The transition to a Biden-Harris administration

President Joe Biden will use the Defense Production Act to boost production of vaccines, testing, and personnel equipment to help ensure the US will have enough vaccines, testing, and protective equipment to withstand the coronavirus pandemic.

The move, part of a slew of executive orders at the start of his administration, will specifically allow government agencies like the State and Defense Departments to use the law to get materials to make more vials, syringes, and more.

On his first day in office Wednesday, President Joe Biden is signing several executive actions aimed at dismantling the Trump administration’s nativist legacy on immigration.

With the stroke of a pen, Biden will be able to halt some of Trump’s most high-profile and controversial immigration policies: the travel ban, construction of the southern border wall, and his attempt to end protections for young undocumented immigrants through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has officially declared China’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang a “genocide” constituting crimes against humanity, making the United States the first country in the world to do so.

The statement, issued on President Trump’s last full day in office, blasts Beijing for atrocities committed by the government against roughly 2 million Uighurs in China’s northwest since 2017, including arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and forced labor.

One of the most remarkable features of President Donald Trump’s presidency has been the consistency of his approval ratings. It seemed that regardless of whatever he said or did, his approval would hover roughly around 40 percent, perhaps ticking up or down a few points depending on the news cycle.

But on his final day in office, it has become apparent that the actions Trump has taken in the final weeks of his presidency — from refusing to concede the election to whipping up supporters who stormed the US Capitol — have caused the president’s support to sink lower than it has at almost any other point.

Now that the Democrats have the Senate, it’s time to get real about eliminating the filibuster — the Senate procedure that creates a de facto 60-vote threshold for most controversial legislation.

The problem is that there are not the needed 50 Democratic senators in favor of abolishing it. The only way any change will happen is if the squeeze is put on resisting senators —making it clear that it is their fault, in concert with Republican senators, that popular parts of the Democratic agenda are blocked. But even with pressure, these Senate centrists aren’t going to vote to “eliminate the filibuster.”

Donald Trump will go down in history as the most American of presidents.

His relentless racism, unearned wealth, despotic greed, and unmitigated bullying — the way he could get away with doing or saying whatever he wanted — has made the 45th president an all-consuming presence in American lives. And for many of Trump’s admirers, these traits make him an enthralling embodiment of white American ideals. His orange mask, the illiteracy reflected in his speech, the unnerving audacity of his inexperience, and his legion of lies made Americans revere or detest him, with no in-between.

A 22-year-old man from Virginia, Guy Berry, was arrested while carrying a handgun, three high-capacity magazines, and 37 rounds of ammunition near the US Capitol on Sunday, becoming the third person detained by police this weekend amid heightened security measures put in place in response to the January 6 insurrection.

According to the Washington Post’s Laura Meckler, Berry’s weapon — a Glock 22 — was visible in a holster; his aunt told the paper, “He’s one of those open-carry people,” and added, “I keep telling him Black men can’t walk around with guns on his hip, but he doesn’t believe me.”

President-elect Joe Biden will start his term on Wednesday with a far higher approval rating than President Donald Trump — but with little support among Republican voters, who remain largely bought into Trump’s election fraud lies.

That’s according to new polls this week from CNN and SSRS, the Washington Post and ABC News, and NBC News.

Despite Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump, the November election was a bit of a letdown for Democrats. The party lost House seats, and Senate Republicans did better than expected, dashing progressives’ dreams of a transformational Biden administration.

Then January 5 happened. Democrats Jon Ossoff’s and Raphael Warnock’s victories in the Georgia runoff elections mean that the Democratic policy wish list has been disinterred — even if the reality of a 50-50 Senate and slimmer Democratic margin in the House may force the party and the president-elect to temper their ambitions.

With the nation still reeling from the January 6 storming of the US Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, law enforcement officials are bracing for something equally, if not more, terrifying: what comes next.

Emboldened by their ability to invade the seat of American government, many rioters and their supporters are plotting a repeat, with multiple rallies and other actions planned between now and President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20. The FBI has warned of armed actions planned at state capitols around the country. Members of Congress have been harassed at airports and are concerned about threats to their homes and families. And lawmakers on Monday were briefed on a plot to encircle the Capitol and prevent Democrats from entering so that Republicans could take over the government, according to HuffPost.

Traditionally, after a presidential election, the Senate spends the period between when new senators are sworn in on January 3 and when the president is sworn in on January 20 holding confirmation hearings on the incoming president’s cabinet. This allows those nominees to be confirmed very swiftly after the president takes office.

Twelve of President Ronald Reagan’s nominees were confirmed in his first two days in office, as were 13 of President Bill Clinton’s nominees, seven of President George W. Bush’s, and nine of President Barack Obama’s. President Donald Trump’s cabinet was confirmed more slowly, but the Senate still respected the tradition of holding confirmation hearings prior to Trump’s inauguration.

The final step in making the results of the 2020 presidential election official — before Inauguration Day itself — takes place Wednesday, January 6, when Congress counts the Electoral College votes and formally confirms Joe Biden’s win.

This usually isn’t a particularly dramatic occasion, since the Electoral College vote count — 306 votes for Biden, 232 for Donald Trump — was finalized when the electors cast their votes in December. But Trump and his allies have hyped up Wednesday’s count as the final showdown in the president’s efforts to overturn Biden’s victory. And there will indeed be some fireworks.

When Joe Biden becomes president on January 20, his administration will gain control of the @POTUS and @WhiteHouse Twitter accounts. But the combined 60 million followers of those accounts may not be going with them.

The transfer has become an issue between Twitter and the Biden transition team, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Biden team wants to keep the followers of those accounts, as was the case for the Obama-Trump transition. Four years ago, and dealing with this issue for the first time, the Obama administration made it a point to make the digital transition as smooth and seamless as possible. This time, Twitter has other ideas.

The political chief of Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy is leaving his post, Recode has learned, which is stirring some speculation that he could take on a new role with his former boss, Kamala Harris.

Mike Troncoso, once a top aide to Harris, is stepping down from his position as the head of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s Justice and Opportunity Initiatives (JOI), CZI confirmed to Recode. The leader of JOI is one of the top positions at the organization that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, founded in 2015. As the head of JOI, Troncoso oversaw one of Silicon Valley’s biggest political advocacy operations that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars pushing for immigration reform, changes to the criminal justice system, and more affordable housing.

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to pick Miguel Cardona, Connecticut’s commissioner of public education, to be his Department of Education secretary, according to multiple sources. With his nomination, Biden will fulfill his promise to select a public school educator to head the department and further his goal of creating the most diverse cabinet in American history.

Cardona began his career in Meriden, Connecticut, as an elementary school teacher who rose quickly to become a school principal and eventually the state’s first Latino commissioner of education. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has urged Biden to nominate Cardona, writing that his “record of accomplishments demonstrates that he is capable and qualified to lead,” as well as noting that as “a Puerto Rican leader, he will bring a valued and diverse voice to the Cabinet.”

On Thursday, the Joe Biden transition team announced that it was asking a number of influential Obama administration officials to return to government — including Tom Vilsack, the only member of Obama’s Cabinet to keep his role for two full terms, who will be renominated for a third term as secretary of agriculture.

Vilsack’s nomination is unusual, to say the least. Cabinet members are rarely asked back to their old posts by subsequent administrations. But precisely because Vilsack has already served as secretary, and so recently, farmers and activists have an extremely strong sense of what kind of secretary he’ll be.

Editor’s note: Brandon Bernard was executed by lethal injection on Thursday for crimes he committed at age 18. This piece was originally published on December 1.

When five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a jogger in New York City’s Central Park in 1989, prominent businessman Donald Trump bought newspaper advertisements calling on New York state to “bring back the death penalty” in the wake of the attack. Little did the country know, Trump’s views on capital punishment then would inform his presidency decades later: In July, the Trump administration reinstated the death penalty at the federal level after a 17-year hiatus.

President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter is under investigation by the Justice Department, Hunter confirmed in a statement issued by the Biden transition Wednesday.

“I learned yesterday for the first time that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs,” the statement reads. “I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors.”

With less than 50 days left in office, President Donald Trump appears to be rushing to implement immigration changes. The Biden administration could unravel many of them — but the latest developments add to what will already be a monumental task of reversing Trump’s nativist policy agenda.

Since the election, the Trump administration has made the citizenship test harder. It’s on track to reach its stated goal of constructing 450 miles of border wall by the end of the year, a physical reminder of Trump’s efforts to keep out asylum seekers and other vulnerable migrants. And on Thursday, it finalized a regulation that would gut the asylum system, going into effect just nine days before President-elect Joe Biden assumes office, unless anticipated legal challenges succeed in blocking it.

Joe Biden is still more than a month away from taking office, but already the basic tasks of his first year in office seem quite clear: He has to end the Covid-19 pandemic, and he has to end the recession and economic fallout from the pandemic.

Most attention on the latter has focused, understandably, on what relief package Biden will be able to pass through Congress. There’s a chance that a bipartisan effort to expand unemployment insurance benefits and state/local government aid will succeed under Trump, but if not Biden will be forced to negotiate a deal with either a Republican Senate or a 50-50 one with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking ties.

He’s a historic pick, but not the only historic option available. He’s qualified, but not easily confirmable under federal law. And he’s experienced, but maybe not in the right way.

Those are the controversies swirling around President-elect Joe Biden’s selection of retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin for defense secretary. Biden promised to form a more diverse Cabinet that “looks like America,” and if confirmed, Austin would be the first Black person to lead the Pentagon.

In 2014, Janet Yellen became the first woman to be named chair of the Federal Reserve. Six years later, she is poised to become the first woman treasury secretary of the United States.

On Monday, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he intends to nominate Yellen, 74, to head the Treasury Department; he also announced his picks for a number of other key members of his economic team. The Yellen choice was widely reported last week.

President-elect Joe Biden has started selecting core members of his foreign policy and national security team, revealing a slate of experienced — if not all that surprising — Cabinet picks with the goal of returning some stability and credibility to America’s relationship with the rest of the world.

“It’s a team that will keep our country and our people safe and secure,” Biden said Tuesday, introducing his nominees. “And it’s a team that reflects the fact that America is back.”

Now that Kamala Harris has been elected vice president, the fight for her Senate seat is on.

A packed field of candidates is currently pitching California Gov. Gavin Newsom: Per the state’s laws on Senate vacancies, Newsom is able to appoint a new lawmaker to the job who will serve out the remaining two years of Harris’s term. Whoever’s picked will be able to run for the seat in 2022 as well.

President Donald Trump is still pretending he won the election.

That’s embarrassing for him on a personal level, but there have been real-world consequences for the rest of us. On Monday evening, the General Services Administration (GSA) finally began the transition process to the Biden administration, ending a highly irregular delay prompted by Trump’s refusal to accept the election results. That delay, in the midst of a pandemic when cooperation is badly needed, could well have cost lives.