“I’ll conclude by grinning at how Mitch’s critics keep giving him nicknames intended as an insult that he keeps adopting with glee,” Cotton said. “A few weeks ago, someone called him the Apex Predator of American politics, which may be the best yet. I nominate as our leader, the Apex Predator of the United States Senate, Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr.”
While control of the Senate is still up for grabs, both parties did not see major changes to their leadership.
The contrast, however, was stark. While Democrats quickly conducted their election business and moved on, Republicans met for more than an hour and a half with frequent applause.
“Everybody’s ecstatic. I think that’s part of why it’s taking so long. We’ve had a lot of excitement about the results. Everybody’s happy with the leadership,” said Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana.
He said his party did better than he expected last week: “It was a strange election.”
Tuesday’s leadership election was the first time the Senate Democratic Caucus met in person in about eight months, because of the coronavirus. Senators wanted to know when they would discuss the party’s message and electoral performance last week, according to a source briefed on the meeting. Senate Democrats will hold their weekly caucus call this afternoon.
“We picked up seats, we have a chance to still be in the majority and while I think you have to engage in a process of reflection we also shouldn’t beat ourselves up too bad,” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “Chuck is also just a very unique figure in the caucus. There’s no one who works harder to keep in touch with everyone in the caucus … there was no question about who our leader was going to be. “
On the Republican side, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota was reelected as whip and Barrasso as conference chairman. Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri stayed on as policy committee chair and Joni Ernst of Iowa remained vice chair of the GOP conference.
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida will take over the GOP campaign arm.
For Democrats, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois will serve as whip again, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington as assistant Democratic leader and Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan as chair of the policy and communications committee.
Schumer also added Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada to his leadership team, as vice chair of the policy and communications committee and vice chair of outreach.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mark Warner of Virginia will stay on as vice chairs of the conference, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as chair of the steering committee, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont as chair of outreach, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia as vice chair of the policy and communications committee, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin as secretary of the conference.
Democrats did not select a chair of their campaign arm, though newly elected Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) is a possible candidate.
Other committee leaders and party rules will be determined at a later date.
Republicans are headed into next year with a narrow majority. But if Democrats win two runoff races in Georgia on Jan. 5, they will take back the majority with a 50-50 Senate and Joe Biden as president.
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are forging ahead with the transition to the White House with 71 days until Inauguration Day, despite the Trump administration’s refusal to take the formal steps necessary to ensure a smooth transfer of power.
Under the law, the Biden-Harris transition teams cannot start meeting with current officials across the government or access secure facilities to work with classified information before the head of the little-known General Services Administration (GSA) determines that the pair are likely the next president and vice president. The GSA administrator has declined to make that determination.
“We believe that the time has come for the GSA administrator to promptly ascertain Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice president-elect,” an unidentified Biden-Harris transition official said Monday night on a telephone briefing with reporters, adding that the transition could pursue legal options if the administration continues to stall.
Mr. Biden is meeting with transition advisers on Tuesday and will make remarks about a GOP-led lawsuit targeting the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court is hearing arguments over the case Tuesday morning.
President Trump has refused to concede the election since Mr. Biden was projected to be the winner on Saturday, and his campaign is pursuing lawsuits in a handful of states challenging the results. The campaign has not produced evidence of widespread voter fraud on a scale that would change the election results.
Attorney General William Barr authorized U.S. attorneys across the country to “pursue substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the 2020 election is certified, according to a memo released Monday. Barr offered no evidence of fraud stemming from last week’s election in the document.
Republican congressional leaders on social media have refrained from commenting on Attorney General William Barr‘s recent approval to let federal prosecutors investigate yet-to-be-substantiated allegations of voter fraud that President Donald Trump says swung the presidential election in favor of his opponent, Democratic President-elect Joe Biden.
Democratic congressional leaders on social media, however, have been strident in their disapproval of Barr’s decision.
In a Monday evening tweet, Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote, “Attorney General Bill Barr is a corrupt Trump henchman who should have been impeached months ago. If he cared one shred about our democracy, he’d be focused on the peaceful transition of power instead of doing the bidding of a wannabe dictator.”
Democratic Californian Representative Ted Lieu wrote in a Monday evening tweet, “Dear @TheJusticeDept Bill Barr: There is no factual predicate for any mass voter fraud. How do we know? Because the@realDonaldTrump campaign still has not come up with credible allegations, and GOP Secretaries of State stand by the results. Stop ignoring the will of the people.”
Democratic Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy III tweeted about Barr’s move and about the resignation of Richard Pilger. Pilger was the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Director of the Election Crimes Branch whose office oversees investigations into voter fraud. He resigned hours after Barr issued his authorization.
“Bill Barr needs to remember he answers to us, not the guy actively trying to undermine our democracy,” Kennedy wrote, adding, “DOJ career officials now resigning. Another Secretary fired by tweet. An entire political party willing to damage our democracy out of fear of a man who lost. What a small, scared President we have had. Better days ahead.”
DOJ career officials now resigning.
Another Secretary fired by tweet.
An entire political party willing to damage our democracy out of fear of a man who lost.
Democratic Hawaiian Senator Mazie Hirono wrote in a Monday evening tweet, “Bill Barr disgraces his office again by acting like Trump’s consigliere — sending US Attys on a fishing expedition to legitimatize baseless conspiracy theories.” She added, “Come Jan. 20, it will be a relief to have an AG who will uphold the rule of law on behalf of the American people.”
Bill Barr disgraces his office again by acting like Trump’s consigliere — sending US Attys on a fishing expedition to legitimatize baseless conspiracy theories.
Come Jan. 20, it will be a relief to have an AG who will uphold the rule of law on behalf of the American people. https://t.co/UqVicDAIHQ
One Republican stood out on Monday evening for having tweeted about Barr’s decision: Tennessean Senator Marsha Blackburn. She wrote, “Thank you, Attorney General Barr, for ensuring and upholding the integrity of our elections.
@TheJusticeDept.”
Last Friday, 39 Republican members of Congress sent a letter to Barr asking, “What are you doing to ensure the integrity of the voting and counting process right now?” and “Will you commit to using all the resources at your disposal to ensure that only legal votes are being counted and being counted in a fully transparent manner immediately?”
In the weeks leading up to the presidential election, Barr repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting could lead to widespread voter fraud despite there being no evidence of such in the years that numerous states have allowed it.
Barr’s authorization ignored a decades-old DOJ policy to keep law enforcement separate from committing actions that could affect an election’s outcome, according to The New York Times. Barr sought to have investigators complete their work before each state certifies its final election results and ballot counts throughout November and December.
A new Vatican report details the church’s handling of abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, shown here in 2015.
Robert Franklin/AP
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A new Vatican report details the church’s handling of abuse allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, shown here in 2015.
Robert Franklin/AP
A new Vatican report on former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked last year amid allegations of sexual misconduct that spanned decades, shows that Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were aware of the accusations against him.
The Vatican on Tuesday made public a detailed 461-page report on an internal investigation revealing that the Holy See repeatedly downplayed or dismissed reports of McCarrick’s alleged sexual transgressions involving both minors and adults.
Last year, Pope Francis dismissed McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., after a church tribunal found him guilty of abusing minors and adults.
The most striking revelation is that Pope John Paul II, who was made a saint in 2014, appointed McCarrick to the position of archbishop of Washington despite a letter from the late New York Cardinal John O’Connor in 1999 detailing allegations against him.
Among other things, the new report reveals that at the time of McCarrick’s appointment as archbishop of Washington in late 2000, the Vatican was aware of allegations that included a report dating to 1987 by a priest who claimed to have observed sexual conduct between McCarrick and another priest, and an anonymous letter charging the McCarrick with pedophilia with his “nephews.”
The report says that at the time, McCarrick was also “known to have shared a bed” with multiple men at his residences and a beach house in New Jersey.
That information had led over the years “to the conclusion that it would be imprudent to transfer” McCarrick. “However, Pope John Paul II seems to have changed his mind in August/September 2000, ultimately leading to his decision to appoint McCarrick to Washington in November 2000,” the report states.
It wasn’t until 2017, when a former altar boy came forward with allegations that McCarrick had groped him in the 1970s, that a canonical trial was set in motion that resulted in his defrocking two years later.
James Grein, who testified that he was abused by McCarrick for two decades starting at age 11, told The Associated Press that he was pleased with the release of the report.
“There are so many people suffering out there because of one man,” Grein told the AP. “And he thinks that he’s more important than the rest of us. He’s destroyed me and he’s destroyed thousands of other lives. … It’s time that the Catholic Church comes clean with all of its destruction.”
Instead, the Trump campaign’s election night watch party held in the White House East Room – with few masks and no social distancing – is being eyed as a potential coronavirus super-spreading event and yet another symbol of Donald Trump’s cavalier attitude toward a virus that is infecting more than 100,000 Americans a day.
Ben Carson, the secretary for housing and urban development, is the latest attendee to test positive, a department spokesman confirmed. The event has been under scrutiny since another attendee, the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, contracted the virus, which has now killed more than 237,000 people in the US alone.
Carson’s deputy chief of staff, Coalter Baker, said the secretary “is in good spirits” and “feels fortunate to have access to effective therapeutics which aid and markedly speed his recovery”.
The latest White House cluster comes just a month after Trump’s own diagnosis and hospitalization, and two weeks after several aides to the vice-president, Mike Pence, including his chief of staff, tested positive for the virus.
And it is not the first potential super-spreader event to take place at the White House – a crowded Rose Garden ceremony, at which Trump announced the supreme court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, also came under scrutiny in October after at least seven attendees tested positive.
The White House has remained secretive about outbreaks. Many White House and campaign officials, as well as those who attended the election watch party, were kept in the dark about the diagnoses, unaware until they were disclosed by the press.
That the virus would continue to spread in the White House has come as no surprise to public health officials who have balked at the White House’s lax approach.
“The administration was cavalier about the risks of the virus for themselves and for the country. And that’s one reason why we have so many cases,” said Dr Joshua Sharfstein, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University’s school of public health.
Even Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has said he has been avoiding the White House since August “because my impression was their approach to how to handle this was different from mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing”.
Trump had long claimed, without basis, that the virus was being hyped by Democrats to hurt his re-election chances and would miraculously “disappear” after 3 November.
Meadows in particular has long tried to play down the severity of the virus. He rarely wore a mask in public, except during the period immediately following Trump’s infection.
He was again without one during Tuesday evening’s East Room event, where more than 100 of Trump’s most loyal supporters, family members and cabinet secretaries gathered to watch the election results come in and see him deliver what they had hoped would be a victory speech.
While everyone who attended the East Room event had been tested in advance for the virus, there was no social distancing and minimal mask-wearing.
It was a festive atmosphere, with half-empty glasses of wine and other beverages strewn across cocktail tables in front of news cameras. Meadows, who spent time with Trump’s family beforehand, was seen working the room, including giving several fist-bumps to those in attendance, before Trump took the stage early on Wednesday morning.
Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere)
Reminder that this is what the East Room looked like at the White House on election night as Trump spoke. Meadows was there. Literally the only person wearing a mask is Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar: https://t.co/JN6lakzZ6r
Carson was there, along with the health and human services secretary, Alex Azar – who did wear a mask.
Earlier that day, Meadows had also accompanied the president to his campaign headquarters in Virginia, where Trump received rousing cheers from several dozen staff and volunteers. Meadows did not wear a mask, nor did other White House staffers. Campaign aides largely did.
If Meadows tested positive on Wednesday – as Bloomberg News reported – he would probably have been infectious during both events, said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist who teaches at George Mason University.
The White House did not respond to specific questions about the current outbreak, but said that contact tracing had been conducted by the White House Medical Unit, consistent with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
“Appropriate notifications and recommendations have been made,” the White House said.
But Popescu called the party, in particular, “a ripe environment for transmission to occur”.
President-elect Joe Biden speaks to the media Monday in Wilmington, Del. The General Services Administration hasn’t given Biden’s team the resources yet that a presidential transition team traditionally receives.
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President-elect Joe Biden speaks to the media Monday in Wilmington, Del. The General Services Administration hasn’t given Biden’s team the resources yet that a presidential transition team traditionally receives.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
President-elect Joe Biden has begun planning his transition, naming a team of experts Monday to work on the coronavirus pandemic. But one thing Biden cannot do at this point is move into any government office space or receive government funding for the transition.
A key, if little-known Trump administration official has yet to determine formally that Biden won the election, holding up some crucial resources traditionally available to the president-elect.
Under the 1963 Presidential Transition Act, it’s up to the General Services Administration, or GSA, to determine or “ascertain” the winner of the presidential election, at least as far as starting the process of turning over the keys to the new administration goes.
Robert MacKichan, who was general counsel to the GSA during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, told NPR the law is kind of vague about what this actually means. “There’s no legal standard contained within this act as to what constitutes the ascertainment,” he said.
In a statement, the GSA said its administrator “ascertains the apparent successful candidate once a winner is clear based on the process laid out in the Constitution.”
The agency cited the contested 2000 election in which George W. Bush was eventually declared the winner over Al Gore as “prior precedent.” But that decision came only after a December Supreme Court ruling.
MacKichan said he believes GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, has so far acted properly. “If I were in her shoes right now, given what has been publicly made available, I think it would be premature,” based on the 2000 election.
Chris Lu, who was former President Barack Obama’s transition director in 2008, said the process for his team was much different.
“This was not an issue at all in 2008. The election was called at about 11 p.m. on election night, and within about two hours, I received a letter from the GSA administrator ascertaining that Sen. Obama was the president-elect,” he said.
Lu said he is “not aware that this has really ever been an issue in previous elections.”
Being ascertained as the winner means the president-elect gets office space in each government agency to begin the transition process, along with computers and $9.9 million to begin hiring transition personnel.
Delaying the process, Lu said, “impede[s] your ability to get a handle on what’s happening in these agencies. That being said, if there’s one person who can overcome this, I think it’s Joe Biden. This is a person who knows the government well, and he’s surrounded by an experienced team of people that have worked in these government agencies. But again, this is not ideal.”
David Marchick, who directs the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition, said there are important real-world implications for a delayed transition. Marchick points to the delay in the transition to the George W. Bush administration after the Supreme Court ruling.
“That slowed the process of the Bush administration getting their national security team in place. Eight months later, we had 9/11,” Marchick said. “When the 9/11 Commission did their autopsy on what went wrong, one of the things they pointed to was the slow pace of the Bush administration getting their national security team in place. And they said it impaired our ability to react.”
Marchick said Americans want the outgoing administration and the incoming one to collaborate on national security and issues such as getting a COVID-19 vaccine distributed, and that “the sooner that collaboration starts, the better to resolve our multiple crises.”
Georgia’s too-close-to-call presidential contest devolved into a fight Monday among Republicans as the state’s top election official rejected calls from its two U.S. senators that he resign for challenging President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
Monday morning, Gabriel Sterling, a lifelong Republican who manages Georgia’s voting system, took to a lectern at the Capitol to plainly and matter-of-factly dismiss criticism of election illegalities in the Southern battleground state as “fake news” and “disinformation.”
“Hoaxes and nonsense,” Sterling said. “Don’t buy into these things. Find trusted sources.”
Hours later, GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — who are each in a Jan. 5 run-off that will determine control of the chamber — called on Sterling’s boss, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to resign for allegedly mismanaging the state’s elections.
“That is not going to happen,” Raffensperger said.
Georgia’s 16 electoral votes are no longer key to deciding the election. Democrat Joe Biden has already secured 290 electoral votes — 20 more than needed to win the White House.
With Biden leading Trump in Georgia by more than 12,000 votes — 0.25% of the total — Republicans in the state are nevertheless locked in a civil war as the presidential race heads for a recount. The upheaval shows how Trump’s persistent and unfounded claims of fraud and refusal to concede the election to Biden are dividing not just the country but his own party.
The back and forth began Monday morning when the secretary of state’s office held one of its regular news conferences, with Sterling updating reporters on the status of the vote count and debunking false information.
But this time, he went to greater lengths to push back on claims of election fraud.
“The facts are the facts, regardless of outcomes,” Sterling said.
“Our job is to get it right for the voters and the people of Georgia and for the people of the United States to make sure the outcomes of these elections are correct and trustworthy,” he added. “At the end of the day — no matter which side of the aisle you’re on, no matter which candidate you supported — you can have trust and believe the outcome of these things.”
Within a few hours, Perdue and Loeffler, eager to stoke Trump supporters ahead of January’s election, called on Raffensperger to resign.
“We believe when there are failures, they need to be called out — even when it’s in your own party,” Perdue and Loeffler said in a joint statement. “The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections. He has failed the people of Georgia, and he should step down immediately.”
Raffensperger, in turn, was quick to respond.
“The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me” Raffensberger said.
“Was there illegal voting?” he added. “I am sure there was. And my office is investigating all of it. Does it rise to the numbers or margin necessary to change the outcome to where President Trump is given Georgia’s electoral votes? That is unlikely.”
Before long, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a former secretary of state, entered the fray.
“Given the close outcome and the record number of mail-in and absentee ballots cast in this election, this needs to be a wake up call to the Secretary of State’s office to take a serious look at any allegations that have been made,” said Cody Hall, press secretary for Kemp. “Georgians deserve to have full confidence in the outcome of our elections.”
It could be weeks before Georgia completes its recount. A candidate can request a recount only after election results are certified. Individual counties have until Friday to certify their results and then the secretary of state must certify the statewide results by Nov. 20.
Recounts rarely change election outcomes.
In more than 5,500 statewide elections since 2000, the group FairVote reports that there were 31 recounts. Three overturned the results of an election.
There have been two statewide presidential recounts in that same period — the 2000 Florida recount in the contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore and a Wisconsin recount requested by Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016. In both cases, very few votes shifted and the original winner remained the victor after the recount.
Over the last few days, Republicans in a number of battleground states have found themselves in the uncomfortable position of pushing back as Trump and his supporters have raised allegations of election fraud without evidence: faulty machines and middle-of-the-night ballot dumps, missing military ballots and votes coming in after legal deadlines.
After Trump and other GOP groups filed a barrage of lawsuits alleging fraud in the closely contested states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania — most of which have been dismissed — thousands of Trump loyalists gathered at state capitols across the nation over the weekend to hold “Stop the Steal” rallies.
In Arizona, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey counseled fellow Republicans last week to not jump to conclusions until there’s a final outcome. “We’re following established Arizona election law to the letter,” Ducey said.
But perhaps nowhere has the debate been as heated as in Georgia — a state Democrats have not carried in nearly 30 years — where Republicans filed a lawsuit the day after the election to prevent the “unlawful counting of ballots received after the election” in Chatham County, which includes Savannah. The petition was dismissed the next day by a state judge who found no evidence to support the claims.
Georgia’s secretary of state’s office has in the past faced scrutiny in tight elections.
In 2018, Democrats accused Kemp, who was then secretary of state, of voter suppression in the run-up to his gubernatorial race against Democrat Stacey Abrams. After Kemp won by just 1.4 percentage points, Abrams refused to concede, accusing Kemp’s office of “gross management.”
This year is different, though, as Georgia’s Republican election officials field fierce criticism from their own party.
Over the last week, Sterling, who as a student interned on Newt Gingrich’s recount effort and went on to be state political director for George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle, has assured Georgians of the integrity of the electoral process.
On Monday,
he said, there were no software issues with the state’s new Dominion voting system. Although there were earlier reports from Michigan, which uses the same machines, of a glitch or software problem, what actually happened there was that a clerk in a small Michigan county made a simple reporting error under trying circumstances.
Reports of thrown-out ballots in a dumpster in Spalding County, he said, were also false. After a video circulated on social media claiming to show people apparently dumpster diving for thrown-out ballots, the state sent investigators. They found no ballots, just empty security envelopes.
Reports of almost twice as many ballots cast in Gwinnett County as the overall vote were also false, he said. Under the National Voting Rights Act, the rapidly diversifying county has to use two languages — Spanish and English — and that doubles the number of pages on their ballots. The system reported ballots cast when it actually meant pages scanned.
Although Sterling said he understood that some Republicans were upset with the outcome, he insisted nobody should be surprised that the race was tight — not after Kemp narrowly beat Abrams in 2018.
“There’s been a description that Georgia suddenly flipped from Republican for years to Democrat,” he said. “None of this is sudden. None of this is really overly surprising to the pundits to track what’s going on in Georgia. And I don’t think you can say it’s a massive flip with Biden leading by about 10,353 votes.” (The total has increased since Sterling spoke.)
Sterling said the state probably would find that some people did vote illegally or cast their vote twice.
“That will be found,” Sterling said. “Is it 10,353? Unlikely.”
(CNN)As the pandemic rages, President Donald Trump lashes out at election returns and President-elect Joe Biden prepares for a new administration, the Supreme Court will meet Tuesday to discuss whether to invalidate the entire Affordable Care Act, the linchpin of the nation’s health care system.
As Joe Biden prepares to enter the White House, California is planning for a transition of its own: From the state of resistance to a state of acceptance.
For four years, California has led the charge against Trump’s policies, including filing more than 100 legal actions against the administration, mostly over environmental issues. And the state has become a haven of sorts for former Obama-era White House officials who landed government jobs in California regulating the world’s fifth largest economy while Republicans ruled Washington.
All of that will change come January, when a Biden administration — with California-born Kamala Harris as the vice president — takes over and likely fills key government jobs with a host of California connections.
“It goes from headwinds to tail winds, that’s pretty obvious,” Newsom said Monday.
Newsom said he is already discussing how it would resolve its lawsuits against the federal government once the Biden administration takes over. But perhaps the biggest impact would be on California’s environmental policies.
Last year, the Trump administration revoked California’s long-held authority to set its own emission standards for cars and trucks that are tougher than those imposed by the federal government. A Biden administration could quickly end that lawsuit by granting the state’s waiver, which would also extend to 15 other states plus Washington, D.C., that follow California’s lead.
Earlier this year, California became the first state to approve rules that would force automakers to sell more electric trucks and delivery vans. The state needs permission from the federal government before it can fully implement the new rules — something much more likely under a Biden administration.
“I think we’re going to go from a place where we’ve been in a defensive posture to one where we’re in a partnership,” said Jared Blumenfeld, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency. “Our hope is that we’re going to be able to quickly resolve those differences and work together.”
Other lawsuits could be more complicated to resolve, including one over the Trump administration’s new rules allowing farmers to take more water from the state’s largest river system at the risk of harming some endangered species of fish. Tom Birmingham, general manager of Westlands Water District, says a Biden administration doesn’t change much — both sides are still required to agree on how to apportion the state’s water.
Kathryn Phillips, director of the Sierra Club of California, said it would be “huge for California” if Biden were to reverse some of Trump’s environmental decisions. But she is worried how the Biden administration will propose to manage California’s water supply and the complicated politics that surround it.
“It’s an area that we think we’ll get a more honest assessment from the Biden administration, but we’re still nervous,” she said.
Biden has already tapped California for people to advise him on the coronavirus, plucking University of California, San Francisco, professor Dr. Eric Goosby from Newsom’s group of scientists reviewing possible vaccines and adding him to a task force advising the new administration about the coronavirus.
Newsom said Monday he expects it to be the first of many announcements from the Biden administration with California ties. He said he’ll be “working hard” to convince some of his key staff to stay — something he said was “slightly tongue in cheek.”
“I would be shocked if you do not hear more announcements over the coming weeks and months,” Newsom said. “That would be great for our state. But, of course, we’d hate to see some of these folks leave our state as well.”
But just because Washington could be awash in California Democrats doesn’t mean the state will get everything it wants, said Thad Kousser, chair of the political science department at the University of California, San Diego. Newsom again reiterated his request on Monday for a multibillion-dollar stimulus package to shore up the budgets of state and local governments — a request that becomes more unlikely to be successful if Republicans maintain control of the U.S. Senate.
“The biggest policy challenge California faces is a massive budget deficit,” Kousser said. “That’s by no means assured.”
Jon Ossoff says he and Rev. Raphael Warnock, the Georgia Democrats competing in two Jan. 5 runoffs to decide partisan control of the U.S. Senate, can win as a “team” riding the state’s demographic changes.
Driving the news: Ossoff made the prediction in an interview for “Axios on HBO” in which he also said that his opponent in the Jan. 5 primary, Sen. David Purdue, embodies “Trumpism in a nutshell.”
Purdue made headlines last month for mocking the name of now-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who parents came from Jamaica and India.
Warnock, who is senior pastor of Atlanta’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church, which was MLK’s spiritual home, faces Republican Kelly Loeffler in the other Senate race.
Long-red Georgia hasn’t chosen a Democrat for president since 1992, but now President-electJoe Biden holds a narrow lead over President Trump in results that will go to a recount.
What they’re saying: “Warnock and Ossoff running together in the double Senate runoff of the century is sort of a beautiful clarification of where Georgia is now,” Ossoff said.
“A young Jewish son of an immigrant, mentored by Congressman John Lewis, and a Black pastor, the senior pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church,” he said. “That’s the team at this moment of transition for our state and this fork in the road for our country.”
Answering a series of questions about his views on specific policies pushed by progressives, Ossoff said he does not support the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, expanding the Supreme Court, defunding police or abolishing ICE.
He said he does support statehood for DC and Puerto Rico.
Asked if he supports ending the filibuster, he said “maybe” and added, “What I will consider is the implications in the long run when the shoe is on the other foot.”
The Trump campaign and its allies unveiled a new tactic to contest election vote counts, suing to stop state officials from finalizing results due to fraud allegations in Michigan and limits imposed on poll observers in Pennsylvania.
Judges likely would be reluctant to take the rare step of blocking final vote counts without seeing substantial evidence of fraud or irregularities widespread enough to change the election, legal analysts said.
“Our system will resolve any recounts or litigation,” he said.
But he also took the opportunity to torch Democrats, saying they had no right to expect that Mr. Trump would quickly concede.
“At this time last week, small-business owners in cities across America were boarding up their windows in case President Trump appeared to win and far-left mobs decided to reprise their summertime rioting,” Mr. McConnell said. “Suffice to say, a few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic.”
Democrats were outraged. Following Mr. McConnell on the floor, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said flatly that “Joe Biden won this election fair and square.” He called Mr. Trump’s claims “extremely dangerous, extremely poisonous to our democracy” and warned Republican leaders not to give them oxygen.
“Republican leaders must unequivocally condemn the president’s rhetoric and work to ensure the peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Schumer said.
A group of 30 former Republican lawmakers, including former Representatives Carlos Curbelo of Florida, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Tom Coleman of Missouri and Bob Inglis of South Carolina, joined a letter calling on Mr. Trump to concede and accept the results of the election.
“We believe the statements by President Trump alleging fraud in the election are efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the election and are unacceptable,” the group wrote. “Every vote should be counted and the final outcome accepted by the participants because public confidence in the outcome of our elections is a bedrock of our democracy.”
Few elected Republicans have voiced such views, or even offered the traditional recognition of Mr. Biden’s victory and called for the country to move forward. In her statement Monday, Ms. Collins joined just a handful of House Republicans and just three other Senate Republicans — Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Ben Sasse of Nebraska — in publicly doing so.
“It would be problematic enough if Barr were reversing longstanding Justice Department guidance because of significant, substantiated claims of misconduct — that could presumably be handled at the local and state level,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
“But to do so when there is no such evidence — and when the president’s clear strategy is to delegitimize the results of a proper election — is one of the more problematic acts of any attorney general in my lifetime,” Mr. Vladeck added.
Mr. Pilger, a career prosecutor in the department’s Public Integrity Section who oversaw voting-fraud-related investigations, told colleagues he would move to a nonsupervisory role working on corruption prosecutions.
“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mr. Pilger’s message.
Justice Department policies prohibit federal prosecutors from taking overt steps, like questioning witnesses or securing subpoenas for documents, to open a criminal investigation into any election-related matter until after voting results have been certified to keep their existence from spilling into public view and influencing either voters or local election officials who ensure the integrity of the results.
“Public knowledge of a criminal investigation could impact the adjudication of election litigation and contests in state courts,” the Justice Department’s longstanding election guidelines for prosecutors say. “Accordingly, it is the general policy of the department not to conduct overt investigations.”
More covert investigative steps, like an investigator going undercover, are allowed but require the permission of a career prosecutor in the department’s Criminal Division.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! I just think we have to be very clear,” said Cavuto, interrupting the broadcast. “She’s charging that the other side is ‘welcoming fraud and welcoming illegal voting.’ Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue showing you this.”
Congress has to pass another round of coronavirus stimulus before President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated in January, offering aid to a U.S. economy that is still grappling with the fallout of the health crisis, U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Thomas Donohue told CNBC on Monday.
“The stimulus bill is essential, and the sooner it’s done, the better for the beneficiaries of the stimulus and therefore better for the markets and the economy,” Donohue said on “Closing Bell.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said last week that passing another pandemic relief bill is “job one” for Congress following the election. “Hopefully, the partisan passions that prevented us from doing another rescue package will subside with the election. And I think we need to do it, and I think we need to do it before the end of the year,” McConnell said.
Biden, a Democrat, was projected as the winner by NBC News and other media organizations Saturday. However, Trump has not yet conceded the election, and his campaign is waging various legal fights in key battleground states.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Saturday congratulated Biden, the former vice president under President Barack Obama. In a statement, Donohue said the business group stood “ready to work with the Biden administration and leaders on both sides of the aisle to restore public health, revitalize our economy, and help rebuild American lives and communities.”
Democratic leaders and Trump administration officials failed to strike a stimulus deal before the election, disagreeing over the size and scale of a potential relief package. Those chasms between the two sides appear to remain.
However, Donohue said he is confident there would be an agreement in the coming weeks that would deliver help to the bruised economy, which has improved from the worst of the pandemic-induced damage. In October, job gains beat expectations and helped bring down the nation’s unemployment rate to 6.9%. Still, millions of people who lost their jobs during the pandemic remain out of work.
“We’re very hopeful that there will be a commitment to do this before the inauguration because that’s quite a ways off,” Donohue said. “And we believe that the parties ought to get together and get on with it, and I think they will.” Inauguration Day is Jan. 20.
Donohue also addressed the news about Pfizer and BioNTech‘s coronavirus vaccine, which interim trial data showed was more than 90% effective in preventing Covid-19 in people who had not previously been infected. The news was cheered by Wall Street, as stocks soared Monday. Some of the session’s biggest winners were those that would benefit from the end of the pandemic, such as airline and other travel companies.
Donohue offered a tempered outlook on the immediate benefits of Monday’s vaccine developments, noting it will be months before the benefits may be felt in the economy. The drugmakers still need emergency approval from regulators, and distribution is a complex task. Those realities make it even more important to deliver more stimulus to the economy, Donohue said.
“We’re probably into February or March of next year before there’s serious supply available where it needs to be,” Donohue said. “All the more reason that sensible people have to get together for the fourth effort to keep this economy going, to keep people safe and take care of our fellow citizens.”
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