted against Paul’s motion, said she thought it was unfortunate that the Senate was forced to vote immediately after Turley’s presentation and before they could hear different views.
“For a significant institutional question like this, to have this sprung upon us caused everybody to be a little bit flat-footed,” she said.
“So we heard one side,” she added. “I think just about everybody was quite surprised to be in a position to actually take not only a public position but a vote on this today.
McConnell also took steps to delay the opening of the trial.
He declined Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer’s (N.Y.) demands to reconvene the Senate from the January recess in time to start the impeachment trial while Trump was still in office.
The pre-trial briefing schedule that Schumer and McConnell later agreed to would have eaten up the week before the inauguration and McConnell argued there was no realistic way to finish the trial while Trump was still in office.
“There is simply no chance that a fair or serious trial could conclude before President-elect Biden is sworn in next week,” McConnell said on Jan. 13.
At the time, it wasn’t clear what would happen because of the delay, but it seems to have let anger over the Jan. 6 riot simmer down within the caucus.
“That’s McConnell’s game. He knows the longer something waits, the more it fizzles,” said a Senate GOP aide. “McConnell knows that if you wait on something, the sizzle goes out.”
McConnell bought more time for his colleagues by pushing for the House impeachment managers to wait until Thursday to present their article of impeachment to the Senate, which would have given Trump's defense team until Feb. 11 to submit a pre-trial brief.
He insisted that the president, as unpopular as he was immediately after the Capitol attack, would get due process and a fair trial, even if it prolonged the process longer than Democrats and even many Republicans wanted.
McConnell and Schumer eventually agreed that the House impeachment managers would exhibit the articles of impeachment on Jan. 25 and that the president’s pre-trial brief wouldn’t be due until Feb. 8, setting Feb. 9 as the start date of the trial.
There were reasons for Schumer to agree to a delay.
He had to balance the concerns of Democrats such as Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who didn’t want an immediate start to the impeachment trial to get in the way of President Biden’s Cabinet picks and work on a COVID-19 relief bill.
McConnell didn’t urge his colleagues to vote one way or another on the Paul motion, and he has not been advocating for or against a conviction.
But a third Republican senator, who requested anonymity to discuss behind-the-scenes maneuvers, said the way the debate played out in the GOP conference was the result of McConnell’s handiwork.
The senator said he viewed McConnell’s statement on Jan. 13 that he had not decided how he would vote on an article of impeachment as more of a warning to Trump not to do anything dumb, such as pardoning the rioters who stormed the Capitol.
“Even going back to the beginning when McConnell was sending the message that he was open to voting to convict, I think that may have been designed to help save the country and keep Trump from doing things that are even more damaging,” the senator said.
Other GOP senators said they thought McConnell was “holding the door open” for voting for a conviction if additional “damning” information emerged about Trump’s role in stirring up the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
It’s unclear to what degree McConnell was just responding to shifting political winds.
But GOP senators say it’s rare the longtime senator’s hand isn’t at play in steering the GOP caucus.
“There’s not a lot that happens that catches Mitch by surprise,” the second GOP senator requesting anonymity said.
'It sets a dangerous precedent, one made more alarming by Facebook's history of suppressing Black viewpoints and its tendency to see far left and far right activists as the same.' (photo: iStock)
Facebook Is Banning Leftwing Users Like Me - and It's Going Largely Unnoticed
Akin Olla, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Facebook placed a number of leftwing organizers on a restricted list during Biden's inauguration. It's part of a much bigger problem."
n response to the fascist riot at the US Capitol, Facebook engaged in a flurry of dangerous and misguided corporate authoritarianism. I, along with a number of other leftwing organizers, was deemed a threat to the inauguration of Joe Biden and placed on a restricted list that limited my ability to communicate with others. My account could no longer create Facebook groups or events, two tools that I’ve used over the last decade to coordinate protests and build entire organizations. I was also banned from commenting in Facebook groups, liking Facebook pages, and messaging Facebook pages. The restriction was to be removed the Saturday after the inauguration, but it only fully ceased apparently after public backlash. This is part of a long history of Facebook treating leftwing activists as if they were far-right extremists, and a pattern of silencing those who speak out against racism and fascism.
Facebook’s latest sweep went relatively unnoticed by most media outlets and was simply framed as a restriction of events in and around Washington DC leading up to the inauguration. Gizmodo was one of the first publications to pick up the story but the majority of its article barely mentions the fact that leftwing users in the United States were targeted and effectively silenced. Most of the relevant content of the article was pulled directly from a blogpost from Facebook itself. Gizmodo, like most other outlets that reported on the decision, seemed to imply that these bans were a net positive and, if anything, a little later than it would have preferred.
The lack of in-depth reporting on what was a massive new development in Facebook’s struggle to monitor itself is unfortunate. This sweep wasn’t as simple as restricting events around a certain location, which should be a troubling development on its own. Facebook targeted users across the US, and while Facebook has publicly claimed it sought out users with past violations, many of the leftwing users targeted had no such violations, according to Facebook itself. Attempts to seek clarity or appeal the decisions have been shut down by Facebook, and the scope of the restrictions have not been made public.
Strictly speaking, this may not be a legal or constitutional infringement on free speech; Facebook, as a private company, sets its own policies about who can use its platform and what opinions they can express. But it sets a dangerous precedent, one made more alarming by Facebook’s history of suppressing Black viewpoints and its tendency to see far-left and far-right activists as the same.
In August 2020, Facebook expanded its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy”, aimed at removing the presence of far-right extremists from its website. It rid itself of many QAnon groups and far-right militias. But it is also struck at leftwing organizations, seeming to accept Trump’s post-Charlottesville “both sides” moral equivalency with little thought. Facebook removed It’s Going Down, a platform that has long provided on-the-ground analysis of mass protests. It also removed CrimethInc, an anarchist publication that provided a teenage me with a new lens in which to view formative events like the invasion of Iraq and the 2008 economic crisis. While both these sites are keystones of the left, they were quickly disappeared from Facebook with little public attention or reaction.
Facebook has also targeted individuals for merely speaking out against racism or responding to hate crimes. Natasha Marin, a Black anti-racism consultant, was temporarily banned for sharing a screenshot of a racist message she received. In response to Liam Neeson’s confession that he once roamed the streets looking for Black men to harm, Carolyn Wysinger, an activist and high school teacher, posted that “White men are so fragile and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them.” It was a reasonable response to Neeson’s remarks and the long history of white men murdering random Black men. Facebook responded by deleting the post and threatening Wysinger with a temporary ban. The list goes on.
While Facebook may place the blame on complicated algorithms that they are working to address, it is clear the problem is deeper than that. In 2018, Mark Luckie, a Black former Facebook employee, illustrated a racist culture at Facebook. He and other Black employees have made frequent complaints about being aggressively accosted by security, dissuaded from joining Black working groups, and being called aggressive or hostile for simply sharing their thoughts in meetings. One employee shared a story in which they were asked to clean up after two white employees, despite being a program manager. In June 2020, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Black Lives Matter. A few months later, he restricted political posts in Facebook’s internal employee forum and banned the placement of text on profile pictures, preventing both employees who wanted to “Make America Great Again” or proclaim that “Black Lives Matter” from expressing themselves outside of specific, moderated groups – or through the use of pre-approved profile frames.
The conflation of the far-right with those speaking out and organizing against injustice continues to this day. On top of restricting my profile, and the profiles of others, Facebook has also moved to ban a new slate of leftwing organizations and individuals. The Socialist Equality party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality were banned earlier this month with no warning or reason. Facebook has recently reversed this decision, but only after inquiries from the Financial Times. And now, Facebook is considering removing posts that critique Zionism.
Facebook has significant power and influence, and decisions like this are a clear argument for the desperate need to regulate the tech behemoths that increasingly decide who and what is heard. While my restriction was temporary, what is stopping Facebook from instating such measures again in the future, particularly during a moment of mass upheaval? The inauguration was such an event; Black radicals and others had every reason to protest the inauguration, but Facebook determined that any such protests were unacceptable. An organization which finds it so difficult to distinguish fascists from Black leftwing activists should not be trusted to make such decisions.
Protesters call for justice for Jacob Blake shot by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last August. (photo: AP)
2 Kenosha Police Officers Who Were Present at Jacob Blake Shooting Are Back on Active Duty
Joe Jurado, The Root
Jurado writes: "While Jacob Blake hasn't received justice for the seven shots fired into his back, two of the officers who watched it happen have been placed back on active duty."
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Officers Vincent Arenas and Brittany Meronek had been on administrative leave since the Aug. 23 shooting. Neither of them used deadly force against Blake and were cleared of any wrongdoing by Noble Wray, a former Madison police chief who was brought on as a consultant to review the state Department of Justice’s investigation into the shooting. Both officers have been listed as active duty since Jan. 20.
Earlier this month, Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced that Officer Rustin Sheskey, the man who fired the seven shots at Blake, would not face charges for the shooting. According to Graveley, despite the fact Sheskey shot a man in the back while he was walking away, he could still successfully argue self-defense because Blake had a knife.
Sheskey is still on administrative leave while an internal review into his use of force is conducted. Blake survived the shooting but was left paralyzed below the waist. Video of the shooting quickly went viral and ignited multiple protests in the city of Kenosha.
During one of those protests, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a staunch Blue Lives Matter and Trump supporter, fatally shot Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, two men who were protesting. Rittenhouse is currently facing charges for the shooting.
Blake’s shooting only intensified nationwide tensions surrounding race and policing following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police only months earlier. The shooting also became a focal point during the 2020 presidential race, with President Joe Biden visiting Blake’s family and saying that charges should be filed. Former President Trump, on the other hand, wheeled out his rote law and order rhetoric and gave his officials sympathetic talking points about Rittenhouse.
So despite one man being paralyzed, and two men getting killed during the fallout, it’s nice to know the officers who more or less started all this chaos won’t face any major consequences. America will never fail to America.
Indigenous leaders attend Congress, Guatemala, Jan. 28, 2021. (photo: Ubaldino García
Guatemala: Indigenous Leaders Denounce Illegal Mining
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Indigenous leaders and mayors gathered on Thursday at Guatemala's Congress to denounce the illegal mining of gold, silver, and jade in their territories."
Nearly 60 mining projects were granted in the Chiquimula Department without prior consultation with the Mayan communities.
The delegation included representatives from Ipala, Concepcion Las Minas, Jocotan, Camotan, San Juan, Quetzaltepeque, Esquipulas, and Olopa territories.
Mayan Indigenous leaders called on Energy Minister Alberto Pimentel to address the illegal mining in the Chiquimula department where the El Pato and Olopa villages are among the most affected zones.
Warning that greater "conflict" and "ungovernability" could erupt in Chiquimula, Indigenous leader Jovelino Ramirez noted that 58 mining concessions were not consulted with the Indigenous peoples or local authorities.
On Feb. 1, lawmakers will interrogate Pimentel who must respond to several accusations voiced by the delegation and offer a report on the mining activity.
"Minister Pimentel has to assume his responsibility, file criminal complaints, and require security forces to close the mining operation in El Pato village where jade, gold, and silver are being stolen," Congressman Carlos Barreda said.
On Thursday, some El Pato residents and priest Mario Canan were arbitrarily detained by the miners as they inspected what was going on there. They were released after the intervention of the Police.
A protester demonstrates against the Dakota Access Pipeline on March 10, 2017, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty)
Appeals Court Agrees That Dakota Access Pipeline River Crossing Is Illegal
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "A federal appeals court has struck another blow against the contested Dakota Access Pipeline."
A three-judge panel on the U.S. District Court of Appeals from the D.C. Circuit agreed Tuesday with a lower court ruling that the pipeline's crossing at the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation is illegal and requires an in-depth environmental review, the Grand Forks Herald reported.
"We are pleased that the D.C. Circuit affirmed the necessity of a full environmental review, and we look forward to showing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers why this pipeline is too dangerous to operate," Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith said in an Earthjustice press release.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has long opposed the pipeline's crossing under Lake Oahe, a drinking water source for the tribe that is located just off of their reservation, the Grand Forks Herald explained. It became the subject of massive Indigenous-led protests in 2016 and 2017, leading the Obama administration to withhold a key permit for the project.
However, the Trump administration approved the pipeline without a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) of the Missouri River crossing, a coalition of Sioux tribes explained in a letter to President Joe Biden. The Army Corps of Engineers began an EIS of the crossing in September based on the lower court ruling, the Grand Forks Herald reported. This is expected to take up to 13 months, but the tribes and their allies are calling on the Biden administration to shut the pipeline down entirely.
Biden has promised to focus on the climate crisis in office, and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on day one of his administration, leading Indigenous and environmental activists to call for a shutdown of all contested fossil fuel pipelines.
"Especially after the Keystone XL decision, the pressure is increasing for the Biden administration to take action here," Jan Hasselman, an Earthjustice attorney who represents the Standing Rock Sioux, told Reuters.
Meanwhile, pipeline proponents considered Tuesday's court decision a win because the court did not order the pipeline to shut down while the EIS is completed. A lower court had originally ordered the pipeline to shut down in July, but that has been reversed.
"I think the big point is that the court did not rule that DAPL is not safe," Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, told the Grand Forks Herald.
The Dakota Access pipeline is the main pipeline delivering oil from North Dakota's Bakken field, which is the second-largest shale development in the U.S., according to Reuters. It currently has the capacity to carry 570,000 barrels of oil a day, but both state regulators and pipeline operators want to double that in coming years, the Grand Forks Herald reported. It is owned by Energy Transfer Partners.
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