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The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, is holding her daily briefing, as we await the start of the Senate impeachment trial.
Psaki said that Joe Biden would meet with members of White House coronavirus response team in the Oval Office today.
The president and the health experts will discuss “next steps in shutting down the virus and getting life back to normal,” Psaki said.
Community health centers across the country, many of which serve minority and low-income communities, will receive one million doses of vaccines from the White House, said Jeff Zients, the White House Covid-19 response coordinator, in a press briefing this afternoon.
The White House plans to give 250 federally qualified community health centers across all 50 states and territories enough doses to vaccinate 500,000 in the coming weeks.
Marcella Nunez-Smith, chair of Joe Biden’s Covid health equity task force, said that the White House hopes to connect with hard-to-reach populations, including those experiencing homelessness, agricultural workers and people living in public housing, by having community centers distribute the vaccine.
Community health centers across the US serve 30 million people, two-third of who are at or below the federal poverty line and identify with racial ethnic minorities. Centers will be able to start to order vaccines as soon as next week, Nunez-Smith said.
Zients also said that vaccine distribution is up 5% compared to last week and is up 28% since Biden came into office, with states receiving 11m doses each week.
The election arm of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), has brought out its final report on the US presidential election, concluding that it was well organised under the circumstances and there was no significant fraud.
The report also found that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and refusal to accept defeat undermined public faith in democratic institutions, and warned the US has long-term problems with providing equal voting rights for all.
As is routine for OSCE member states, its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) sent a team out to observe the run-up, election day itself and the aftermath. Its report notes that voting infrastructure in the US is chronically underfunded, and the extra $400m disbursed to deal with the challenge of voting in a pandemic was insufficient.
A total of 101 million Americans, 64% of all 2020 voters, cast an early ballot, but despite that unprecedented number, the report found that “early voting was generally well organised and implemented professionally”.
“The number and scale of substantiated cases of fraud associated to absentee ballots were negligible,” it said.
One of the main problems with the election and its aftermath, according to the findings, was the incumbent president.
“On many occasions, President Trump created an impression of refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, claiming that the electoral process was systematically rigged,” the report said.
“Such statements by an incumbent president weaken public confidence in state institutions and were perceived by many as increasing the potential for politically motivated violence after the elections.”
The ODIHR report did not take an explicit view on Trump’s role in inciting the Capitol riot, on 6 January and for which he was impeached a second time. But it noted that at his rally immediately beforehand, Trump “persisted in his accusations that the election had been stolen, urging his supporters to pressure representatives to overturn the counting of electoral college votes.”
The ODIHR was most scathing about the state of voting rights in the US. It notes that after the supreme court invalidated key parts of the Voting Rights Act, “some states enacted laws which effectively compromised voting rights for some disadvantaged groups”.
An estimated 5.2 million citizens are effectively disenfranchised due to a criminal conviction, even though half have served their sentences.
The report concluded: “These restrictions on the voting rights of ex-felons and felons contravene principles of universal suffrage and the principle of proportionality in the restriction of rights, as provided for by OSCE commitments and other international standards.”
Further reading from Sam Levine:
Here’s where the day stands so far:
- The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump will soon begin. The Senate is expected to hold another vote on the constitutionality of the trial today, before the impeachment managers and the former president’s legal team start presenting their arguments on whether Trump should be convicted for incitement of insurrection.
- The impeachment managers will present new evidence in the trial, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer told reporters this morning. “The evidence will be powerful. The evidence, some of it, will be new,” Schumer said, urging senators to “approach the trial with the gravity it deserves”.
- The impeachment managers filed their final pre-trial brief, dismissing arguments from Trump’s legal team. “President Trump’s pre-trial brief confirms that he has no good defense of his incitement of an insurrection against the Nation he swore an oath to protect,” the managers wrote in the brief. “President Trump’s conduct on January 6 was the paradigm of an impeachable offense.”
The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.
The Senate now plans to continue with the impeachment trial on Saturday, Sunday and Monday (which is a federal holiday).
One of Donald Trump’s defense attorneys, David Schoen, had requested that the trial adjourn on Friday night to allow him to recognize the Sabbath.
Senate leaders had planned to accommodate that request, but Schoen dropped the matter yesterday. The Senate will now convene on Saturday, although Schoen will not work that day.
If the impeachment managers want to call witnesses, the Senate will hold a vote to determine whether they will be allowed to do so.
But if no witnesses are called, it’s possible the impeachment trial could wrap up by Sunday or Monday, given that the president’s defense team is not expected to use all of its 16 hours to present its case.
Joe Biden will participate in a CNN town hall on the coronavirus pandemic when he visits Milwaukee, Wisconsin, next week, the network announced.
The White House announced earlier this morning that Biden would visit Wisconsin next Tuesday, marking the president’s first official trip since taking office.
CNN has more details on the event:
The ‘CNN Presidential Town Hall with Joe Biden’ will air live from the Pabst Theater on February 16 at 8 p.m. ET, the network announced Tuesday. …
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper will moderate the town hall. A CNN spokesperson said an invitation-only, socially distanced audience will be present and will follow Wisconsin’s guidance and regulations to ensure a safe event.
The President is expected to field questions on a number of issues as his administration, lawmakers and business leaders debate how to defeat the coronavirus, while trying to bring a sense of normalcy back to people’s lives.
The event comes as Biden and congressional Democratic leaders attempt to pass the president’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.
The impeachment managers also dismissed arguments from Donald Trump’s defense team that the former president’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud, which incited the January 6 insurrection, were protected by the First Amendment.
“Accepting President Trump’s argument would mean that Congress could not impeach a President who burned an American flag on national television, or who spoke at a Ku Klux Klan rally in a white hood, or who wore a swastika while leading a march through a Jewish neighborhood—all of which is expression protected by the First Amendment but would obviously be grounds for impeachment,” the managers wrote in their brief.
“The First Amendment does not immunize President Trump from impeachment or limit the Senate’s power to protect the Nation from an unfit leader.”
The managers then go on to note the criminal activity seen during the Capitol insurrection, which resulted in five deaths. The managers write, “And even assuming the First Amendment applied, it would certainly not protect President Trump’s speech on January 6, which incited lawless action.”
In their new legal brief, the House impeachment managers argued an acquittal for Donald Trump would set a dangerous precedent for the future of American democracy.
“There can be no doubt that President Trump is singularly responsible for inciting the violent insurrection that followed his speech,” the managers said of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
“The Framers of our Constitution designed the impeachment power to protect against a President who would subvert our democracy to keep himself in power. … President Trump’s conduct on January 6 was the paradigm of an impeachable offense.”
The House impeachment managers have filed a reply to the pre-trial brief from Donald Trump’s legal team, which defended the former president’s actions on January 6 and argued the Senate did not have jurisdiction to hold this impeachment trial.
“President Trump’s pre-trial brief confirms that he has no good defense of his incitement of an insurrection against the Nation he swore an oath to protect,” the managers wrote.
“President Trump now studiously ignores all that preceded his speech and provided meaning and context to his statements, asking the Senate to do the same and focus only on a handful of his remarks in isolation.”
The managers argued the former president’s defense team is turning to process complaints about the constitutionality of the trial because his actions on January 6 are indefensible.
“Because President Trump’s guilt is obvious, he seeks to evade responsibility for inciting the January 6 insurrection by arguing that the Senate lacks jurisdiction to convict officials after they leave office,” the managers wrote.
“President Trump’s jurisdictional argument is both wrong as a matter of constitutional law and dangerous as a matter of Senate practice. It would leave the Senate powerless to hold Presidents accountable for misconduct committed near the end of their terms.”
Senator Bernie Sanders is expected to support the nomination of Neera Tanden to lead the office of management and budget, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reports:
To win Senate approval, Ms. Tanden’s nomination will need 51 votes. Democrats control 50 seats in the chamber and Vice President Kamala Harris can break a tie. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats, is expected to support her nomination, despite past disagreements with Ms. Tanden, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
Sanders and Tanden have long had a tense relationship, dating back to Tanden’s loyal support of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.
In 2019, Sanders wrote a letter to the Center for American Progress, which Tanden leads, accusing her of “maligning my staff and supporters and belittling progressive ideas”.
Some of Sanders’ allies expressed disappointment about Tanden’s nomination, but the senator has apparently decided to put aside any of his own concerns and support her confirmation.
Given the very narrow Democratic majority in the Senate and widespread Republican opposition to Tanden, Democrats need every vote to get her nomination across the finish line.
