“WASHINGTON — President Biden’s allies say that with the distraction of the impeachment trial of his predecessor now over, he will quickly press for passage of his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan before moving on to an even bigger agenda in Congress that includes infrastructure, immigration, criminal justice reform, climate change and health care.
Mr. Biden has so far succeeded in pushing his agenda forward even amid the swirl of the impeachment, trial and acquittal of former President Donald J. Trump. House committees are already debating parts of the coronavirus relief legislation he calls the American Rescue Plan. Several of the president’s cabinet members have been confirmed despite the Trump drama. And Mr. Biden’s team is pressing lawmakers for quick action when senators return from a weeklong recess.” Read more at New York Times
“Purely as a matter of political self-interest, congressional Republicans had some good reasons to abandon Donald Trump as the de facto leader of their party.
Trump is unpopular with most Americans, and he has been for his entire political career. He was able to win the presidency in 2016 only with help from some unusual factors — including an unpopular opponent, intervention from both Russia and the F.B.I. director and razor-thin wins in three swing states.
Today, Trump is a defeated one-term president who never cracked 47 percent of the vote, and political parties are usually happy to move on from presidents who lose re-election.
That would have been true even before Trump’s reaction to his defeat. He became the first president in U.S. history to try to overturn an election result, and he incited a crowd of supporters that violently attacked Congress while it was meeting to certify the results. (Here’s the latest about what he knew during the riot.) On the Senate floor this weekend, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said that Trump was ‘practically and morally responsible’ for the attack and accused him of ‘a disgraceful dereliction of duty.’
Partly because of the riot, Trump left office with just a 39 percent approval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight. Multiple recent polls showed that a majority of Americans thought that the Senate should convict him and disqualify him from holding future office.
So why didn’t Senate Republicans do so?
Senator Mitch McConnell arriving at the Capitol on Saturday. Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg
The G.O.P. is doing just fine
There are two important parts to the answer.
The more obvious one is the short-term political danger for individual Republicans. Roughly 70 percent of Republican voters continue to support Trump strongly, polls suggest. A similar share say they would be less likely to vote for a Republican senator who voted to convict Trump, according to Li Zhou of Vox.
For Republican politicians, turning on Trump still brings a significant risk of being a career-ending move, as it was for Jeff Flake, the former Arizona senator, and Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general. Of the seven Republican senators who voted for conviction, only one — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — faces re-election next year, Burgess Everett of Politico noted. And the seven are already facing blowback in their home states.
The second part of the answer is more subtle but no less important. Today’s Republican Party is less concerned with national public opinion than it used to be — or than today’s Democratic Party is.
The Republican Party of the past won elections by persuading most Americans that it would do a better job than Democrats of running the country. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower each won at least 57 percent of the vote in their re-election campaigns. George W. Bush won 51 percent, largely by appealing to swing voters on national security, education, immigration and other issues. A party focused on rebuilding a national majority probably could not stay tethered to Trump.
But the modern Republican Party has found ways other than majority support to achieve its goals.
It benefits from a large built-in advantage in the Senate, which gives more power to rural and heavily white states. The filibuster also helps Republicans more than it does Democrats. In the House and state legislatures, both parties have gerrymandered, but Republicans have done more of it. In the courts, Republicans have been more aggressive about putting judges on the bench and blocking Democratic presidents from doing so. In the Electoral College, Democrats currently waste more votes than Republicans by running up large state-level victories.
All of this helps explain Trump’s second acquittal. The Republican Party is in the midst of the worst run that any party has endured — across American history — in the popular vote of presidential elections, having lost seven of the past eight. Yet the party has had a pretty good few decades, policy-wise. It has figured out how to succeed with minority support.
Republican-appointed justices dominate the Supreme Court. Republicans are optimistic they can retake control of both the House and the Senate next year (even if they win fewer votes nationwide). Taxes on the wealthy are near their lowest level in a century. Democrats have failed to enact many of their biggest priorities — on climate change, Medicare, the minimum wage, preschool, gun control, immigration and more.
Yes, Trump’s acquittal bucks public opinion. But it still might not cost the Republicans political power.” Read more at New York Times
“Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations are declining sharply in the US, in what feels like an encouraging piece of news. But the nation isn't yet in the clear. Though more than 38 million Americans so far have received at least their first vaccine dose, vaccinations aren't actually what's driving case numbers down. Instead, one expert says, it's following tried-and-true safety measures that's behind the decline: wearing masks, physical distancing, not traveling and not congregating with others indoors. It's especially important those behaviors continue: Vaccinations won't be widely available to most Americans until late spring or summer. New coronavirus variants are popping up. And a troubling batch of mutations have been found in US coronavirus samples. In other news, investigators from the World Health Organization have found signs that the original coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019 was much wider than previously thought.” Read more at CNN
“When will it stop? Will it ever go away? What if it never goes away? Daily questions the world over regarding the coronavirus pandemic.
One possibility is that the disease continues to persist for a long time but in a much milder form, like a common cold, Aniruddha Ghosal and Christina Larson report.
Scientists don't yet have data to understand how it could evolve over five or 10 years or longer. Dr. T. Jacob John was at the helm of India’s efforts to tackle polio and HIV/AIDS. He predicts that the virus will someday become ‘another animal in the zoo,’ joining many other infectious diseases that humanity has learned to live with. Read more at AP
“U.S. Surge: Average daily new coronavirus cases in the United States dipped below 100,000 in recent days for the first time in months, but experts cautioned that infections remain high and precautions to slow the pandemic must remain in place. The seven-day rolling average of new infections was well above 200,000 for much of December and went to roughly 250,000 in January, as the pandemic came roaring back after it had been tamed in some places over the summer, Sudhin Thanawala and Kate Brumback report.” Read more at AP
“Vaccine Tussle: Many Europeans are desperate for a coronavirus vaccine. But not just any vaccine. As AstraZeneca vaccines are rolling out to European Union nations this month, joining the Pfizer and Moderna shots already available, some people are balking at being offered a vaccine that they perceive as second-best.
Poland has begun vaccinating teachers with the AstraZeneca vaccine, but some had misgivings about its efficacy. It's a concern that some professional groups are also voicing in Italy and Spain, even though AstraZeneca says its vaccine offers high levels of protection against severe disease. And the health minister of Cyprus warns that opting for one vaccine over another risks delaying inoculations. Vanessa Gera in Warsaw and Nicole Winfield in Rome report.” Read more at AP
“Israel Fake News: The government is blaming online misinformation for a sudden slowdown in the vaccination campaign, after the country surged ahead in the race to inoculate its population. Israel’s Health Ministry has spearheaded the vaccination efforts, and is now employing both warnings and incentives to persuade reluctant holdouts to get immunized. It has beefed up a digital task force to counter what it calls fake news about the vaccines. Local governments are turning to DJs and offer free food to lure people to vaccination centers. Isaac Scharf and Ilan Ben Zion report from Jerusalem.” Read more at AP
“More from Around the World:
New Zealand’s largest city of Auckland began a three-day lockdown following the discovery of three unexplained cases in the community. Officials say they’ve found no evidence it has spread further, raising hopes the restrictions might be short-lived.
The Philippine government's approval of the reopening of movie theaters, video game arcades and other leisure businesses shut since last year has been postponed at least another two weeks after mayors feared new infections.
Japan has formally approved its first vaccine and says it will start nationwide inoculations within days, but months behind the U.S. and many other countries.
Lebanon has administered its first jabs of the vaccine, with an intensive care unit physician and a well-known 93-year-old comedian becoming the first to receive Pfizer-BioNTech doses.
Zimbabwe has received its first COVID-19 vaccines with the arrival of 200,000 Sinopharm doses from China. It is one of China’s first shipments of vaccines to Africa, after deliveries to Egypt and Equatorial Guinea.
The U.K. government says it has reached its goal of giving at least one vaccine shot to the most vulnerable people in the country,. Some 15 million people, or 22% of the U.K. population, have received their first shot or were offered one.
Dubai International Airport says the pandemic pushed passenger traffic down by an unprecedented 70% in 2020, compared to the previous year. Still, the key east-west transit hub held onto its title as the world’s busiest for international travel.” Read more at AP
“For anyone who believes Donald Trump is a spent force after his Senate impeachment trial, as one of his fellow New Yorkers might say: fuhgeddaboudit.
Within hours of his acquittal, two of the seven Republican senators who voted to convict him for inciting the Jan. 6 rampage in the U.S. capitol were facing censure by their state parties. There’s now a no-holds battle for control of the GOP between its populist and establishment wings.
Trump, who has suggested he might run for president in 2024, is itching for revenge against those who crossed him, Jennifer A. Dlouhy and Mike Dorning report.
And even though he’s blocked from most social media, he can probably turn out voters on behalf of his loyalists in the 2022 midterm elections.
Trump still enjoys substantial support. A Pew poll taken after the attack showed that 57% of Republican or Republican-leaning voters want him to remain a major political figure.
If that percentage falls and a majority of Republicans start to view him as too toxic, he has some options: form his own party, set up a Trump network to take on Fox News or even a Trump rival to Twitter.
Allies such as South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham see an enduring influence by Trump. Far from writing him off, ‘we need Trump-plus,’ he said.
Yet potential legal problems are looming. Beyond the probe by the Manhattan district attorney into possible fraud and tax evasion, a Georgia prosecutor has started a criminal investigation into Trump’s alleged attempts to influence the presidential vote in the state to reverse his loss to Joe Biden.
It was a point made by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell as he tried to straddle the party divide.
Minutes after he voted to acquit Trump, he excoriated him as ‘practically and morally responsible’ for the insurrection and said: ‘He did not get away with anything — yet.’” — Karl Maier Read more at Bloomberg
“Former President Donald Trump may have been acquitted at his impeachment trial over the weekend, but his legal troubles are just beginning. Prosecutors in Georgia are conducting criminal investigations into his attempts to overturn the state's election results, while prosecutors in New York are looking into his business dealings. Trump is also facing civil state inquiries and defamation lawsuits by two women accusing him of sexual assault. Still, Senate Republicans' failure to hold the former President accountable for his behavior on January 6 raises a key question, CNN's Ronald Brownstein writes: Has the extremist wing of the GOP coalition grown too big for the party to confront?” Read more at CNN
“Following the acquittal of former president Donald Trump, there are growing calls among lawmakers for a bipartisan commission to investigate the administrative and law enforcement failures that failed to stop the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill and recommend changes for how to prevent another siege.
Such a commission appears to be the main remaining option for Congress to try to hold Trump to some accountability for his role in the attack. Top lawmakers have squashed a post-impeachment censure of the former president, and the possibility of barring Trump from holding office again under the 14th Amendment seems remote.
RELATED:Trump is ‘alive and well’ as a Republican party force, Lindsey Graham says
Lawmakers in both parties have called for a commission modeled after the bipartisan panel established after the Sept. 11 attacks, with Representative Madeleine Dean, a Pennsylvania Democrat and an impeachment manager, on Sunday describing it as ‘an impartial commission, not guided by politics, filled with people who would stand up to the courage of their conviction.’
Former president George W. Bush signed a law establishing the Sept. 11 commission in 2002, mandated to investigate what caused the attack, what might have stopped it, and outline how to prevent a similar attack from occurring. The commission ultimately offered three dozen recommendations for how to reshape intelligence coordination and congressional oversight. Read more at Boston Globe
“Democrats are bringing earmarks back. And they’re trying to clean them up.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the new chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations panels, will announce in the coming weeks that Democrats will reinstate earmarks -- also known as ‘member-directed spending’ -- in next fiscal year's spending bills.
Democrats say they will be transparent and disclose the details of each earmark -- who requested it, and which entity would get the money. Members cannot request earmarks for entities to which they have financial ties. And Congress will not allow earmarks for for-profit institutions, such as private companies. Earmarks will be limited to state and local governments and nonprofits that carry out quasi-government functions. There will be limits on how much of each spending bill can be allocated toward earmarks.
Some lawmakers, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), have been arguing for years that Congress should bring back earmarks. The idea is to give members of Congress a personal stake in spending bills.
Hoyer and other pro-earmark lawmakers also argue that no one knows the needs of a state or congressional district better than the people who represent them in Congress.
DeLauro, whopublicly supported reinstating earmarks in her campaign for the Appropriations gavel, is expected to make a formal announcement as soon as next week, when Congress returns from the Presidents’ Day recess….
Republicans ended earmarks when they took control of the House in 2011 following years of controversy. (Remember the infamous ‘Bridge to Nowhere?’ Shout out to Don Young! ) Then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was fine with banning the practice since he never sought earmarks anyway. Around that time, Senate Republicans came under pressure to adopt the same stance as their House counterparts. They eventually did.
Earmarks led to several huge political scandals, such as the one that sent ex-GOP Rep. Duke Cunningham to prison -- former President Donald Trump pardoned the disgraced Vietnam War hero before leaving office. The PMA Group scandal -- an episode that almost took down the powerful former Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) -- was the nail in the coffin for earmarking.
There have been calls to bring back earmarks under limited circumstances in the last decade. Banning the practice stripped congressional leaders of a powerful tool. There was never the political will to bring them back -- until now. In fact, the Senate Republican Conference endorsed a permanent ban on earmarks last Congress, so it’s not clear what the GOP reaction will be. Publicly, it'll likely be negative. In private, maybe not so much.
How will this impact D.C.? This is a big deal for a lot of reasons. This will rejuvenate a whole line of business for lobbying shops. Appropriations lobbying was once a very lucrative corner of the influence market -- that will come back now.
This has the potential to make life easier for the leadership. Earmarks are a carrot to help convince lawmakers to vote for spending bills. They can also be a stick for problematic members. The new policy also makes DeLauro and Leahy quite powerful -- they will have a huge say in which projects get funded, and which don’t.
Here’s a question worth pondering: will House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy allow his lawmakers to take earmarks, or will he use this as an opportunity to try to set Republicans apart? Rule 30 of the House GOP rules ban Republicans requesting earmarks. But there are many Republicans who will want to change that given the shifting politics.” Read more at Punchbowl News
“Tightening grip| Myanmar’s junta strengthened its grip on power, ordering an internet blackout and making it easier for authorities to make arrests as it looks to quell protests against the Feb. 1 coup. Demonstrations continued today as tens of thousands rallied in defiance of the military, even as the regime stepped up detentions of civil servants, lawyers and other professionals. Read more at Bloomberg.
Police and soldiers stand on guard during a demonstration on Feb. 9 in Yangon.
Photographer: Aung Kyaw Htet/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
“A young climate activist in India has been arrested after she shared a social media toolkit that listed ways people could support farmers who have been demonstrating for months around the country's capital of New Delhi -- a document later shared by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. It's the latest effort by India to crack down on dissenting voices in support of farmers, who have been protesting new agricultural laws they say will devastate their livelihoods. The arrest of Disha Ravi, who is in her 20s, has prompted outrage from high-profile figures and opposition leaders, at least one of whom called the move "an unprecedented attack on democracy." Thousands of supporters are calling for her release.” Read more at CNN
“Nearly 170 million people -- about half of all Americans -- are under winter weather advisories, with icy roads, power outages and dangerously low temperatures threatening to snarl traffic and paralyze cities from coast to coast. The cold is so widespread that you could travel nearly 2,000 miles from the Rio Grande on the Mexican border to the St. Lawrence River on the Canadian border entirely in winter storm warnings or watches. At least 11 people in the nation's heartland have died in weather-related vehicle accidents since cold temperatures took hold of the country. More than two million customers were without power as of this morning, and emergency declarations have been issued in at least seven states.” Read more at CNN
“Flamboyant former Argentine President Carlos Menem dies
Former Argentine President Carlos Menem has died at age 90. Menem delivered short-lived economic stability and forged close ties with the U.S. in the 1990s even as he navigated scandal and enjoyed a flamboyant lifestyle. The dapper lawyer from one of Argentina’s poorest provinces was often dismissed by critics as a playboy. He steered Argentina toward a free-market model that was once envied by neighbors and favored by investors. Menem’s accomplishments, however, coincided with growing unemployment, economic inequality and foreign debt.” Read more at AP
“Duchess of Sussex expecting second child, a sibling for Archie
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expecting their second child. A spokesperson for the couple said that Archie is going to be a big brother and they are overjoyed. Prince Harry and American actress Meghan Markle married at Windsor Castle in May 2018. Their son Archie was born a year later. In early 2020, Meghan and Harry announced they were quitting royal duties and moving to North America, citing what they said were the unbearable intrusions and racist attitudes of the British media. They recently bought a house in Santa Barbara, California. In November, Meghan revealed that she had a miscarriage in July 2020.” Read more at AP
“Lives Lived: Reggie Jones began his lifeguard career at Jones Beach on Long Island in 1944. He stuck with the job for the next 64 summers, saving swimmers well into his 70s. Jones died at 93.” Read more at New York Times