The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[River]

There is also a feeling Becerra isn't sympathetic enough to the pharma industry, which is a little weird given the overwhelming "popularity" of some of the Trump Admin's moves regarding drug pricing. Also, in my experience, when there's a policy maker or policy decision that is really going to make waves in pharma it's on the front page of Stat News. Stat's articles on Becerra are mostly buried and uncritical. The industry wasn't too freaked out by Azar, either. COVID pretty much dominates the scene.

[N.E. Brigand]

That leaves just one Cabinet nominee to be confirmed: Marty Walsh for Labor. The nomination was voted out of committee more than a month ago.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The final vote on Walsh is, I believe, expected on Monday.

There are also two other cabinet level positions that have not yet been confirmed. Eric Lander is Biden’s nominee to direct the Office of Science and Technology Policy and will serve as a presidential science adviser, a position that Biden has elevated to Cabinet-level for the first time. And Biden has yet to name a replacement for Neera Tanden as the nominee for Office of Management & Budget Director.

[River]

I wonder if that's why the date of Biden's address to a Joint Session of Congress keeps getting pushed. He wants a full Cabinet in place first. Just in case.

[N.E. Brigand]

The final vote on Walsh is, I believe, expected on Monday.

There are also two other cabinet level positions that have not yet been confirmed. Eric Lander is Biden’s nominee to direct the Office of Science and Technology Policy and will serve as a presidential science adviser, a position that Biden has elevated to Cabinet-level for the first time. And Biden has yet to name a replacement for Neera Tanden as the nominee for Office of Management & Budget Director.

Thanks for that update. For purposes of my ongoing tally, I've only been counting the 15 department heads and not the other 9 positions, but it's good to know about the rest.

Speaking of the Cabinet, it appears that Joe Biden's HUD Secretary, Marcia Fudge, has violated the Hatch Act by commenting on the potential candidates to replace Ohio Senator Rob Portman after he retires in two years:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

[N.E. Brigand]

Joe Biden tripped and fell while climbing the stairs of Air Force One today. Some people are citing that incident in support of an argument that he's too frail to be President.

Here is video of Vice President Mike Pence tripping and falling while climbing the stairs of Air Force Two last June.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Donald Trump, Jr. tweeted a mocked up video of his father hitting a golf ball and then showing the ball supposedly hitting Biden and make him fall, with the words "it wasn't the wind, folks."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... uxbndlbing

Repulsive.

[Frelga]

Isn't there something in the law about making threats to POTUS?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I'm sure that there is. I am equally sure that this would not qualify.

[N.E. Brigand]

The mainstream media continues to search for a scandal to pin on the Biden administration. ABC flew its Sunday morning panel to the U.S.-Mexico border to do today's show live in front of the border fence. Pretty sure they never did that while Trump was in office. But a lot of the people now crossing the border into the U.S. (most of whom are being promptly turned back by the government) were living in squalid border camps in Mexico for the past couple years, because of Trump policies, and the current increase in crossings is continuous with a trend that started nearly a year ago, under Trump. Why didn't ABC ever stage its show there when that was happening? Not even when the First Lady visited camps where immigrant children were being held while she wore a jacket reading "I really don't care, do u?"



The reason for this nonsense, as I've said before, ABC and the other mainstream networks have a pro-Republican bias.

(And the media has long held this bias. Think about how New York Times reporting helped move the U.S. to invade Iraq.)

And to think that just a few days ago, a federal appeals court judge was claiming just the opposite! A judge who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George Bush, no less. The judge, Laurence Silberman, wrote in his (dissenting) opinion that "The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions." That was part of his attack on the networks for supposedly being pro-Democrat. Lunacy.

If Donald Trump had only been a little more careful about his wrongdoing, the media totally would have given him the benefit of the doubt and buried those stories.

[Frelga]

It helps to remember that most media outlets are owned by large corporations, and funded by ads placed by other large corporations. Whatever local news outlets still survive must be protected at all cost.

[N.E. Brigand]

Agreed.

Here's another example of the media falsely representing Biden's actions on immigration: a CNN anchor says that the Biden administration was warned that reversing Title 42 would lead to a surge in immigration and implies the Biden team is suffering the consequences for having done that.

But the Biden administration has not reversed Title 42.

(But maybe they should? Title 42 is a health measure that the Trump administration invoked last April. The numbers have consistently gone up since then.)

[N.E. Brigand]

Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas:

Bill Clinton ran for re-election on a platform that said, "We cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it."

Barack Obama once said, "We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked."

President Biden has instead emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants, regardless of their legal status.

Cornyn apparently thinks "humane treatment" is bad.

[Frelga]

Chilling.

[River]

Yes, that's a common position among the hard-liners and the reason why Trump et al instituted their policies. The cruelty of the broken families and caged children and remanding asylum seekers to squalid camps in Mexico was the entire point: make it too horrible to come. It didn't work in the sense that people kept moving northward, though loading the Mexican side of the border with refugee camps did have the desired optics on our side of the border. However, what those who promote deterrence fail to scknowledge is that these asylum seekers, aka refugees, are fleeing societal collapse in their countries of origin. To them, daring the US border, no matter how horrible Trump made it, was better than staying put. And yeah, once Trump left office some magical thinking probably did take hold among some of these people, but you don't send your kids alone on a perilous journey of thousands of miles unless there's no better option.

The societal collapse in Central American countries has been fueled by lots of things and is something I believe the Biden Administration is going to have to address, if they haven't started. I know foreign aid is even less popular than immigrants in some political circles, but the deterrance measures and tough talk don't solve anything either. Also, it would be nice if Mexico stepped up a little more becasue these people do have to cross Mexico to get here. And along those lines, apparently Mexico and the US are making a deal that according to the diplomats totally isn't a quid pro quo: we'll send them COVID-19 vaccine and they'll step up their border security on their southern border.

[N.E. Brigand]

Biden should push for a constitutional amendment updating the pardon power.

Imagine a president gets a request for a pardon that's gone through the proper channels and includes such documentation as statements from the convicted person's victims asking for clemency. And based on this carefully vetted information, the president grants the pardon.

But then imagine that after the president leaves office, news emerges that the convicted person paid the victims to make those statements.

In that case, the former president ought to have the ability to say, "In light of this new information, I wish for my grant of pardon to be withdrawn because it was granted under false pretenses." And then the new president gets a chance to review the case and undo it if appropriate.

Surely that's what Donald Trump would do in the case of Eli Weinstein, right?

Weinstein ran a $200 million Ponzi scheme. There were other schemes for which he was never charged that apparently brought him even larger illicit sums. He was initially charged on the Ponzi scheme in 2010. While he was out on bail, he engaged in more financial crimes. In 2014, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 24 years in jail. The money he stole was never recovered.

His case came to the attention of Alan Dershowitz, who presented it to President Trump. Trump pardoned Weinstein in January.

Now the New York Times is reporting that at least one of Weinstein's victims was promised $100,000 if she signed a letter supporting Weinstein's release.

So obviously Trump will be upset at being duped in this way, and I think the Constitution ought to allow for Trump to ask Biden to put Weinstein back in jail.

(If Weinstein now spends the money he stole, is he committing a new crime? Is committing a crime simply by having it? Or is it his money now?)

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Of all the things that we needed constitutional amendments for, pardon power is very far down on the list.

IMNSHO.

[N.E. Brigand]

If this article is correct:

https://prospect.org/justice/did-cnn-ai ... io-grande/

then CNN may have been tricked by Republican activists into presenting a staged incident on the Rio Grande as if it were real.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Marty Walsh has been confirmed as labor secretary. So all Cabinet departments have now been confirmed.

Sent from my VS988 using Tapatalk

[N.E. Brigand]

Marty Walsh has been confirmed as labor secretary. So all Cabinet departments have now been confirmed.

The final list:

93-2 Lloyd Austin, Defense -- confirmed Jan. 22, 2021
92-7 Tom Vilsack, Agriculture -- Feb. 23, 2021
87-7 Denis McDonough, Veterans' Affairs -- Feb. 8, 2021
87-13 Pete Buttigieg, Transportation -- Feb. 2, 2021
84-15 Janet Yellen, Treasury -- Jan. 25, 2021
84-15 Gina Raimondo, Commerce -- Mar. 1, 2021
78-22 Antony Blinken, State -- Jan. 26, 2021
70-30 Merrick Garland, Attorney General -- Mar. 10, 2021
68-29 Marty Walsh, Labor -- Mar. 23, 2021-Mar. 11, 2023
66-34 Marcia Fudge, Housing and Urban Development -- Mar. 10, 2021-Mar. 22, 2024
64-35 Jennifer Granholm, Energy -- Feb. 25, 2021
64-33 Miguel Cardona, Education -- Mar. 1, 2021
56-43 Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security -- Feb. 2, 2021
51-40 Deb Haaland, Interior -- Mar. 15, 2021
50-49 Xavier Becerra, Health and Human Services -- Mar. 18, 2021

Again, that's setting aside other Cabinet-level positions.

Within that group, Joe Biden achieved what Barack Obama and Donald Trump did not: all his initial nominees for these positions were confirmed. Obama's first and second choices for Commerce Secretary, Bill Richardson and Judd Gregg, were withdrawn, as was Tom Daschle, his first choice for Health and Human Services Secretary. And Trump withdrew his first choice for Labor Secretary, Andrew Pudzer.

The average number of votes in favor of Biden's department heads was 73, slightly ahead of the average of 70 for Trump's department heads and far behind the average of 91 for Obama's department heads (that counts the many voice votes for Obama's choices as 100, though). I include the votes for Obama's first confirmed Commerce and HHS secretaries and Trump's first confirmed Labor secretary in those averages.

The fewest number of votes received for an original Obama department head was 60 for Tim Geithner at Treasury. For an original Trump department head that number is 51 for Betsy Devos, which includes the tie-breaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence.

(Edited for spelling.)