Brilliantly played, @GretaThunberg. 👏#howitstartedhowitsgoing #Inauguration2021
#climatecrisis #climateaction pic.twitter.com/iMob35dQFG

— Rebecca Woodward (@rwclimate) January 20, 2021

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/534971-biden-expected-to-ask-surgeon-general-to-resign-after-inauguration-ceremony

President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday will reportedly ask for the resignation of U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams shortly after he takes office at noon.

The Washington Post reported that Biden will request Adams’s resignation as one of his first acts as president; he previously announced in December that Vivek Murthy would return to the role under his administration.

Adams’s resignation will represent a break from the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, the Post reported. Murthy was previously fired by President Trump in the spring of 2017.

Biden is set to name an acting surgeon general within hours, according to the Post, though the position will reportedly not go to Deputy Surgeon General Erica Schwartz, who has said she will retire after being passed over. A request for comment from Biden’s transition team was not immediately returned.

The president-elect’s efforts to break with his predecessor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic comes as the U.S. recently passed 400,000 deaths nationwide from the virus, and experts have warned that cases will reach their peak in the coming weeks.

Biden’s incoming Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chief, Rochelle Walensky, predicted Sunday that the U.S. could see another 100,000 deaths before the end of February.

https://morningconsult.com/2021/01/19/biden-inauguration-housing-polling/

With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the household budgets of many Americans, housing stability will be one of the biggest economic issues facing the Biden administration.

President-elect Joe Biden made housing a key priority in his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package released Thursday, asking lawmakers to approve $25 billion in rental assistance on top of the $25 billion included in the package lawmakers passed last month, and another $5 billion put toward those experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Biden is also asking Congress to extend the eviction and foreclosure moratoriums until Sept. 30, from its current date at the end of the month.

According to a new Morning Consult poll, many in the country — especially renters — have alarmingly insecure housing plans if they lost their current residence.

A bunch of interesting interviews up at Democracynow.

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/19/rashida_tlaib_trump_biden_transition

As President-elect Joe Biden prepares for his inauguration on Wednesday, he has outlined sweeping plans for his first days in office to address the raging coronavirus pandemic and roll back key parts of Donald Trump’s agenda, including on immigration, the climate crisis and more. President Trump, meanwhile, leaves office as the only president ever impeached twice, after he encouraged a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. For more on the transition, we speak with Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who says senators must vote to convict Trump after his impeachment in the House. “I hope that there’s an awakening in the Senate, but I’ve been waiting for that awakening to happen for quite a while,” says Tlaib.

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/20/biden_inauguration_waleed_shahid_michael_eric

We look at the path forward for the Biden-Harris administration and the role of social movements with political strategist Waleed Shahid and author and analyst Michael Eric Dyson. Shahid, spokesperson for the progressive political action committee Justice Democrats, says Biden could be “one of the most transformative presidents” in U.S. history if he acts boldly. “But it will take an immense amount of pressure on Joe Biden, on the political system, on the political class for him to get there,” says Shahid.

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/20/michael_eric_dyson_trump_presidency

As Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are inaugurated and the Trump presidency comes to an end, we look back at his regime with author and analyst Michael Eric Dyson. “The Trump presidency has been an unmitigated disaster,” Dyson says. His “direct assault” on democratic processes resulted in a “neofascist presidency that attempted to undermine the very legitimacy of the democracy that he was put in office to uphold.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/20/avril_haines_biden_nominee_john_kiriakou

Avril Haines, Biden’s nominee for director of national intelligence, began her confirmation hearing Tuesday. She was President Obama’s top lawyer on the National Security Council from 2010 to 2013 and CIA deputy director from 2013 to 2015, where she authorized using drone strikes to carry out targeted extrajudicial assassinations. “We know that in almost all cases that she said it was legal to put these names on the kill list, and people were subsequently killed by drone, including American citizens,” says CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed the Bush-era torture program and was the only official jailed in connection to it. He also discusses Haines’s handling of CIA agents who illegally hacked the computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee to thwart its investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program that used torture methods like waterboarding.

https://www.democracynow.org/2021/1/19/white_supremacist_police_infiltration_capitol_riot

At least 28 law enforcement officers from across the United States attended the Trump rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6 that led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, with some even boasting on social media about taking part in the riot that left five people dead. BuzzFeed News investigative reporter Albert Samaha says off-duty police officers’ involvement in the insurrection reflects a growing problem of right-wing radicalization in police ranks — a problem Black officers say has gone unaddressed by higher-ups. Samaha says that while “white supremacist ideology in law enforcement is as old as law enforcement in the U.S.” there was a marked change in tone and attitudes among police officers following the 2014 Ferguson uprising against police brutality. He says that Donald Trump’s loud support for police against claims of misconduct and systemic violence gave officers new license to express bigoted and extremist views. “The top came off, and the rhetoric suddenly became acceptable within locker rooms,” he says.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2021/01/trump-presidency-in-review.html

And yet: For all of the mass death and democratic backsliding we’ve suffered these past four years, America is in far better shape than it might have been. Entrusting an authoritarian con man with the world’s most powerful elective office brought the United States catastrophe, but it has also left us with a historic opportunity for democratic renewal.

We are lucky that Donald Trump started no major wars (thanks, in no small part, to Iranian restraint). We’re lucky that Republicans came a few votes short of throwing millions off of Medicaid. We’re lucky that the GOP’s internal divisions on immigration prevented Trump from inscribing his most xenophobic policies into legislative statute, and, thus, that his nativist legacy is almost entirely revocable by executive fiat. Above all, we are lucky that Trump did not win reelection and that the incoming Democratic government will actually have the power to implement reform.

These last points are worth emphasizing. What Trump’s 2020 coalition lacked in size, it nearly made up for in geographic efficiency. Joe Biden’s 4.4-point margin in the popular vote — and narrow victories in historically red Arizona and Georgia — has obscured just how close the president came to winning a second term. In November, Biden won the tipping-point state of Wisconsin by 0.6 percent, or a little over 20,000 votes. Which means that, had the Democrat won the national vote by “only” 3.7 points, Trump quite likely would have won reelection.

That Biden will actually be able to implement a legislative agenda is even more fortuitous. Thanks to Trump’s consolidation of the white rural vote, the median U.S. state is now roughly 6.6 percent more Republican than the nation as a whole, which gives the GOP a massive advantage in the battle for Senate control. It took one of the largest midterm landslides in history to keep Democrats in contention for the upper chamber this year. In 2018, the party won the House popular vote by over 8 percent, yet lost seats in the Senate, while longtime red-state incumbents like Joe Manchin and Jon Tester barely eked out reelection on the strength of the national environment. Even after salvaging these seats in hostile territory, it took a minor miracle for the party to secure a bare majority in 2020: Had David Perdue received 0.3 percent more votes against Jon Ossoff in November, he would have won more than 50 percent of the vote and thereby averted the runoff that his Democratic challenger won in Georgia earlier this month.

Of course, getting lucky often takes hard work. The Democrats’ triumphs in November 2018 and January 2021 were authored by diligent organizers who sacrificed their nights and weekends to voter-registration drives and to the humbler efforts of Democratic voters who did their civic duty in extraordinary numbers.

We cannot count on remaining so fortunate in the future.

The GOP controls more states than Democrats do and thus will be able to engineer a heavily gerrymandered House map following the 2020 census. According to Democratic pollster David Shor’s projections, the GOP’s advantage in the Electoral College is likely to grow even steeper by 2024. If Democrats do not use their tenuous grip on power to rebalance this playing field — by making our electoral institutions more small-d democratic — they will clear the way for a coalition of would-be oligarchs and QAnon LARPers to reconquer the capital by 2024.

The package of electoral reforms that Democrats introduced this week — which includes a variety of measures that would facilitate higher levels of voter registration, make it easier for voters to cast ballots, and combat partisan-gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement — is a fine start. But Democrats must also provide statehood to D.C., Puerto Rico, and any other U.S. territory that desires it, so as to mitigate the underrepresentation of nonwhite voters in the Senate. The point of these reforms is not to bar the GOP from power; even if Democrats admit Puerto Rico and D.C. to the union, Republicans will retain a structural advantage in the upper chamber. Rather, the point is to make it harder for the Republican Party to cater to a reactionary minority of the U.S. public and still compete in national elections.

But Joe Biden will not be able to bring majority rule to the United States if his party does not first bring it to the U.S. Senate. Mitch McConnell is currently pushing for Democrats to commit to maintaining the legislative filibuster, a malign institution that effectively establishes a 60-vote threshold for all major, non-budgetary legislation. This would effectively prevent the Democratic Party from passing any democracy reforms. There are not ten Republican votes in the Senate for making the GOP less electorally competitive for the sake of making the U.S. government more majoritarian.

Democrats must not make such a concession. Given the party’s razor-thin margins in both chambers, the GOP’s structural advantages, and the tendency of out-of-power parties to overperform in midterms, Democrats are vastly more likely to lose control of Congress than win a larger Senate majority in 2022. The party’s leadership may not have the leverage to make Joe Manchin, Jon Tester, Kyrsten Sinema, or other Senate moderates do anything they don’t wish to. But Chuck Schumer must at least make every member of his caucus aware of the stakes of inaction. Perhaps moderates can be made comfortable with eroding the filibuster instead of outright ending it. Maybe a special exception can be made for democracy-expanding measures, akin to the Byrd rule’s exemption for budget-reconciliation bills. Or maybe Democrats can simply restore the talking filibuster — which is to say, revive rather than repeal Senate tradition — by requiring those who wish to obstruct legislation to speak continuously from the Senate floor. Regardless, if the party does not find some way of using its fortuitous trifecta to fortify U.S. democracy against the threat of minority rule, it will squander the Trump presidency’s silver linings.

The past four years could be remembered as our republic’s rock bottom — the period when our polity debased itself too thoroughly to deny that it had a problem. Or it could be a farcical preview of the illiberal right’s tragic triumph. Whether the Trump presidency will be the end of a dark chapter in American history or the beginning of one is something that Senate Democrats have a great deal of power to decide. They must not leave our democracy’s future up to chance.

https://prospect.org/politics/that-old-time-southern-populism-georgia-democratic-victory/

The combination of organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, Black and white, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket. The Biden win is what can happen when you have a historically unpopular opponent riling up the base. The Ossoff and Warnock wins are more sustainable, less reliant on the opponent. And they signal a winning formula for a new Southern populism, one that braids together the region’s rich diversity with a wildly popular economic message. Until now, Democrats had barely wrapped their hands around the first. But after years of unsuccessfully chasing white moderates across the South, the Georgia runoffs uncorked a model for competing.

It’s one that has been there all along.

Go for it

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-new-patriot-party_n_6007b77cc5b6ffcab968bb5d

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering the launch of his own political party after leaving office on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The newspaper said it’s not clear how serious he is about competing with the GOP under his own banner, but that he’s already picked out a name: The Patriot Party.

The potential for a new party comes as Trump grows unhappy with Republican leaders, who he feels abandoned him after his supporters assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6 when Congress met to certify the 2020 election results.