https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bidens-secretary-of-state-pick-praised-by-bernie-sanders-advisers

Two advisers close to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have taken to Twitter to praise President-elect Joe Biden’s secretary of state pick, Antony Blinken, following the administration’s official announcement on Monday.

“Solid choice,” Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir tweeted. “Leaders around the world will assume that when Blinken speaks, he speaks for Biden.”

Sanders’ foreign policy advisor for the campaign, Matt Duss, added Blinken “has the strong confidence of the president elect and the knowledge and experience for the important work of rebuilding US diplomacy.”

“It will also be a new a great thing to have a top diplomat who has regularly engaged with progressive grassroots,” Duss added.

Progressive lawmakers from “The Squad” also reacted to Blinken’s appointment.

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., did not praise Blinken directly, but said Biden’s cabinet picks are “a capable team that has a one-in-a-generation opportunity to reorient our foreign policy toward justice.”

Meanwhile, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., used the announcement to blast current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent statement that the U.S. is “committed to countering the Global [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] Campaign as a manifestation of anti-Semitism.”

“So long as [Blinken] doesn’t suppress my First Amendment right to speak out against [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s racist and inhumane policies, she wrote in response to Shakir. “The Palenstinian people deserve equality and justice.”

Despite the positive reception, Blinken has also faced criticism for his early support for the Iraq War and consulting firm West Exec Advisors.

Sanders himself has not publicly commented on the appointment.

https://prospect.org/coronavirus/unsanitized-almost-nothing-states-cities-vaccine-distribution/

The day that the COVID-19 vaccines are approved for emergency use by the FDA—likely December 11, based on the timing of their meetings—will be a great triumph for science and public investment. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, for the first time based on messenger RNA, herald a new scientific breakthrough that could unlock a host of new therapies and palliatives. (AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which announced some positive results today, could also be approved in short order.) And the rapid timing from discovery of the virus to a vaccine, pushed along by public dollars and guarantees, should also become a model, though if we collaborated with the world instead of going it alone we would have dispensed the vaccine even faster and saved a lot of lives.

But these innovations, which will have wide-ranging effects into the future, collide with the near-term block and tackle of how you get a drug manufactured, stored, and shipped to every corner of the globe, to be administered, twice, to virtually everyone on the planet. At some point the science gives way to a logistics operation on a scale nobody has ever seen before. Compounding this difficulty is the fact that Joe Biden’s transition has no access to the vaccine data and is frozen out from the decision-making process.

The infrastructure we currently have for vaccine distribution is by definition weak, because the scale of what’s needed with this is so massive. The Vaccine for Children program provides something like 3 million shots a year. We need 600 million in a matter of a few months, just for the U.S. And the big, glaring problem is that, in our federal system, the primary role in actually getting the vaccine delivered to people goes to states and localities. And incredibly, there’s practically no money for this purpose right now.

Here is how this has been explained to me. There are 64 “jurisdictional immunization programs,” which includes 50 states, D.C., eight U.S. territories, and five large cities. They ask for an allocation and the government, through Operation Warp Speed, will fill that. But at that point it’s up to the jurisdictions to determine vaccination sites, transport the vaccine to those locations, and make sure there’s enough demand at each particular site so the vaccine doesn’t go to waste. Pfizer’s vaccine in particular has a short shelf life, just five days in a refrigerator, so it has to get out immediately once it reaches the last leg of the journey.

There’s also prioritization for who gets the initial supply of shots, staffing for how administers them and how the health system can integrate it, and just a mountain of other details. We already know about the freezers; many locations just don’t have this capability.

So how much money has been allocated for this, the largest logistical project in the history of mankind? $200 million. That’s all the jurisdictions have received thus far. Biden has promised $25 billion for vaccine distribution, but that’s tied up in the moribund stimulus talks. There may be some smart person devising some way to unlock emergency funding along the lines of what Trump did on the border wall, but at the moment, you need Congress to issue some dollars. “[W]e absolutely do not have enough to pull this off successfully,” said the state health officer of Mississippi to the New York Times.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/11/24/shameful-and-concerning-he-even-being-considered-says-aoc-rahm-emanuel-floated-role

Given his reputation as an “egomaniac,” some raised the possibility that the swirling rumors about a potential cabinet role for Emanuel are coming from the former Chicago mayor himself, who did not hesitate to viciously attack denigrate progressives during his tenure as Obama’s chief of staff.

“I strongly suspect that Rahm is generating most of this copy himself, and team Biden is happy to have Rahm hanging out there so his other picks get less scrutiny,” tweeted The American Prospect’s David Dayen.

But no matter the source of the rumors and media reports, progressives are using their growing numbers in Congress to attempt to exert influence over Biden’s cabinet picks and establish that they will not quietly fall in line for nominees who are hostile to their popular policy agenda.

“Imagine thinking it’s ‘divisive’ to want someone other than the guy who covered up a murder to lead a department or agency,” said Rep.-elect Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.).

https://www.businessinsider.com/eu-thanks-joe-biden-support-brexit-negotiations-with-uk-2020-11?utm_source=reddit.com

The EU has thanked President-elect Joe Biden for his support after he warned Boris Johnson not to undermine the Good Friday Agreement in pursuit of a favourable Brexit deal.

Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, ‘thanked the President-elect for his clear support of the Withdrawal Agreement the EU concluded with the UK last year.’

It came after Biden publicly warned Boris Johnson in October that a UK-US trade deal was off the table if Boris Johnson undermined the Good Friday Agreement.

The EU has thanked President-elect Joe Biden for his support after he warned Boris Johnson against his plans to rip up parts of his Brexit deal with Europe.

Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, spoke with Biden by phone on Monday, according to a readout provided by the EU. During the phone call, Michel “thanked the President-elect for his clear support of the Withdrawal Agreement the EU concluded with the UK last year.”

“This agreement preserves peace and stability in Ireland and fully respects the Good Friday Agreement,” the readout added.

The statement came after Johnson announced a plan to pass a piece of legislation, called the Internal Market Bill, which would disapply some parts of the provisional Brexit deal struck between the UK and the EU last year. Parts of the Internal Market Bill, which Johnson is still trying to push through parliament, relate to the passage of goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

Ministers admitted the plan would break international law because it would involve breaking an international treaty. Biden’s tweet in October echoed the concerns of other senior Democrats, who warned that it could involve breaking the Good Friday Agreement, despite Downing Street’s insistence that it would not.

However, Biden, who spoke to Johnson for the first time earlier this month, used his call to remind Johnson twice of his commitments to Brexit in relation to Northern Ireland, according to reports.

While President Trump was an ardent supporter of the UK’s departure from the EU, Biden was firmly opposed to the idea. Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state pick, last year called Brexit a “total mess.”

The president-elect in October also publicly warned Boris Johnson in October not to let the Good Friday Agreement become “a casualty of Brexit.” He also said that a UK-US trade deal was off the table if the UK government undermined the Good Friday Agreement.

https://theintercept.com/2020/11/24/congress-override-supreme-court/

What makes Ledbetter so unusual is that Democrats have not similarly fought equally absurd yet consequential rulings from the Supreme Court, instead throwing their hands up in despair at the unfairness of a particular decision and then moving on.

But a joint review of dozens of Supreme Court cases by The Intercept and the American Prospect finds dozens of statutory rulings similar to Ledbetter’s that Congress could overturn simply by tweaking the statute to remove whatever ambiguity the court claimed to find in its text. Even where the court has ruled on constitutional grounds, there is often much room left to legislate the boundaries, just as conservatives have done in relation to Roe v. Wade and abortion restrictions. From salvaging the Voting Rights Act gutted by Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 to protecting workers’ free speech rights on the job or safeguarding reproductive rights, the list of cases awaiting a creative Congress runs long.

Overrides can be passed on an individual basis, as part of larger omnibus bills, or even tacked on to unrelated appropriations or debt ceiling bills. Even the Affordable Care Act, which is currently under judicial review yet again, could be rescued from the court’s clutches with a simple legislative tweak. Most of the legislation necessary to overturn these decisions is short: just a few lines to reinforce congressional intent in a way that the judiciary cannot distort it.

A demonstrator raises his fist outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Nov. 10, 2020.A demonstrator raises their fist outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 10, 2020. Photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Bloomberg via Getty Images
These statutory overrides offer a road map for progressives left paralyzed by the court’s new composition, with the installation of Amy Coney Barrett as a sixth conservative justice. Congress can place an important and ever-needed check from a co-equal branch on an increasingly conservative judiciary, which has not shied from defanging legislation, especially regulatory law. Just as the court sets the boundaries of congressional intent, Congress can move those boundaries.

Some observers, like University of California, Irvine law professor Rick Hasen, predict that judicial overrides would likely require near-unified control of Congress and the presidency, like Democrats had in 2009 when they passed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. In other words, whether Democrats retake the Senate following two Georgia runoffs in January could have a major impact on their ability to get judicial overrides through the legislative grinder, especially as many areas of once bipartisan lawmaking, particularly civil rights, have grown more polarized.