POLITICO NIGHTLY: The democracy crisis Biden didn’t address

 

BY RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Nick Taylor-Vaisey President Joe Biden speaks to a crowd at the Atlanta University Center Consortium. | Megan Varner/Getty Images STOPPING THE NEXT INSURRECTION — President Joe Biden abandoned his inclinations toward bipartisanship today, blasting Republicans in an Atlanta speech for a raft of new GOP led state voting laws. For the first time, he backed the idea of allowing voting rights legislation to pass with a simple Senate majority rather than a filibuster-proof 60 bipartisan votes. “This is the moment to defend our democracy,” Biden said today. Yet even some liberal-leaning election law experts say Biden’s focus on voting rights obscures a larger threat to U.S. election integrity in the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential contest: The idea that a future election loser could subvert the country’s electoral machinery to take power — in other words, the next insurrection might be successful. “It’s the primary thing,” Richard Pildes, an election law expert at New York University, told Nightly. Pildes and Ned Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, joined two conservative scholars in an op-ed to argue for the urgency of reforming the Electoral Count Act, a 150-year-old law that contains the rules for how Congress certifies a presidential election. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has expressed interest in reforming the law. Biden didn’t mention the Electoral Count Act in his speech today. Biden picked the wrong moment to discard bipartisanship, Foley told Nightly today. “It was essential, in my judgment, to make common cause with every possible Republican,” Foley said. In his view, the country’s democracy is in crisis, one that requires Democrats to reach out to Republicans willing to buck former President Donald Trump — not give them a reason to unite against Democrats. Voting rights, at the moment, has become shorthand for a vast array of issues that have to do with voting and elections — everything from how congressional and statehouse districts get drawn to how elections are carried out to who is eligible to vote. Those issues are important, Foley said — he called Georgia’s new limits on political organizations giving people waiting in a poll line food and water “ugly and obnoxious” — but he sees them as less dire than the threat that Trump or a future presidential loser could successfully overturn the will of the voters. Foley and Pildes propose to revise the Electoral Count Act to bar Congress from invalidating a state’s electoral votes, unless a legislature sends competing slates of electors — which hasn’t happened since 1876. “As long as the state itself has settled on who won that state through policies established in advance of the election, Congress has no role other than to accept those as being the state’s electoral vote,” they wrote in the Washington Post with Michael W. McConnell and Bradley Smith. Biden and the Democrats are instead pushing forward with two highly partisan bills that may not have even simple majorities to pass. And that don’t address the law that the Capitol rioters hoped to exploit to keep Trump in office. It’s a strategy that could backfire, Foley said, if it further drags election law into partisan, winner-take-all territory. Democrats are crying foul on state Republican election measures. In his speech today, Biden compared some of these laws to the kind of state control imposed by totalitarian regimes. And the feeling that the game is rigged is shared by the GOP: The vast majority of Republicans already believe Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. Democrats don’t need to choose between their voting bills and Electoral Count Act reform, Pildes said, but he worries about this pervasive distrust in elections from every side right now. “That is a dangerous situation for any democracy,” Pildes said. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @RenuRayasam.   BECOME A GLOBAL INSIDER: The world is more connected than ever. It has never been more essential to identify, unpack and analyze important news, trends and decisions shaping our future — and we’ve got you covered! Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Global Insider author Ryan Heath navigates the global news maze and connects you to power players and events changing our world. Don’t miss out on this influential global community. Subscribe now.     WHAT'D I MISS? — Biden health team weighs new mask distribution plan: Biden administration health officials are weighing whether to offer high quality masks, which could include KN95 or N95s, to all Americans , as the Omicron variant fuels a record surge of Covid-19, three people with knowledge of the deliberations told POLITICO. The internal discussions come amid growing calls for the government to make the more protective masks more easily accessible, and as evidence mounts that the cloth masks many have relied on throughout the pandemic are less effective at protecting against the Omicron variant. — Powell’s warning to Congress: Inflation a ‘severe threat’ to jobs: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell had a stark warning today for U.S. senators who will decide whether he gets a second term: Surging prices pose a threat to the job market. He vowed to get them under control. That stance could put him at odds with some Democratic lawmakers, who have pressed the Fed to continue its two-year effort to boost the economy until the benefits of the recovery can be felt by most workers. — FAA briefly halted West Coast flights amid North Korean missile scare: A North Korean missile launch prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to ground flights for a short time at some West Coast airports Monday out of an abundance of caution. The temporary “ground stop” — an order, most often used during bad weather, that curtails landings at certain airports — prompted a brief mystery about what the threat was that shuttered landings for at least some airports on the West Coast. — Senators grill feds over Jan. 6 riot probe: Democratic senators grilled top Justice Department and FBI officials today for declining, so far, to declare Jan. 6 rioters’ crimes as “domestic terrorism” as judges sentence those involved for their crimes. The questions came during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Justice Department’s response to the storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Democrats challenged prosecutors for not seeking the lengthier, terrorism-related sentences related to the insurrection, while Republicans often steered the discussion away from the Jan. 6 attack altogether. — Florida might ban abortions after 15 weeks: State lawmakers in Florida are planning to pass legislation this year that would drastically limit how and when people can access abortions, a move sure to inflame growing tensions nationally over conservative efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade . Republicans who control the Florida Legislature have spent months crafting the proposal after Texas lawmakers in May banned all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and opened up abortion providers to lawsuits from private individuals. They settled on a less extreme but still restrictive measure that will anger Democrats and abortion rights advocates across the country: a ban on abortion after 15 weeks except if two doctors agree a fetus is suffering from a fatal abnormality. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. Existing Florida law restricts abortions after 24 weeks.   STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today.     THE GLOBAL FIGHT Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau receives his Covid-19 vaccine booster shot at a pharmacy in Ottawa. | Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP CANADIAN INITIATIVE, LESS WORTHWHILE THAN PROJECTED — Ottawa Playbook author Nick Taylor-Vaisey writes: Canada has talked a big game on helping to vaccinate the world against Covid. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced C$440 million in Sept. 2020 for the global COVAX facility — half of which would pay for doses headed to low- and middle-income countries. The rest of that money would secure up to 15 million doses for Canadian arms. That promised investment eventually grew to C$545 million. Ottawa pledged millions in surplus doses to other countries that desperately needed them. International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan’s orders are to donate 200 million doses by the end of 2022. But the talk has not been matched with action. The latest figures reveal a relative pittance in donations. As of Dec. 21, Canada had sent fewer than 12 million COVAX-funded shots to 17 countries, and shipped more than 750,000 surplus AstraZeneca doses to six others. Rwanda received the most recent shipment: 477,680 doses of Moderna on Dec. 21. As Omicron’s rapid spread has forced Canadian provinces to quickly ramp up booster shot campaigns, one sentence from Trudeau’s 2020 announcement stands out: “Protecting Canadians from Covid-19 is priority number one, and the first foundation of the Government of Canada’s plan for a stronger and more resilient Canada.” Every government’s most important job is protecting its people. But Canada’s federal procurement department has secured six vaccines for every Canadian, the most in the world per capita. Canada’s vaccination rates are among the highest in the world. As Omicron silently infects thousands of people a day, the nation appears as hungry for boosters as it was for first and second shots. On Dec. 1, only 3.4 percent of the population had received a third shot. Monday’s total was 26.6 percent. Everybody knows that vaccination rates in most of the developing world badly lag Canada’s numbers. Trudeau knows vaccine nationalism will prolong the global crisis. “We cannot beat this virus in Canada unless we end it everywhere,” he said back in September 2020. Ottawa, however, is loath to risk damaging fragile relationships with vaccine manufacturers by waiving the patent on Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine using a rarely employed federal measure. And Trudeau also knows how politics work back home. Canadians fancy themselves a generous society when a crisis strikes somewhere far away. But they want their boosters, and they want them now. The political price of giving short shrift to the rest of the world pales in comparison to the upheaval caused by a cupboard left bare at home. AROUND THE WORLD WHO PUMPS ENDEMIC BRAKES — The World Health Organization told governments today it was too early to predict that the Covid-19 pandemic will burn itself out, as it warned that more than half of people in Europe would catch the disease over the next two months, Sarah-Taïssir Bencharif writes. With the highly contagious Omicron strain unleashing “a new west-to-east tidal wave sweeping across the region,” hospitalizations can be expected to rise, WHO Europe chief Hans Kluge told a press conference. “It is challenging health systems and service delivery in many countries where Omicron has spread at speed, and threatens to overwhelm in many more,” said Kluge. The intervention by the global health body came after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez signaled a policy shift away from counting cases and quarantining, toward a risk-based approach typical of managing outbreaks of diseases like influenza that seeks to protect the most vulnerable. NIGHTLY NUMBER About 17 hours The amount of time between Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot announcing she and the Chicago Teachers Union ended a tense standoff over the safety of children and staff returning to school amid the Omicron surge, and Lightfoot announcing she had tested positive for Covid-19. PARTING WORDS Sen. Roger Marshall presents a display of the yearly pay received by Anthony Fauci at a Senate HELP hearing on Capitol Hill. | Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images ‘WHAT A MORON’ — Anthony Fauci called Sen. Roger Marshall a “moron” at the end of a contentious question-and-answer exchange focused on whether the financial disclosure information of the White House’s top public medical adviser is available to the public. Marshall (R-Kan.) began his interrogation into Fauci’s finances by noting the doctor’s salary, $434,000, and the multibillion-dollar budget for federal research grants that he oversees as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “As the highest-paid employee in the entire federal government, would you be willing to submit to Congress and the public a financial disclosure that includes your past and current investments?” Marshall asked. “After all, your colleague [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle] Walensky and every member of Congress submits a financial disclosure that includes their investments.” Fauci countered Marshall’s claim, stating that his investments and financial information were already “public knowledge,” and had been for more than 30 years. “All you have to do is ask for it,” Fauci said. “You’re so misinformed, it’s extraordinary.”   Follow us on Twitter Chris Suellentrop @suellentrop Tyler Weyant @tweyant Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam Myah Ward @myahward   FOLLOW US

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