Joe Biden to set out his foreign policy goals in state department speech – live

Yesterday the Republican caucus opted to take no action against Marjorie Taylor Greene, so that hasn’t headed off a vote today to try and throw her off from her committee appointments. Fox News’ Chad Pergram expects a preliminary debate at midday (that’s 5pm if, like me, you are in London).

Here’s the text of H. Res. 72 which calls for “Removing a certain Member from certain standing committees of the House of Representatives”.

One of the reasons behind president Joe Biden picking the state department as a very early stop-off during his presidency is to reassure a department that had a torrid time during the Trump era. As CNN remind us in a preview piece this morning:

The content and the symbolism of his appearance is meant to convey unmistakable signals: that this administration values diplomacy and its diplomats, it will center its foreign policy around cooperation with allies, and it will work to restore its reputation as a country that leads by example.

State department expertise was oftentimes shirked and viewed with suspicion by a President who once called the agency “the Deep State Department.”

Donald Trump visited the department just once in his four years in office for a ceremonial event. He repeatedly and publicly disparaged one of its most well-respected diplomats, Marie Yovanovitch, during the course of his first impeachment. His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, failed to publicly or robustly defend her, deepening the decline in morale at Foggy Bottom.

CNN state that the incoming secretary of state wishes to change all that:

Antony Blinken pledged to have the backs of his workforce on his first full day as secretary of state, a commitment that US diplomats said was necessary after years of being denigrated. However, they have also said that actions will speak louder than words and it will take time to see exactly how the Biden administration lives up to its promises and elevates the diplomatic corps.

Read more here: CNN – Biden to signal commitment to US diplomats and allies with state department visit

Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is expected to be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, will introduce today a bill to strengthen antitrust enforcers’ ability to stop mergers, reports Diane Bartz for Reuters.

The bill would reduce the standard for stopping mergers, from saying that the government had to prove that a deal would “substantially lessen competition” to showing that it would “create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition.”

It comes after a year in which federal and state governments filed big antitrust lawsuits against Alphabet’s Google and Facebook and sued to block big mergers, like Visa’s plan to buy fintech company Plaid.

One provision in the bill would give significantly more funds to the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, which divide up the work of enforcement.

The bill would increase authorizations to each agency by $300 million, bringing the FTC to $651 million and the Justice’s division to $484.5 million.

“What do I think we can immediately do, that matters the most, is increasing the resources. They can’t take a trillion dollar company on with Band-Aids and duct tape,” Klobuchar said, referring to the lawsuits against Google and Facebook.

But Klobuchar is not worried just about big tech, but also about communications, agriculture and drug prices, she said. The bill is “broader because we have a monopoly problem in our country,” she said.

The bill identifies several types of mergers – like deals valued at more than $5 billion or when a company buys a disruptive rival – where the burden of proof would shift so that the merging companies would have to show that the merger was legal under antitrust law.

Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer, one of just 10 Republicans who voted to impeach then-president Donald Trump over the deadly attack on the Capitol, defended his decision while taking pointed criticism from voters last night.

“What we witnessed at the Capitol the attempted insurrection, the involvement of a sitting American president propagating the falsehoods that led up to that required a significant response,” he said during his first town hall, a virtual event that 400-plus people watched on Zoom or Facebook, reports David Eggert for the Associated Press. The lawmaker spoke from his office in Washington, DC.

Two constituents who asked questions said they were deeply disappointed with Meijer, a 33-year-old Iraq War veteran who represents the 3rd District in western Michigan.

“Why aren’t you doing what your constituents wanted you to do?” said Cindy Witke. “I went against people who said not to vote for you because I believed in you. I’ve lost that belief.”

Nancy Eardley accused Meijer, the only first-term legislator to back impeachment on 13 January, of betraying the district within two weeks of taking office.

“I don’t know that there’s really much you can say that will ever change my mind and not work toward primarying you out after two years,” she said, claiming no court looked at evidence of election fraud.

There was not widespread fraud, as was confirmed by a range of voting officials and by former Attorney General William Barr, a Trump appointee.

Meijer said Trump told “two fundamental lies” after losing to Democrat Joe Biden, falsely stating that the election had been stolen and that 6 January, the day Congress counted electoral votes, was a chance to “stop the steal.”

Trump, who had exhorted his supporters to “fight like hell” shortly before they swarmed the Capitol, took close to 2 1/2 hours to issue a video urging them to go home despite the riot having turned deadly, Meijer said.

“This was a moment when we needed leadership and the president, in my view, did not show that,” he said.

One participant, Kim Reeder, thanked Meijer for his vote. “I didn’t vote for you, but right now I’m sure glad you’re my representative,” she said.

At least one Republican has already vowed to challenge Meijer in the 2022 primary: Tom Norton, who finished third to Meijer in a five-way primary last year.

Meijer in November won the open, longtime GOP-held seat by nearly 6 percentage points over a Democrat, a larger margin than Trump’s 3-point victory there.

Meijer acknowledged that a majority of Republicans in his district, “maybe a strong majority,” are upset with his impeachment decision. “That weighed on me. That was one of the reasons why I felt ultimately sickened by having to take this vote,” he said. “How do I balance that immediate feeling with what we need to do as a country, what I feel my party needs to do and where I hope we can go?”

Oliver Milman writes for us today that Joe Biden’s plans to combat climate crisis have – predictably – provoked a GOP backlash:

Republican lawmakers in Congress have denounced Biden’s flurry of executive orders on climate and have even introduced legislation to bypass the president and approve the contentious Keystone XL oil pipeline. Republican-led states are also joining the fray with Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who is vowing to use the courts to block Biden’s move to halt oil and gas drilling on public lands. “Texas is going to protect the oil and gas industry from any type of hostile attack launched from Washington DC,” Abbott said.

While some younger, more moderate Republicans want to reform the party’s position on climate, the criticism of Biden has wandered into bizarre territory, such as Texas senator Ted Cruz tweeting that the president has shown he is “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh” by rejoining an international agreement to cut emissions that happened to be signed in Paris. John Kennedy, another Republican senator, mocked Biden’s plan to boost take-up of electric cars by telling Fox News on Tuesday that “my car doesn’t run off fairy dust, it doesn’t run off unicorn urine”.

The Republican onslaught has been amplified and fueled by Fox News, which has aired a string of misleading claims over the Paris agreement and the economic impact of addressing the climate crisis. Much of this has centered upon the Keystone pipeline project, lamenting the loss of 10,000 temporary jobs that don’t actually exist yet. Meanwhile, despite Facebook’s attempt to promote accurate climate science, the platform is still routinely used by conservative entities such as Prager University, a non-profit media company, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to spread dozens of climate disinformation adverts to millions of people.

This range of opposition “is pretty much the standard Republican message to any sort of climate proposals”, said Robert Brulle, an academic at Brown University whose own research has found fossil fuel companies spent $2bn lobbying lawmakers over climate change between 2000 and 2016. “This argument certainly resonates in areas with a large presence of fossil fuel employment.”

It’s also a line of attack the Biden administration has prepared for, with the early salvo of executive orders framed as a job creation opportunity for millions of workers. “Unfortunately workers have been fed a false narrative, they’d been fed the notion that somehow dealing with climate has come at their expense. No, it hasn’t,” said John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, last week. Kerry noted that the solar industry was rapidly adding jobs prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, while the coal industry has entered a steep decline.

Read more of Oliver Milman’s report here: Joe Biden’s plans to combat climate crisis have – predictably – provoked GOP backlash

A Texas county judge has temporarily blocked the state’s efforts to remove Planned Parenthood from Medicaid, report CNN. Caroline Kelly writes:

A slew of Texas Planned Parenthood affiliates asserted in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that the Texas Health and Human Services Commission failed to issue “a proper notice of termination” from the program. The state had promised to remove the groups from the Medicaid program Thursday.

The chief press officer for the Texas Health & Human Services Commission, Christine Mann, declined to comment on the case citing pending litigation.

The impacts of such a shift could be stark. In 2019, Planned Parenthood provided health care to more than 8,000 Medicaid recipients in the state, according to the most recent figures available from the organization.

Texas has long sought to ban Planned Parenthood from the program — though Medicaid funding does not cover abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or when the woman’s life is at risk, due to the Hyde Amendment, which dates back to 1976.

Read more here: CNN – Judge temporarily blocks Planned Parenthood’s ouster from Texas Medicaid program

Sam Baker and Andrew Witherspoon have a relatively upbeat analysis of the coronavirus situation across the US today for Axios. They write:

New coronavirus infections slowed by nearly 16% over the past week, continuing a trend of rapid improvement. The US still has a ton of coronavirus, and there’s still the potential for dark days ahead. But this is progress, and the improvement is significant. If this trend keeps going, the country will be in a far better and safer position as vaccines continue to roll out.

Nationwide, the US is averaging about 139,000 new cases per day — a 16% improvement over last week, which was a 16% improvement over the week before. The number of new hospitalizations was also down last week, by just over 26%. And deaths fell by about 6%, to an average of 3,097 deaths per day.

The US is back at about the same caseload we were experiencing shortly before Thanksgiving. 139,000 cases and 3,000 deaths per day is still a very bad pandemic, but at least the numbers are headed in the right direction.

Read more here: Axios – Coronavirus cases are falling all across the country