According to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) the funding will help pay for supplies required for storing, handling, distributing, transporting, and administering vaccines, including containers for medical waste, and supplies necessary for proper storage of the vaccines including liquid nitrogen, dry ice and portable storage units. Additionally, the funding supports vaccine transportation such as refrigerated trucks and transport security,
On Thursday morning, Twitter users began postingscreenshots of their Robinhood apps that showed a message appended to the stocks of GameStop, AMC, Nokia and Bed, Bath and Beyond: “This stock is not supported on Robinhood.”
Robinhood said in a blog post on Thursday morning, just before the stock exchanges opened: “In light of recent volatility, we are restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only, including $AMC, $BB, $BBBY, $EXPR, $GME, $KOSS, $NAKD and $NOK.”
In a tweet, the @wsbmod Twitter account (which is tied to the Wall Street Bets subreddit community driving recent trades), said: “Individual investors are being stripped of their ability to trade on [the Robinhood app]. Meanwhile hedge funds and institutional investors can continue to trade as normal.”
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan, responded to Robinhood’s decision, calling on the House Committee on Financial Services to hold a hearing on the trading service’s actions, calling them “market manipulation.”
An image circulating on social media Wednesday just after noon ET showed an apparent warning from TD Ameritrade saying it put restrictions on the trading of stocks for GameStop, AMC and others. The brokerage firm confirmed the restrictions, saying it made the decisions “out of an abundance of caution amid unprecedented market conditions and other factors.”
“In the interest of mitigating risk for our company and clients, we have put in place several restrictions on some transactions in $GME [GameStop], $AMC [AMC Theaters] and other securities,” reads the TD Ameritrade message.
A TD Ameritrade spokesperson says the restrictions made include increasing requirements needed to borrow money for stocks known as a margin and limiting transactions such as short sales.
“It is not uncommon for us to make such decisions, which we consider on an individual basis, in the interest of mitigating risk,” the spokesperson said Wednesday via email. “We have been adjusting our requirements for several days as we continued to see trends indicating unusual volume in an unprecedented market environment, which appear to be divorced from traditional market fundamentals. We have made what we believe to be prudent and appropriate decisions to place some limits on certain transactions for certain securities.”
The fervor over stock trading hasn’t gone unnoticed. Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman told CNBC Wednesday that if there is any market manipulation going on, it may halt the trading of a stock to investigate. AMC is listed on Nasdaq, while GameStop is traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
William Galvin, the secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, told Barron’s Wednesday that he thinks the New York Stock Exchange should “consider simply suspending it for a month and stop trading it.”
The Securities and Exchanges Commission, which oversees the stock markets, told the New York Times it’s watching “internet chat rooms for signs of potential market manipulation.”
“We are aware of and actively monitoring the on-going market volatility in the options and equities markets, and consistent with our mission to protect investors and maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets,” the agency said in a statement Wednesday. “We are working with our fellow regulators to assess the situation and review the activities of regulated entities, financial intermediaries and other market participants.”
Even the White House is “monitoring the situation,” according to Press Secretary Jen Psaki Wednesday.
Clarification: This story initially misstated the actions TD Ameritrade took. The firm put certain restrictions in place for GameStop and AMC stock, but did not ban them.
With demand for COVID-19 vaccines outpacing the world’s supplies, a frustrated public and policymakers want to know: How can we get more? A lot more. Right away.
The problem: “It’s not like adding more water to the soup,” said vaccine specialist Maria Elena Bottazzi of Baylor College of Medicine.
Makers of COVID-19 vaccines need everything to go right as they scale up production to hundreds of millions of doses — and any little hiccup could cause a delay. Some of their ingredients have never before been produced at the sheer volume needed.
And seemingly simple suggestions that other factories switch to brewing new kinds of vaccines can’t happen overnight. Just this week, French drugmaker Sanofi took the unusual step of announcing it would help bottle and package some vaccine produced by competitor Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech. But those doses won’t start arriving until summer — and Sanofi has the space in a factory in Germany only because its own vaccine is delayed, bad news for the world’s overall supply.
“We think, ‘Well, OK, it’s like men’s shirts, right? I’ll just have another place to make it,’” said Dr. Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, a vaccine adviser to the U.S. government. “It’s just not that easy.”
DIFFERENT VACCINES, DIFFERENT RECIPES
The multiple types of COVID-19 vaccines being used in different countries all train the body to recognize the new coronavirus, mostly the spike protein that coats it. But they require different technologies, raw materials, equipment and expertise to do so.
The two vaccines authorized in the U.S so far, from Pfizer and Moderna, are made by putting a piece of genetic code called mRNA — the instructions for that spike protein — inside a little ball of fat.
Making small amounts of mRNA in a research lab is easy but “prior to this, nobody made a billion doses or 100 million or even a million doses of mRNA,” said Dr. Drew Weissman of the University of Pennsylvania, who helped pioneer mRNA technology.
Scaling up doesn’t just mean multiplying ingredients to fit a bigger vat. Creating mRNA involves a chemical reaction between genetic building blocks and enzymes, and Weissman said the enzymes don’t work as efficiently in larger volumes.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine, already used in Britain and several other countries, and one expected soon from Johnson & Johnson, are made with a cold virus that sneaks the spike protein gene into the body. It’s a very different form of manufacturing: living cells in giant bioreactors grow that cold virus, which is extracted and purified.
“If the cells get old or tired or start changing, you might get less,” Weissman said. “There’s a lot more variability and a lot more things you have to check.”
An old-fashioned variety — “inactivated” vaccines like one made by China’s Sinovac — require even more steps and stiffer biosecurity because they’re made with killed coronavirus.
One thing all vaccines have in common: They must be made under strict rules that require specially inspected facilities and frequent testing of each step, a time-consuming necessity to be confident in the quality of each batch.
WHAT ABOUT THE SUPPLY CHAIN?
Production depends on enough raw materials. Pfizer and Moderna insist they have reliable suppliers.
Even so, a U.S. government spokesman said logistics experts are working directly with vaccine makers to anticipate and solve any bottlenecks that arise.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel acknowledges that challenges remain.
With shifts running 24/7, if on any given day “there’s one raw material missing, we cannot start making products and that capacity will be lost forever because we cannot make it up,” he recently told investors.
Pfizer has temporarily slowed deliveries in Europe for several weeks, so it could upgrade its factory in Belgium to handle more production.
And sometimes the batches fall short. AstraZeneca told an outraged European Union that it, too, will deliver fewer doses than originally promised right away. The reason cited: Lower than expected “yields,” or output, at some European manufacturing sites.
More than in other industries, when brewing with biological ingredients, “there are things that can go wrong and will go wrong,” said Norman Baylor, a former Food and Drug Administration vaccine chief who called yield variability common.
HOW MUCH IS ON THE WAY?
That varies by country. Moderna and Pfizer each are on track to deliver 100 million doses to the U.S. by the end of March and another 100 million in the second quarter of the year. Looking even further ahead, President Joe Biden has announced plans to buy still more over the summer, reaching enough to eventually vaccinate 300 million Americans.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told a Bloomberg conference this week that his company will actually wind up providing 120 million doses by the end of March — not by speedier production but because health workers now are allowed to squeeze an extra dose out of every vial.
But getting six doses instead of five requires using specialized syringes, and there are questions about the global supply. A Health and Human Services spokesman said the U.S. is sending kits that include the special syringes with each Pfizer shipment.
Pfizer also said its factory upgrade in Belgium is short-term pain for longer-term gain, as the changes will help increase worldwide production to 2 billion doses this year instead of the originally anticipated 1.3 billion.
Moderna likewise recently announced it will be able to supply 600 million doses of vaccine in 2021, up from 500 million, and that it was expanding capacity in hopes of getting to 1 billion.
But possibly the easiest way to get more doses is if other vaccines in the pipeline are proven to work. U.S. data on whether Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose shot protects is expected soon, and another company, Novavax, also is in final-stage testing.
OTHER OPTIONS
For months, the chief vaccine companies lined up “contract manufacturers” in the U.S. and Europe to help them crank out doses and then undergo the final bottling steps. Moderna, for example, is working with Switzerland’s Lonza.
Beyond rich nations, the Serum Institute of India has a contract to manufacture a billion doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine. It’s the world’s largest vaccine maker and is expected to be a key supplier for developing countries.
But some homegrown efforts to boost supplies appear hobbled. Two Brazilian research institutes plan to make millions of doses of the AstraZeneca and Sinovac vaccines but have been set back by unexplained delays in shipments of key ingredients from China.
And Bottazzi said the world simultaneously has to keep up production of vaccines against polio, measles, meningitis and other diseases that still threaten even in the midst of the pandemic.
Penn’s Weissman urged patience, saying that as each vaccine maker gets more experience, “I think every month they’re going to be making more vaccine than the prior month.”
____
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
After almost a year of virtual learning due to the coronavirus pandemic, Philadelphia’s youngest students will see the inside of a classroom in February. “We’ve relied on science and data to help inform every step that we’ve taken to develop and implement a plan,” superintendent William Hite said.
The reopening comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced there’s little evidence of coronavirus transmission in schools if precautions are followed. In addition to face masks, physical distancing and increased room ventilation, schools need to limit risky activities like indoor sports and restricting indoor dining.
Dr. Joseph Allen, the director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard School of Public Health, called school closures “a national emergency.”
“We are seeing the devastating cost just pile on top of each other,” he said. “The reports we see on suicides and decreases in literacy, less access to food, food insecurity issues.”
The new data “supports that schools are not the source or not contributing in meaningful ways to community spread,” Allen said.
But across the country, the divisive debate rages between districts and teachers unions refusing to return. Chicago, the nation’s third-largest school district, is on the brink of a teacher strike.
“My message to the teachers unions is we need you guys,” said Tameika Hinton, a single mother to 10-year-old Destin.
Hinton had to move in with her grandfather after cutting her work hours to be able to stay home to supervise her child’s learning.
One reason unions are pushing back on returning is because there are only 23 states that prioritize teachers to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.
The Biden administration is seeking to get younger students back in the classroom as soon as possible. The White House confirmed to CBS News that President Biden’s goal to reopen a majority of schools in his first 100 days does not apply to high schools and there’s no word of a timeline for reopening secondary schools.
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – Six lucky Oregon drivers got a dose of the coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday while stranded in the snow.
Josephine County Public Health held a vaccine clinic at Illinois Valley High School and had six leftover doses because the intended recipients got stuck on their way to the clinic. The vaccines were about to expire, so officials decided to give them out.
Twenty personnel were on their way back to Grants Pass when they got stuck on Highway 199 near Hayes Hill. Thats when they went car to car and gave out the extra doses.
An ambulance was near by as a precaution.
One of the drivers ended up being a Josephine County Sheriff’s Office employee who was meant to receive the dose.
JCPH Director Mike Weber said it was one of the coolest operations he’d been a part of.
President Biden will sign executive orders Thursday that would revoke a Trump-era policy cutting funds to global organizations that offer abortion and to expand access to health insurance.
Eric Gay/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Eric Gay/AP
President Biden will sign executive orders Thursday that would revoke a Trump-era policy cutting funds to global organizations that offer abortion and to expand access to health insurance.
Eric Gay/AP
President Biden will sign two executive actions Thursday that are designed to expand access to reproductive health care and health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
The president’s memorandum instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to open a special enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act through HealthCare.gov, the federally run health insurance marketplace. The enrollment period will run Feb. 15 to May 15, giving Americans who’ve lost their employer-based health insurance due to the pandemic an opportunity to sign up for coverage.
“For President Biden, this is personal,” a news release read. “As we continue to battle COVID-19, it is even more critical that Americans have meaningful access to affordable care.”
Biden will also order federal agencies to re-examine current policies that may undermine the Affordable Care Act and the health insurance exchanges created under it. He’ll also request a review of policies that could make it more difficult for Americans to enroll in Medicaid.
His second order aims “to protect and expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care” by rescinding the Mexico City Policy, also known as the “global gag rule.” This policy, reinstated and expanded by the Trump administration, bars international non-governmental organizations that provide abortion counseling or referrals from receiving U.S. funding.
Affordable Care Act
Biden’s executive actions will undo some of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the ACA.
Last November, the Trump administration and several Republican-led states argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that the program should be voided completely, which would have eliminated popular elements of the law, such as protections for those with preexisting conditions.
The Supreme Court will hear a case that could decide the legality of work requirements for Medicaid recipients. The Trump administration granted waivers to allow work requirements for Medicaid to 12 states, though not all have been granted, and some have been blocked in lower courts.
Biden is reversing course and directing federal agencies to reconsider those work requirement rules. He is also asking agencies to review policies that undermined protections for people with pre-existing conditions, including COVID-19 related complications.
The Trump White House also refused to advertise the ACA as an option for the millions of Americans who lost their jobs and health insurance during the pandemic. The administration faced pressure to open HealthCare.gov for anyone to enroll in the Affordable Care Act in response to the coronavirus, but it never did.
Global gag rule
For decades, Democratic and Republican presidents have alternately rescinded or reinstated the global gag rule, with Democrats, such as Biden, opposing the policy. Republicans have argued that the rule would reduce the number of abortions.
However, a study released last year suggested the policy failed to reduce the rate of abortions and ultimately had the opposite effect. The study said the rate of abortions increased by about 40% in the countries studied — most likely because the funding ban caused a reduction in access to contraception and a consequent rise in unwanted pregnancies.
Under the actions set to be announced Thursday, the president will tell federal agencies to review a Trump-era rule that limited the use of Title X federal funds meant for family planning and reproductive health services for low-income patients. Under this program, organizations that promoted or provided abortions could not have access to those federal funds.
The White House said, “Across the country and around the world, people — particularly women, Black, Indigenous and other people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those with low incomes — have been denied access to reproductive health care.”
But that warning came in a private channel to law enforcement agencies. Terrorism warnings issued to the public like the bulletin on Wednesday are rare: The most recent came a year ago during a period of tension with Iran after the American military’s killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
The bulletins issued by the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, have typically identified foreign terrorist threats. Federal authorities have for years lagged on warnings about the threat of terrorism from within United States borders, perpetrated by American citizens.
“There’s value in soliciting the public’s assistance in identifying and alerting authorities about suspicious activity,” said Brian Harrell, a former assistant secretary for homeland security in the Trump administration. “The watchful public will always be the best ‘eyes and ears’ for law enforcement.”
Asked during a briefing about the motivation for the new terrorism bulletin, Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, said, “In my view, it is domestic terrorism mounted by right-wing extremists and neo-Nazi groups.” He added, “We have to be candid and face what the real risk is.”
Such candor has long been an exception.
When a warning in a 2009 Department of Homeland Security report, early in the Obama administration, that military veterans returning from combat could be vulnerable to recruitment by terrorist groups or extremists prompted a backlash from conservatives, the homeland security secretary at the time, Janet Napolitano, was forced to apologize.
The report was retracted and an edited version was eventually reissued.
“It was an early lesson in how fraught dealing with these issues can be, but it turns out the report itself and the substance of the report was quite prescient,” Ms. Napolitano said in an interview. “What we saw two weeks ago is what I think we were seeing in 2009, but it has only grown and it seems to have exploded in the last four years.”
This week, Mr. Biden ordered a comprehensive assessment of the threat of domestic violent extremism. During his confirmation hearing, the president’s pick for homeland security secretary, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, said he would empower the department’s intelligence branch, which has long struggled to distinguish its assessments from the F.B.I.
In an interview just after the November election, the American Petroleum Institute’s senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, Frank Macchiarola, said his group was aware of Biden’s plan to impose a leasing moratorium. “But we also recognize that that was a campaign proposal, and campaigning is often different from governing,” he said at the time.
Washington (CNN)Video of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg before she was elected to Congress went viral Wednesday amid an uproar over newly reported comments she made in 2018 and 2019.
CNN’s Rachel Janfaza, Em Steck, Andrew Kaczynski, Clare Foran, Daniella Diaz, Annie Grayer and Kristin Wilson contributed to this report.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump clash with police and security forces on Jan. 6 as people try to storm the U.S. Capitol.
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
Supporters of former President Donald Trump clash with police and security forces on Jan. 6 as people try to storm the U.S. Capitol.
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
The union representing U.S. Capitol Police officers says the force’s leadership failed to relay the known threat of violence adequately ahead of the Jan. 6 deadly riot, calling the acting chief’s recent admission of prior knowledge of the threat to Congress “a disclosure that has angered and shocked the rank-and-file officers.”
The statement Wednesday from the Capitol Police Labor Committee comes a day after acting Chief Yogananda Pittman testified to Congress, saying in prepared remarks:
By January 4th, the Department knew that the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacists organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target.
Pittman, who apologized in her testimony for her department’s “failings” during the insurrection, told Congress that the former police chief, Steven Sund, had asked the Capitol Police Board, a three-member oversight body, on Jan. 4 to declare a state of emergency for Jan. 6 and to request National Guard assistance.
Pittman said the board denied both requests.
Capitol Police leaders have faced stinging criticisms for not having better prepared for the violent assault by supporters of former President Donald Trump that left five people dead, including one police officer. Additionally, the acting head of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department revealed on Wednesday that a second officer who responded to the attack has died by suicide since the insurrection.
In the Wednesday statement, union Chair Gus Papathanasiou called the revelation that leadership had prior knowledge of the threat of violence “unconscionable.”
“We have one officer who lost his life as a direct result of the insurrection. Another officer has tragically taken his own life,” Papathanasiou said. “Between USCP and our colleagues at the Metropolitan Police Department, we have almost 140 officers injured. I have officers who were not issued helmets prior to the attack who have sustained brain injuries. One officer has two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal discs. One officer is going to lose his eye, and another was stabbed with a metal fence stake.”
In the days after the riot, top security officials at the Capitol — including Sund; the House sergeant-at-arms, Paul Irving; and the Senate sergeant-at-arms, Michael Stenger — resigned their posts following requests from leaders of both parties.
“The disclosure that the entire executive team … knew what was coming but did not better prepare us for potential violence, including the possible use of firearms against us, is unconscionable,” Papathanasiou said. “The entire executive team failed us, and they must be held accountable. Their inaction cost lives.”
The statement goes on to say that the department’s high-ranking officials are unfit to take the helm as chief.
“We have leaders in this department who have the support of the front-line officers. They can implement the changes we need to make, but those leaders are not at the Chief or Assistant Chief level, nor possibly the Deputy Chief level,” Papathanasiou said, adding later: “Our officers need leadership they can trust.”
Sund, the former chief, had previously defended his handling of the riot in an interview with NPR, saying that the insurrection had been a sophisticated attempt to siege the complex.
“This was not a demonstration. This was not a failure to plan for a demonstration. This was a planned, coordinated attack on the United States Capitol,” he said.
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin will become one of only 10 states without statewide mask mandates when the Assembly votes this week to overturn Gov. Tony Evers’ order.
More than two dozen public health organizations, as well as state and local health officials, have urged the Republican-controlled Legislature to reconsider. The vote to repeal the mask order, planned for Thursday, comes as Wisconsin lags in distribution of the vaccine compared with other states.
Also, health officials have warned about the spread of contagious new variants of the virus and total deaths due to COVID-19 are nearing 6,000 in the state.
COPYRIGHT 2021 THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
President Joe Biden has issued a series of executive actions since assuming office on January 20 aimed at tackling a wide variety of issues, from immigration to racial justice to the environment.
Some prominent Republicans have claimed that Biden has issued a modern-record number of executive orders in his first days in office. Biden had issued 37 executive orders during his first week, the New York Post reported on Tuesday.
Representative Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) criticized Biden for the large number of executive orders he has issued.
“The party that spent four years calling President Trump a dictator are now applauding Joe Biden for setting the record of week-one executive orders,” Boebert tweeted on Tuesday.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who served as former President Donald Trump‘s personal lawyer, also was critical.
“Biden once said that excessive reliance on executive orders, ignoring the Legislature, is dictatorial,” Giuliani said. “Well Joe do you remember saying that it could be dictatorial […] Are you aware enough that it now applies to you?”
Biden once said that excessive reliance on executive orders, ignoring the Legislature, is dictatorial.
Well Joe do you remember saying that it could be dictatorial
Biden has taken more executive action in his first week in office than his immediate predecessors and many of those orders have been aimed at reversing Trump-era policies.
The Economist noted on January 22 that Biden had signed more executive orders in two days than Trump had in two months and was setting a record pace, while NBC News lists 40 executive actions up to January 26.
Of the 40, 32 are listed as executive orders. The others are classed as proclamations or memoranda. However, it’s common to refer to these as executive orders and they have a similar effect. Executive orders are listed at the Federal Register, but the site has not been fully updated yet.
“It’s too early to know whether we’ll see a large number of executive orders by Biden. It’s not unusual for a president to sign several orders on his first day in office, but Biden did more of those than his predecessors, in large part to undo many of Trump’s more controversial ones,” said Seth Masket, professor of political science at Duke University.
“But this also reflects the increasing ideological distance between the parties and a lengthening Democratic agenda—as the party’s nominee, Biden simply has more to accomplish than many of his predecessors did, even on ‘day one.'”
Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at NYU Law School, told Newsweek that “None of President Biden’s initial EOs [executive orders] test the limits of executive power yet, but he faces strong demands to make government function effectively; if Congress cannot overcome gridlock, the pressures to make more aggressive use of executive powers will inevitably increase.”
The Ruling
Mostly true.
While not all Biden’s executive actions are executive orders, he has issued a modern-record number in his first days in office, far outpacing his immediate predecessors. However, many of these actions are aimed at reversing controversial policies from the previous administration.
The Federal Register clearly shows that Trump, former President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush took far fewer executive actions during their first week in office. Bush’s first executive order did not come until nine days after his inauguration in 2001.
It’s too early to tell if Biden will issue an unusual number of executive orders during his term. The initial slew of orders appears to be a reaction to the Trump policies that were still in place.
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks about the coronavirus pandemic in the State Dining Room of the White House on January 26, 2021, in Washington, D.C. Biden has issued a large number of executive orders in his first week. Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images
WASHINGTON – After a vote Tuesday suggested the Senate may likely acquit former President Donald Trump at his impeachment trial, Democratic senators searched Wednesday for ways to make their case against him.
Many Republicans and Democrats conceded a Trump conviction seemed unlikely given the vote. But Senate Democratic leaders doubled down on moving forward with the impeachment trial while others suggested they try something else.
One path for Democrats is to pursue the trial scheduled to resume Feb. 9 – describing the violence that left five dead and playing videos of the Capitol under siege – as a way to document Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Another option some senators are exploring is to censure Trump, a more modest step than conviction aimed at gaining more bipartisan support.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said he was exploring offering a resolution censuring Trump as a punishment that could attract more Republicans to climb on board than conviction and possible prohibition from future office. But Kaine said he wouldn’t offer his proposal unless at least 10 Republicans joined.
“I’ve drafted something, I haven’t filed it yet because I’m trying to get other people’s ideas about what should be in it,” Kaine said. “But I’m hoping that we might find, we might find it and it could be an alternative.”
His comments come after the Senate voted 55 to 45 Tuesday to reject a motion from Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who challenged the impeachment trial as unconstitutional because Trump has already left office. Paul lost the vote, but it signaled Trump won’t be convicted of inciting insurrection at the Capitol, which would require a two-thirds majority.
Kaine called the vote “clarifying” that there won’t be 67 votes to convict Trump. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said “you pretty much know where it’s going to go.” When asked if the same 45 Republicans would vote to acquit, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said “that would be my guess, yeah.” Paul called the trial “dead on arrival.”
Despite the vote, Democrats are pressing forward.
Durbin questioned whether the 45 Republicans who voted to avoid the trial agreed with Paul’s argument, are still loyal to Trump or “fear” his followers.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., insisted the trial would go forward.
“The evidence against the former president will be presented, in living color, for the nation and every one of us to see,” Schumer said. “Once again, no one will be able to avert their gaze from what Mr. Trump said and did, and the consequences of his actions. We will all watch what happened, we will listen to what happened, and then, we will vote.”
Durbin offered an overview of the House impeachment case against Trump from the Senate floor that was occupied three weeks earlier by a riotous mob. He recalled how the Secret Service hustled former Vice President Mike Pence out of the chamber while hearing a challenge to counting Electoral College votes. Senators who fled down the stairs could see through a window the mob that Trump is alleged to have exhorted to the Capitol.
“How can anyone who was in this chamber Jan. 6 really argue that something critical and important and horrific occurred?” Durbin asked. “It was his last desperate gasp to keep the White House, even at the expense of the Constitution and reality.”
The Senate will judge Trump’s role at the trial. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., hasn’t said how he would vote at the trial or whether his vote in support of Paul’s motion signaled a vote for acquittal.
“Well, the trial hasn’t started yet,” he said. “And I intend to participate in that and listen to the evidence.”
One of the five Republicans who voted against Paul’s motion, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, is working with Kaine to use censure as an alternative to a trial.
“It seems to me that there is some value in looking at an alternative to proceeding with the trial,” Collins said. “If the outcome of the trial is already obvious … then the question is, is there another way to express condemnation of the president’s activities with regard to the riot and the pressure that he put on state officials?”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, another one of the five Republicans who joined Democrats in voting against Paul’s motion, said she hasn’t seen the proposed language, but would consider it.
“I’ll have to see exactly what the censure language is,” Murkowski said.
Avoiding a trial might be a lost cause. “I appreciate their thinking outside the box,” said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. “We’re past that point.”
The Democratic efforts come against a background of opposition or indifference by some. The second-ranking Democratic leader, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, said a man at the Chicago airport last week urged him to let it go.
“Someone seated nearby said, ‘Hey, senator, get over it. Let this president ride off into the sunset.’ Those were his words,” Durbin said. “It’s hard to get over it if you’ve lived it. Many of us in this chamber did.”
“That big of a tent requires a big bank account, and that really to me is more of the question — how much money are they going to be willing to commit to this?” said Phil Smith, spokesperson for the United Mine Workers of America labor union. ”How much money is Congress going to be willing to let them commit to this?”
The factions pushing to influence Biden’s agenda also have far different priorities — including Bernie Sanders-supporting green groups that want to ban all oil and gas drilling, automakers anticipating new markets for electric cars and fossil fuel companies that hope U.S. climate action will leave room for them to continue to produce the oil and gas whose production had boomed under the previous three presidents.
Biden drew a sharp line between his plan to fight climate change and the Trump administration, which rolled back regulations, denigrated the science and turned its back on the global efforts to rein in the greenhouse gases pumping up the Earth’s temperatures. Wednesday’s flurry of executive orders have their roots in the policies he rolled out during the campaign and the pledge to make climate change policy one of the administration’s top priorities.
But the new president’s approach also represents a striking change from Obama’s efforts, which included a doomed attempt to pass climate legislation in 2009 that unraveled amid opposition from Republicans and fossil fuel advocates. Only in his second term did Obama attempt to push through major greenhouse gas limits through regulations — executive actions that were still mostly unfinished when Donald Trump took office and began unraveling them.
Now, climate advocates have an even stronger case to make that ignoring the changes that are driving devastating storms, wildfires and rising seas pose an even bigger risk than ignoring them.
Biden has tied his plan to an economic stimulus — a move that’s drawn support from groups like the Chamber of Commerce, which previously opposed aggressive action from the federal government, as well as a raft of individual companies that are taking action at the behest of their customers and investors.
And the new president is seeking to appeal to racial justice groups, whose clout inside the environmental movement has skyrocketed in recent years as attention to the pollution that disproportionately affects people of color and low-income communities has risen. That’s far different from the roster of national environmental groups, with their largely white leaders and lobbyists, who helped lead the charge for Obama’s doomed cap-and-trade legislation.
Advocates for that “environmental justice” movement have already shown they have the power to influence the new administration, tanking the expected nomination of veteran California air and climate regulator Mary Nichols to head the Environmental Protection Agency over complaints that she had failed to address racial disparities.
Advocates for environmental justice say giving them a seat at the table is long overdue.
“We’ve never had too many cooks in the kitchen — we’ve never had a broad diversity of perspectives,” said Peggy Shepard, executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice. “This is a good thing. This is how we get to improve life for everybody.”
Biden’s orders will press pause on auctions of federal lands and waters to oil and gas companies, expand conservation protections for large swaths of land, create a new civilian conservation corps and promise to deliver economic help to coal-producing regions suffering from the industry’s decline.
But pressure from that broader coalition will be needed to persuade Congress to spend the $2 trillion Biden wants to help eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 2035 and across the economy by 2050.
Green groups were quick to welcome Biden’s climate initiatives, which had been the subject of chatter among environmental activists for weeks. Many of those groups had spent the past four years locked in court challenges against Trump’s own steady stream of executive orders.
“These actions stand in stark contrast to the denial of climate change and the attacks our oceans and coasts have faced over the past four years,” said Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana, a group advocating for protection of oceans, of Biden’s plans to place an open-ended moratorium on the issuing new leases for oil and gas drilling in federal waters. “This stuff is a major step forward.”
Wednesday’s orders fill in many of the details left out of last week’s orders that called for blocking the Keystone XL pipeline and rejoining the Paris climate agreement.
On the international front, Biden will convene a promised climate change summit with world leaders for April 22, Earth Day, and he’s calling for a national intelligence estimate on the security implications of climate change. His State Department will also prepare the process for the country joining an international phase out of super-planet-heating hydrofluorocarbon chemicals as stipulated in the Montreal Protocol, and all agencies to develop strategies for integrating climate considerations into their international work.
White House Climate Envoy John Kerry said in a speech to the World Economic Forum Wednesday that the executive orders will include directing agencies to develop a plan for eliminating public finance of fossil fuel projects.
It creates a national climate task force for the 21 federal agencies and departments to coordinate actions addressing climate change. The work would include better protecting government facilities against the effects of climate change and making sure the public is kept up to date on climate-related forecasts and protection methods.
It also orders the creation a new organization, the Civilian Climate Corps Initiative, “to put a new generation of Americans to work conserving and restoring public lands and waters, increasing reforestation, increasing carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protecting biodiversity, improving access to recreation, and addressing the changing climate.”
The new orders will address environmental justice issues, such as by establishing new commissions to address the concerns of so-called fenceline communities that are disproportionately people of color or low-income families that live near pollution sources. It will create a program to deliver 40 percent of the benefits of relevant federal investments to disadvantaged communities.
Biden is also directing agencies to weigh the climate change effects of all their decisions, a move that could affect procurement strategies for government vehicle fleets or electricity production.
It also seeks to strengths climate defenses in rural areas, directing the secretary of Agriculture to collect input from farmers, ranchers and others on how to use federal programs to encourage adoption of agricultural practices that reduce carbon emissions.
In another move, Biden will call for meeting his campaign promise to place 30 percent of U.S. land and waters under conservation protections by 2030. The so-called 30×30 plan was proposed by Rep. Deb Haaland, Biden’s nominee to lead the Interior Department, and former New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall.
The order that has generated the sharpest opposition from oil companies is one that promises to rewrite the relationship between the industry and public lands. The Biden administration will order an open-ended freeze on offering public land for oil and gas drilling and coal mining, pending reviews of whether such leases were in the public interest. Under that review, the administration is expected to consider whether to add language to new government lease agreements to tighten standards on greenhouse gas emissions and increase the royalties that companies must pay for minerals they produce on public land.
Wednesday’s move will not affect production currently underway or the oil and gas leases and permits that companies had stockpiled under Trump administration in expectation of new restrictions. That means oil and gas production on federal land, which contributes about one-fifth of overall U.S. production, will not stop immediately, with activity likely to continue for at least another year, energy analysts have said.
But that plan is drawing sharp pushback from lawmakers from big oil and coal producing states, such as Sen. Cynthia Lummis, whose state of Wyoming is the leading coal producer in the country.
“[It’s] unbelievable that the Biden administration, to placate its radical minority and elites on both coasts, would pick on eight states that are producing energy,” Lummis told reporters on a call. “This is ill-advised. I would strongly encourage the President to withdraw this ill-conceived executive order.”
People in the oil and gas industry have said they fear the moratorium could end up becoming an outright ban, something Biden had promised on the campaign trail.
But conservation groups and even some industry analysts have argued that the fossil fuel industry is already sitting on leases for thousands of acres of federal land that companies haven’t used yet, and they questioned why the government should offer even more.
The planned review will assess whether the leasing program delivers a fair return for taxpayers, which will include calculating the effects of climate change from fossil fuels produced on federal land. That will significantly reduce the benefits from energy extraction, but the Biden team’s iterative process might also insulate the administration from legal challenges, said National Wildlife Federation CEO Collin O’Mara.
“It’s clear that they’re going to use sound science and the law to achieve the commitments that he made in the campaign, that are incredibly thoughtful and methodical,” O’Mara said. “It’s encouraging that they’re doing it systematically.”
Still, a pause on new activity could come back to take major bite out of some state budgets, especially those with an outsized dependence on oil production for revenue, such as New Mexico, which gets more than 10 percent of it revenue from the activity.
New Mexico Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Rob Black said the moratorium would simply lead companies to shift their operations to neighboring Texas, a state with little federal property and a state oil industry regulator who has called concerns about greenhouse gas emissions “misplaced.”
“It won’t further our shared goals on carbon emissions,” Black said during a call with reporters. “It would just cause production to move a few miles down the road to private oil and gas leases [in Texas] or will incentivize it to go overseas to Saudi Arabia and Russia.”
This is a widget area - If you go to "Appearance" in your WP-Admin you can change the content of this box in "Widgets", or you can remove this box completely under "Theme Options"
