Good morning, everyone.
This pundit round-up will begin with an overview of the Day One policy and personnel happenings of the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris Administration.
David A Graham of The Atlantic found that President Biden’s Inaugural speech was extraordinary because of its ordinariness.
Biden’s speech was well wrought, but it offered nothing unusual, nothing surprising, nothing especially memorable. Paradoxically, that was the source of its power. As Biden took the bully pulpit of the presidency, he delivered a sermon in the tradition of America’s civic religion. The basic foundation of American political rhetoric has long been a seamless, platitudinous blend of Christianity, rose-tinted history, and pop culture. Donald Trump discarded this, explicitly courting division and rancor. After four years of Trump, Biden’s bromides sounded newly fresh and relevant.
“This is democracy’s day, a day of history and hope, of renewal and resolve,” Biden said. “Through a crucible for the ages, America has been tested anew. And America has risen to the challenge. Today we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The people, the will of the people, has been heard, and the will of the people has been heeded.”
These shopworn clichés are wheeled out at every inauguration, as much a part of the furniture as the blue carpet and the grandstand on the West Front of the Capitol. Many of us learned these ideas so long ago, in elementary-school social-studies classrooms, that they are just background noise.
German Lopez of Vox sums up the totality of President Biden’s Day One executive orders.
On his first day, Biden will sign 17 executive initiatives. He’ll mandate masks on federal property. He’ll rescind Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization. He’ll extend eviction and foreclosure moratoriums as well as a student loan pause. He’ll take multiple actions on global warming, including rejoining the Paris agreement. He’ll move on immigration, reversing Trump’s travel ban and stopping construction of a wall at the US-Mexico border. He’ll reinforce commitments to racial equity and nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people. And more.
Biden’s team emphasized in a call with reporters that these day-one actions were only the start. A memo from White House chief of staff Ron Klain outlined Biden’s plans to tackle “four overlapping and compounding crises”: Covid-19, the economy, global warming, and racial justice. Short of congressional action, Biden will sign “dozens of executive orders, presidential memoranda, and directives to Cabinet agencies” to address those areas and more.
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Some of the moves will also have an immediate impact — helping millions of Americans who would struggle to pay rent and student loans, providing some relief to undocumented immigrants, and shifting the country toward combating climate change.
The scope of the actions is a reflection of Biden running on one of the most progressive agendas in history. But it’s also an acknowledgment that Democrats didn’t perform well enough in congressional races to fully implement that agenda. Now Biden will need to use his more limited executive powers to fill some of the gaps between his campaign promises and hard political realities.
Oliver Milman of Guardian on the significance of rejoining the Paris agreement.
The re-entry to the Paris agreement ends a period where the US became a near-pariah on the international stage with Trump’s refusal to address the unfolding disaster of rising global temperatures. Countries are struggling to meet commitments, made in Paris in 2015, to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era, with 2020 setting another record for extreme heat.
“It’s just a huge day to get rid of this myopic, benighted administration and welcome in a new president who manifestly is committed to strong, meaningful action,” said Todd Stern, who was the lead US negotiator in Paris. “Rejoining Paris is just the first step, but it’s a big first step.”
Biden is expected to convene an international climate summit in the spring to help accelerate emissions cuts and will probably submit a new US emissions reduction goal to help it reach net zero emissions by 2050. “We can’t be afraid or diffident about exercising leadership again but we need a sense of humility in light of what has occurred over the past four years,” Stern said of America’s return to climate diplomacy. “The message is ‘we are back, let’s move hard.’ It will be deliberate, aggressive and strategic.”
Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser, said Biden will in all reverse “more than 100” climate-related policies enacted by Trump.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker reports on the Senate confirmation hearing of President Biden’s nomination for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen.
In policy terms, the hearing provided a fascinating glimpse of what Washington politics will be like post-Trump. For the foreseeable future, three topics are set to dominate the agenda: the coronavirus, spending and taxes, and China. Donald Trump’s legacy will color all of these, but in different ways. As Yellen’s testimony made clear, the immediate task facing the new Administration is fixing the mess that the departing President made of the pandemic. But the upcoming tussle over Joe Biden’s proposal to spend another $1.9 trillion on covid relief will also demonstrate the Democrats’ ability to address some of the underlying economic inequalities that helped give rise to Trumpian populism—and reveal whether the establishment G.O.P. aims to return to some of its pre-Trump roots. At the same time, a bipartisan focus on confronting China will serve as a reminder that at least part of Trump’s policy legacy will live on, although the measures used to address the relationship between the two countries may change.
With the coronavirus still racing across the United States, and with new claims for unemployment benefits rising sharply, Yellen made the common-sense Keynesian argument that a further burst of government spending is needed to alleviate human suffering, shorten the recession, and head off long-term “scarring” to the economy. Senator Chuck Grassley, the outgoing Republican chair of the committee, dismissed the Biden package, which includes expanding child tax credits and raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, as a “laundry list” of liberal proposals. Other Republicans on the committee pressed Yellen on whether Biden’s proposal to give an additional cash payment of fourteen hundred dollars to households that earn up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, even those that haven’t suffered any income losses, was well-targeted.
Tom McTague of The Atlantic writes out a sketch of the rough foreign policy terrain that awaits the Biden-Harris Administration.
Last month, with Biden’s inauguration just weeks away, the European Union and China pushed a new economic agreement over the line. The actual terms of the China Investment Agreement remain unclear—the text is still to be finalized—but the broad outline is simple enough: a deeper trading relationship based on common and apparently enforceable standards. According to the EU, the deal ties Beijing to a new “values-based investment relationship” that will protect labor and environmental standards, and help root China in the rules-based global order. This is Europe fulfilling the global role it has cast for itself as a “regulatory superpower,” exporting and defending its values through its economic size.
Yet this is not how the agreement is seen in Washington. Brussels went forward with the deal despite a very public plea from the incoming administration to hold fire. Four years of Europe-bashing by Donald Trump, it seems, had hardened European hearts in favor of a pointed display of “strategic autonomy.” Autonomy from whom you might ask? The United States is the only answer.
Europe’s refusal to wait until yesterday’s transfer of power in Washington is an indication of the extent to which the world has changed since Biden was last in government. Today’s Europe is not prepared to “consult” the U.S. before signing an agreement of such importance, as Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, requested—and it rejects the very notion that it should have to. Just because the U.S. defends Europe does not mean a kind of
Brezhnev doctrine of obedience is in place, the EU argues.
Robin Givhan of the Washington Post reminds us that democracy barely survived as a result of the past four years.
It was a close call for this country and one we won’t soon forget. The civic unrest of 2020, ignited by calls for racial justice, mutated into mobs storming the U.S. Capitol only two weeks ago, fueled by a desire to subvert the Constitution. Rioters broke out windows and vandalized historic rooms, all while cowering behind the American flag. And while the glass can be replaced, the vandalism scrubbed away, the country’s citizens bear the scars of anger and fear, suspicion and cynicism.
Our volatile history of racial injustice has never been resolved. Instead, we’ve tiptoed around it, whispering and hanging back instead of getting on with the difficult work of defusing it. Over countless generations, we’ve been putting out stubborn fires, professing shock when white supremacy flared up and willfully misunderstanding the difference between grievance and justice. We must contend with these threats.
But on Jan. 20, the American flag flew over the U.S. Capitol, and despite the recent assault on it — regardless of the civic unrest and the political division — it represented the best of us. Its promised meaning resonated more deeply than ever. Once again, the country moved forward.
Jenice Armstrong of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes about the powerful symbolism of having a Vice President Kamala Harris.
Yes, President Joe Biden was sworn in and delivered a great inaugural address. And Lady Gaga killed it in that red-and-black ballgown when she sang our national anthem. The symbolism behind Garth Brooks’ rendition of “Amazing Grace” moved me.
But what I will remember for the rest of my days is that America finally got her first female vice president, who was also Black and Asian American. And she was sworn in by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first woman of color on the Supreme Court, and used a Bible that belonged to the late Justice Thurgood Marshall. The optics were surreal.
To me it symbolized what the American dream is supposed to be about — you can work hard and achieve what you want regardless of your race or sex. As a nation, we can take great pride in this moment because we inched closer to living up to what this country is supposed to be about.
As a result, future generations will get to grow up in a world in which having a female vice president — and hopefully someday soon a woman president — won’t be noteworthy.
We’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. But one day, we will be.
Eugene Scott of the Washington Post moves beyond the symbolic and shows the ways in which Vice President Harris’ mere presence in the room could make the Vice President a powerful catalyst for political change.
But Harris’s presence in the most powerful rooms in Washington will be significant for reasons beyond symbolism. She’ll be charged with helping lead major political — and cultural — changes in a country in which many citizens are looking to recover from an administration they believe set the nation back in terms of political and cultural advancement.
Here are three things Harris’s ascension represents:
A pendulum swing
Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, in part, due to the cultural anxiety of his base about the demographic changes in America. The fact that the country was becoming more ethnically and religiously diverse and ideas about gender and sexuality were changing was of great concern to many of those who believed that the multiculturalism on display in the Obama administration was fundamentally un-American.
With the election of Harris, most American voters okayed a return to just that. And in doing so, they gave a powerful voice to many groups that have rarely had a seat at the tables of power in Washington. Harris — and her family — are arguably the epitome of the underrepresented: She is the Black and Asian daughter of immigrants, married to a Jewish man.
As a stepmother, she also makes blended and multicultural families more visible in American politics. Her election is a reminder that American families in 2020 often look quite different from those that have been depicted in the media and on the political stage, especially those often viewed as the ideal among adherents of the “Make America Great Again” worldview.
(Also check out Vox’s Li Zhou and The Atlantic’s Christian Paz for a number of items and key votes that Vice President Harris could play a huge role in getting passed.)
Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing for The Atlantic, revisits his 2017 essay “The First White President” and puts a 2021 addendum on it.
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.
The temptation to look away is strong. This summer I watched as whole barrels of ink were emptied to champion free speech and denounce “cancel culture.” Meanwhile, from the most powerful office in the world, Trump issued executive orders targeting a journalistic institution and promoted “patriotic education.” The indifference to his incredible acts was telling. So much for chivalry.
The mix of blindness and pedantry did not plague merely writers, but also policy makers and executives. “The FBI does not talk in terms of terrorism committed by white people,” the journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote in the days after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. “Attempting to appear politically ecumenical, a recent bureaucratic overhaul during an accelerated period of domestic terrorism created the category of ‘racially motivated violent extremism.’” But only so ecumenical. “For all its hesitation over white terror,” Ackerman continued, “the FBI until at least 2018 maintained an investigative category about a nebulous and exponentially less deadly thing it called ‘Black Identity Extremism.’”
Charles Blow of the New York Times isn’t alone in continuing to feel some rage about the past four years, I’m sure.
Trump taught us, the hard way, that what we took for granted as inviolable was in fact largely tradition, and traditions are not laws. They have no enforcement mechanism. They are not compulsory.
There is the feeling of releasing resistance, of allowing the tension in the neck to relax and the shoulders to drop. It is the feeling of exhaling. It is the feeling of returning to some form of normalcy — a normal presidency, a normal news cycle, a normal sleep habit.
But embedded in that feeling is the knowledge that normal is a removal of Trump’s outrageous behavior and incompetence, not a return to fairness, equity and equality. Those things didn’t fully, truly exist before the Trump presidency. Normal wasn’t working even then.
Biden is coming into office facing multiple extraordinary challenges: a pandemic not yet controlled, a teetering economy, open displays of white supremacist terrorism, yet-to-be-addressed racial inequities and a large portion of the electorate that sees his presidency as illegitimate.
Even so, his administration’s feet must be held to the fire in a quest for true, transformational change. We must not assume that a return to normal is a greater achievement than overturning, in the most positive way, what “normal” looks like.
Rex Huppke of the Chicago Tribune believes in some form of “unity”...or at least trying...but...
The new, duly elected president of the United States is Joseph R. Biden. That’s a fact. It’s provable, quantifiable. There was no grand conspiracy, the election was not rigged. To say otherwise at this point is to cross that eroded boundary from the reality we have into the reality you want.
If we are to come together, we must invite back the people who crossed that boundary. But to get back, they have to acknowledge they bought into lies. They have to accept they were conned. That’s not a toll, it’s an intellectual necessity. You can’t return to reality without first recognizing you’ve been living somewhere else.
This doesn’t mean we all have to agree on everything, or even on most things. Biden acknowledged that “the forces that divide us are deep and real.”
But there’s a mammoth difference between disagreeing on issues relating to immigration or the economy and disagreeing on whether Biden is a secret communist about to let Chinese troops storm the country.
Huppke gets close to the right formulation in stating that an invitation can be given but only if certain conditions are met.
Adam Rogers of WIRED surmises that Biden’s presidency will be defined by the success of his plan to combat COVID-19
So, the new plan: Last week, Biden laid out a new, more aggressive approach, part of a promise to let science lead policy during his term. The US public health system, broken and underfunded, hasn’t been able to cope with the pandemic, leaving vaccines as the best and only hope, for now, of controlling it. But for all the blazing speed of their development and testing, vaccine rollout has been, in Biden’s (and everyone else’s) words, “a dismal failure.” Biden has now set a goal of giving 100 million shots of vaccine in the first 100 days of the administration. (As of January 19, the number in the US was 14.7 million, according to Bloomberg’s tracker.)
That won’t be easy, but it is possible. Biden proposed opening up who’s allowed to get vaccinated—sidestepping the tier system recommended to states by various government panels in an attempt to ensure equity along with speedy shot-giving. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will build 100 mass vaccination centers in places like stadiums and convention centers, and the feds will deploy mobile vaccination clinics as well—run, Biden said, by FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and staffed by the public health corps, retired medical professionals, even the military.
Of course, to make all that work, the government will need to increase vaccine production and improve distribution. Last week, outgoing Health and Human Services secretary Alexander Azar also
proposed releasing doses that had been “held back” to guarantee the second shots required by both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and opening up vaccinations to everyone over 65 years old. That was just before
The Washington Post reported that there wasn’t enough vaccine to go around. “Our plan is as clear as it is bold: Get more people vaccinated for free. Create more places for them to get vaccinated. Mobilize more medical teams to get shots into people’s arms. Increase supply and get it out the door as soon as possible,” Biden said on Friday. “This is going to be one of the most challenging efforts ever undertaken by our country, but you have my word, we will manage the hell out of this operation.”
Lawrence Wright of the New Yorker writes about all of those COVID-19 variants floating about and what we can do about them.
A month after the new variant was uncovered in England, a similar lineage emerged in South Africa, called B.1.351. It quickly became the dominant variant in that country and began its own tour of the world. It has the same mutation as B.1.1.7, which allows it to adhere more tightly to the ace2 receptors, but it also carries an additional mutation that is far more concerning. The mutation is denominated E484K, meaning that the amino acid, glutamic acid (code letter E), has been replaced by another, lysine (code letter K), in position 484 of the genetic sequence of the spike protein. This tiny alteration may possibly make the vaccine less effective against it. In a lab experiment, the E484K mutation caused greater than tenfold drop of immunity in the antibodies of some covid-19 survivors. The vaccines that are being deployed now should still be effective, researchers have said, but clearly the virus is evolving new strategies that make it more contagious and less able to be corralled by a vaccine.
Yet another dangerous variant, B.1.1.28, turned up in Brazil. A forty-five-year-old health-care worker in the northeastern part of the country, who had no comorbidities, got covid-19 in May of 2020. She was sick for a week with diarrhea, muscle aches, exhaustion, and pain while swallowing, but she fully recovered. Then, in October, a hundred and fifty-three days later, she fell ill again with covid-19, and, this time, the disease was more severe.
“This made the hair on my neck stand up,” Brooks said. Unlike the South African variant, the Brazilian variant doesn’t have the mutation that makes it more infectious, but it does have the E484K mutation, which raises the unsettling possibility that “it could possibly overcome the vaccine, and it may reinfect.” He compares the coronavirus to the flu or the common cold, which are constantly changing, dodging the body’s immune system. Gregory Armstrong told me of an experiment to determine how many mutations it would take to create what is known as an “immune escape” strain. “They grew it up in tissue culture from a generic sars-CoV-2 in dilute convalescent sera,” he said. “They were eventually able to grow one that had three mutations that conferred almost complete resistance” to the antibodies in the survivors’ blood.
Finally this morning, Michael Chugani of the South China Morning Post says that no one should betting against American democracy.
Many have declared the demise of American democracy, some gleefully, others mockingly, after the storming of Capitol Hill. The Global Times headlined it America’s “Waterloo” and quoted Chinese experts as saying the incident marked the fall of the “beacon of democracy”.
An opinion piece in China Daily said the attack on the Capitol building “exposes rot in American democracy”. Some on Chinese social media compared the attack with the July 1, 2019 storming of the Hong Kong Legislative Council.
Authoritarian states had a field day. Iranian President Hassan Rowhani described Western democracy as a failure. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s upper house, said American democracy “is obviously limping on both feet”.
It is not the first time the US has been written off as a declining power. That happened when former president George W. Bush mired the US in the “war on terror”. And again during the 2008 financial crisis.
But every time America’s global image is tarnished, it picks itself up. Barack Obama helped the US do that when he replaced Bush. I am betting Biden will do likewise after four turbulent years of Trump.
Everyone have a great morning!