Senate passes budget plan to allow Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief package without Republicans – live

The Washington Post have an interesting piece this morning which reflects one of the complexities of the social media environment we live in. Rachel Lerman reports that lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems have asked Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler to preserve posts about the company, even if the material was already removed for spreading misinformation. She writes:

The posts need to be kept “because they are relevant to Dominion’s defamation claims relating to false accusations that Dominion rigged the 2020 election,” according to the demand letters from Dominion’s law firm Clare Locke. Dominion sued Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell for more than $1.3 billion each in January, alleging that the lawyers defamed Dominion by saying the machines were used to steal the election from President Donald Trump.

Dominion asked each company to keep posts from slightly differing lists of people. Those included right-wing pundit Dan Bongino, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and Powell. It also included news organizations Fox News, One America News Network and Newsmax and — in Twitter’s case — Trump.

Dominion warned in its letters to the social media companies that more lawsuits would be coming.

You imagine the situation might be particularly difficult for Parler, which was knocked offline by its hosts in the wake of the 6 January Capitol riot, has only been able to partially restore the service with support from a Russian-owned technology firm, and this week ousted its CEO John Matze.

Read more here: Washington Post – Dominion Voting tells Facebook, Parler and other social media sites to preserve posts for lawsuits

An extremely quick and to-the-point snap from Reuters confirms that the House of Representatives will vote today on the final passage of a budget resolution that would allow Democrats in Congress to approve Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief package without Republican support. That’s per a Democratic leadership aide.

Yesterday, president Joe Biden announced his intention to welcome 125,000 refugees to the US in the next year, a far cry from the much smaller number pushed by his predecessor Donald Trump. This week, in our Politics Weekly Extra podcast, Jonathan Freedland speaks to president and chief executive officer of the International Rescue Committee and former British politician David Miliband about the new president’s true capacity to recalibrate America’s approach to globalism.

The overnight budget resolution vote in the Senate makes good on president Joe Biden’s promise to move swiftly on relief measures for those in the economy affected by the coronavirus pandemic. At 8:30am EST (1:30pm GMT) we’ll get the latest jobs report numbers, which will be the first major indicator of how the economy is faring since he took office.

The $1.9 trillion relief package proposed would be used to speed Covid-19 vaccines throughout the nation. Other funds would extend special unemployment benefits that will expire at the end of March and make direct payments to people to help them pay bills and stimulate the economy. Democrats also want to send money to state and local governments dealing the worst health crisis in decades.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said the vote was a “giant first step” toward passing the kind of comprehensive coronavirus aid bill that Biden has put at the top of his legislative agenda.

Richard Cowan notes for Reuters that shortly before the final vote, Democrats flexed their new Senate muscles by offering an amendment reversing three earlier votes that Republicans had won.

They had hijacked the coronavirus aid battle to voice support for the Canada-to-United States Keystone XL pipeline that Biden has blocked and support for hydraulic fracking to extract underground oil and natural gas.

Also overturned was a Republican amendment barring coronavirus aid to immigrants living in the US illegally.

The Senate also approved a series of amendments to the budget outline, which had already passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday. As a result, the House must now vote again to accept the Senate’s changes, which could occur as early as today. The Senate, for example, added a measure calling for increased funding for rural hospitals whose resources are strained by the pandemic.

None of the approved amendments will carry the force of law in a budget blueprint and mainly are guidelines for developing the actual coronavirus aid bill in coming weeks.

We shouldn’t forget that the reason the Senate was working overnight on a Covid economic relief resolution was because the US is in the middle of a pandemic, one which just recorded its highest number of daily deaths according to the Johns Hopkins University.

Yesterday there were 122,473 new cases, taking the total US caseload to 26.6m.

The daily death toll has been recorded at 5,077. This is significantly higher than any other daily total, and the first time that the US has recorded more than 5,000 deaths in one day. The previous highest daily toll was 4,466 on 12 January.

The hospitalization figures continued to fall, going below 90,000 for the first time since 27 November. They stand at 88,668 according to the Covid Tracking Project.

CDC figures state that 28.2 million people have now received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine in the US and its territories.

Reports this morning suggest that court papers are gradually showing the co-ordinated and organised methods employed by members of the right-wing Proud Boys movement in the ransack of the US Capitol last month. This week Canada designated them a terrorist organization. Alan Feuer reports for the New York Times:

In a flurry of court papers filed in recent days federal officials have [been] assembling the first draft of a narrative that suggests the Proud Boys brought some coordination to the Capitol attack. While prosecutors have not issued an overarching indictment accusing the group of a detailed conspiracy to storm the halls of Congress, they have left hints in the record that they believe a measure of planning went into disrupting the certification of the presidential vote.

In a criminal complaint released on Wednesday night, prosecutors said that days before the Capitol attack, Ethan Nordean, the “sergeant of arms” for the Seattle Proud Boys, issued a call on social media asking for donations of “protective gear” and declared during his podcast, “We are in a war.”

In previous filings, the government has said that some group members went to the Capitol with communication equipment and that leaders ordered subordinates to show up undercover, not in their typical black-and-yellow shirts.

Prosecutors say, in late December, chairman of the group, Enrique Tarrio, apparently planning for a pro-Trump “Save America” rally in Washington 6 January, posted a message on Parler, telling the Proud Boys to attend the event in small teams and “incognito,” instead of in their trademark polo shirts.

Two days before the march, prosecutors noted Nordean posted an episode of his podcast in which he likened the Proud Boys to “soldiers of the right wing.” He also discussed what he described as “rampant voter fraud” in the presidential election, saying that the Proud Boys could not afford to be complacent, but had to “bring back that original spirit of 1776 of what really established the character of what America is.”

Read more here: New York Times – Did the Proud Boys help coordinate the Capitol riot? Yes, US suggests

Giovanni Russonello writes for the New York Times On Politics newsletter this morning on the highly unusual move by the House yesterday to strip rightwing extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene from her positions on committees. He writes:

While party caucuses have from time to time stripped their own members of their committee assignments as a disciplinary measure, yesterday’s vote was the first time in modern US politics that the majority party had used a chamber-wide vote to depose a member from the minority.

Greene called her previous comments “words of the past” that “do not represent me” and said she should be given an opportunity to learn from her mistakes. “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true, and I would ask questions about them and talk about them, and that is absolutely what I regret,” she said.

But Democrats were unimpressed, and some pointed out in speeches of their own that Greene had not apologized at any point in her eight-minute address. The Democratic caucus voted unanimously to remove Greene from her posts, arguing in particular that she did not belong on the Education Committee given her history of claiming that the school shooting in Parkland, Florida was a hoax.

Only a handful of Republicans backed the move, despite at one point House majority leader Steny Hoyer exhibiting a Facebook advert for Greene in which she is depicted holding a gun next the faces of the high profile progressive congresswomen of color Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Democratic Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has just given his social media reaction to the vote, praising his caucus for their unity.

In truth, there are a few Democrats, like West Virginia’s Sen. Joe Manchin who have issues with some of the details of the plan. He was behind one of the amendments that passed, in conjunction with Maine Republican Susan Collins who proposed a ceiling barring “upper-income taxpayers” from eligibility for stimulus checks.

“I don’t think a single person on this floor would disagree to target the relief to our neighbors who are struggling,” Manchin said during the debate. “There are other families who have not missed a single paycheck as a result of this pandemic. It does not make sense to send a check to those individuals.”

Amendments aren’t binding on the eventual plan that gets passed, but the 99-1 vote in favor of the limit suggests a clear direction of travel for the drafting of the legislation that will now take place.

The White House digital comms team have already been working on a campaign video to try and win Republican voters over to the idea of Biden’s Covid stimulus plan.

Yesterday they pushed live a video entitled “Conservatives speak on the American rescue plan” which features ordinary voters saying things like “I’m a political conservative” and “I grew up in a Republican family” before going on to express support for the rescue package.

There’s some Republicans they have no hope of winning over. Last night during the debate, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said “This is not the time for trillions more dollars to make perpetual lockdowns and economic decline a little more palatable. Notwithstanding the actual needs, notwithstanding all the talk about bipartisan unity, Democrats in Congress are plowing ahead. They’re using this phony budget to set the table to ram through their $1.9 trillion rough draft.”

It’s important to stress that the overnight Senate vote does not mean that Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package is a done deal – but it is certainly now a lot closer to becoming a reality. As Jaclyn Diaz puts it for NPR:

The resolution allows Democrats to move forward with an eventual coronavirus relief bill that can circumvent the 60-vote threshold required to end a filibuster. They could now potentially pass the future bill with a simple majority.

The House must now pass the same version of the budget measure before lawmakers can begin writing the final relief package. That vote may come later Friday.

The budget resolution gives committees the authority to draft legislation reflecting Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. It’s expected to eventually include $1,400 stimulus checks for Americans and expanded pandemic unemployment aid.

Republicans oppose the size of Biden’s proposal and have offered a smaller alternative. The president said he “will not settle” on his pandemic relief bill.