WASHINGTON — Lawmakers of the 117th Congress formally convened for the first time on Sunday, getting ready to take the oath of workplace as the capital will get prepared for a brand new president, feuds over the mendacious claims of victory by the departing one and continues to battle a lethal pandemic.
In the House, Democrats are poised to re-elect Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker, handing her management of an exceedingly slender majority for what could also be her ultimate time period. But the course of, which started when the House convened at midday, is anticipated to take a lot of the day due to social distancing necessities.
After two years as President Trump’s most outspoken Democratic antagonist, Ms. Pelosi will quickly be accountable for making an attempt to shepherd via Congress as a lot of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s agenda as doable. It isn’t any straightforward job. With her get together in command of simply 222 of 435 seats, Ms. Pelosi can afford to lose solely a handful of Democrats on any given vote. She may even need to cope with a well being disaster that may sideline lawmakers at any second, starting with a couple of who had been anticipated to overlook Sunday’s session.
“I am confident that the Speaker’s election today will show a united Democratic Caucus ready to meet the challenges ahead, and that we are prepared to set our country on a new course,” Ms. Pelosi wrote Sunday morning in a letter to colleagues.
On the different facet of the Capitol, the Senate is getting ready for a extra subdued opening day as each events await a pair of runoff elections in Georgia on Tuesday that can decide which ones begins the 12 months in management. The end result might decide the destiny of Mr. Biden’s legislative targets on local weather change, taxes and well being care; his response to the coronavirus pandemic; and his capability to fill his cupboard and influential federal judgeships.
Republicans at present have an edge, with 50 seats to Democrats’ 48. Democrats must sweep each races to attract the chamber to a tie and successfully take management when Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, who would forged tiebreaking votes when wanted, is sworn in with Mr. Biden on Jan. 20.
With the coronavirus circulating rampantly, members-elect anticipated little of the traditional pomp that normally accompanies Congress’s preliminary convening. House leaders had been getting ready for a drawn-out, socially distant affair, with lawmakers taking the oath of workplace and voting for speaker in small teams, moderately than all collectively in the usually boisterous corridor of the House. They had even constructed a small plexiglass enclosure in considered one of the galleries overlooking the chamber in order that three lawmakers in a protecting quarantine might vote in particular person however not mingle on the House ground.
Nor was there a lot promise that the partisan warfare that has seized the capital in recent times would quickly subside with the new session. After they’re sworn in, a rising cohort of Republican senators and House members plan to provoke a long-shot try on Wednesday to attempt to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory and ship a second time period to Mr. Trump. The try will fail, however solely after it cleaves the Republican Party in two and additional erodes confidence in Mr. Biden’s legitimacy amongst the president’s most ardent supporters.
WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence signaled help on Saturday for a futile Republican bid to overturn the election in Congress this week, after 11 Republican senators and senators-elect stated that they’d vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory when the House and the Senate meet to formally certify it.
The announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s transfer to endorse it — mirrored a groundswell amongst Republicans to defy the unambiguous outcomes of the election and indulge President Trump’s makes an attempt to stay in energy with false claims of voting fraud.
Every state in the nation has licensed the election outcomes after verifying their accuracy, many following postelection audits or hand counts. Judges throughout the nation, and a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, have rejected nearly 60 attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to problem the outcomes.
And neither Mr. Pence nor any of the senators who stated they’d vote to invalidate the election has made a particular allegation of fraud, as an alternative providing obscure ideas that some wrongdoing may need occurred and asserting that lots of their supporters consider that it has.
The senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election is not going to change the end result. But it ensures that an in any other case perfunctory session on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the outcomes of the presidential election will as an alternative grow to be a partisan brawl, during which Republicans amplify specious claims of widespread election rigging which have been debunked for weeks whilst Mr. Trump has stoked them.
The spectacle guarantees to set a caustic backdrop for Mr. Biden’s inauguration and displays the polarized politics on Capitol Hill that will likely be amongst his best challenges.
It may even pose a political dilemma for Republicans, forcing them to decide on between accepting the outcomes of a democratic election — even when it means angering supporters who dislike the end result and will punish them at the polls — and becoming a member of their colleagues in displaying unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump, who has demanded that they again his bid to cling to the presidency.
For generations, the prevailing mythology of Atlanta has been that it’s an undeniably Southern metropolis that can be not like the remainder of the South, a spot the place the relentless pursuit of financial and social development meant casting apart a lot of the racial division and bitter historical past which have lengthy dogged the area.
But these days, that notion has been examined — by the pandemic; by violent encounters between African-Americans and the police; and by the fluctuating divide between metropolitan Atlanta and the far more conservative and conventional state surrounding it.
The pandemic has laid naked gaps in entry to alternative and well being care, as the virus has hit the African-American neighborhood particularly exhausting. It has additionally galvanized ideological divides between the metropolis and the state, as the mayor and governor sparred over adopting strict measures to curb the virus’s unfold. Protests pressured many to look at the stubbornness of institutional racism.
A meltdown during the summer primaries, with lengthy strains and malfunctioning voting machines, stoked considerations over suppression.
Those points are definitely not Atlanta’s alone. But time and again in current months, the metropolis emerged as an enviornment during which these tensions performed out in vivid and revelatory methods.
When Georgia votes on Tuesday, representatives of very completely different segments of Atlanta will play main roles on this chapter of the metropolis’s historical past: the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Dr. King’s famed Ebenezer Baptist Church; and Jon Ossoff, a younger media govt from the Atlanta suburbs, are the Democratic candidates. Kelly Loeffler, considered one of the Republican senators pushed into the runoff, is a rich businesswoman who’s an proprietor of the metropolis’s skilled girls’s basketball crew and has an property in the prosperous Buckhead part of the metropolis.
The context of current occasions has injected vitality into the runoffs, which have already drawn enormous turnout. The election comes after Joseph R. Biden Jr. turned the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia in 28 years, a mirrored image of the get together’s rising energy in the state, pushed overwhelmingly by voters in Atlanta and its suburbs, which collectively make up practically half the state vote. It additionally follows the protracted marketing campaign by President Trump to overturn his loss via recounts, authorized challenges and a barrage of baseless allegations of fraud.
WASHINGTON — On Sunday, the 116th Congress ended a lot because it started — full of anticipation but bitterly divided — having lurched via a cycle of once-in-a-generation moments packed into two years. The shuttering of the authorities for greater than a month. The impeachment and trial of a president. The deadliest pandemic in a century and a multitrillion-dollar federal response.
Even with a couple of legislative accomplishments, partisan gridlock pressured lawmakers to punt on their hopes that they could possibly be the ones to do troublesome issues.
Still, Congress made historical past of a distinct variety, ushering in a brand new period of governing via expertise throughout the pandemic.
Here are a few of the moments that outlined the 116th Congress.
Swearing In During a Shutdown
With considered one of the largest lessons of newly elected lawmakers in congressional historical past, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California turned the first particular person in additional than 60 years to reclaim the speakership after having misplaced it.
Within hours of her election as speaker, Ms. Pelosi started calling votes on laws to reopen authorities companies that had been closed since late December 2018, as Mr. Trump demanded extra money for the border wall that had been his signature marketing campaign promise.
But Senate Republicans refused to think about the measure, even earlier than it cleared the House. It set the predicate that may maintain agency for most of the Congress: Legislation triumphantly shepherded via by House Democrats would not often be granted a vote on the Senate ground by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority chief.
An Impeachment, Then an Acquittal
Ms. Pelosi would spend months pushing again on the notion of impeachment earlier than altering course after the president was accused of wrongdoing.
But in late August, an intelligence whistle-blower revealed that in a half-hour cellphone name in July, Mr. Trump had pressured Ukraine’s leader to analyze Joseph R. Biden Jr., simply as the president was withholding tens of millions of {dollars} in army help for the nation.
Democrats who had resisted impeaching Mr. Trump swung into motion, starting 5 months of hearings and investigations that may yield extra particulars about Mr. Trump’s strain marketing campaign on Ukraine and rising calls for his elimination. The House voted to cost Mr. Trump with excessive crimes and misdemeanors, with Republicans unanimously opposed. It was the third impeachment of an American president in historical past.
The end result in the Senate was by no means doubtful, as most Republicans shortly concluded that his actions didn’t warrant his elimination.
Legislating in a Pandemic
As the pandemic unfold to the Capitol, lawmakers raced to finish a $2.2 trillion stimulus regulation.
By the finish of 2020, practically 10 p.c of Congress had contracted the coronavirus, briefly hospitalizing no less than two lawmakers and forcing various lawmakers to quarantine.
Democrats moved to permit the House to vote remotely for the first time in the historical past of the chamber, instituting a system that may enable a lawmaker to have a colleague cast a vote for them by proxy in the event that they had been unable to journey.
A Stimulus Deal Almost Derailed
Republicans’ exhibiting in the November elections
left Mr. Biden, who was declared the victor quickly after, with a slim majority in the House and Democratic management of the Senate contingent on the outcomes of two runoff races in Georgia.
The political stakes of the contests helped shift the monthslong debate over offering pandemic aid to tens of millions of unemployed Americans, small companies, faculties and hospitals throughout the nation, prodding leaders into negotiations over one other package deal.
Shortly after the election, a gaggle of moderates started work on a compromise framework. They lastly yielded a $900 billion deal that handed each chambers days earlier than Christmas after a number of near-misses.
Still, Mr. Trump threatened to not signal it, plunging the destiny of the laws into uncertainty and holding out the risk of yet one more authorities shutdown. Four days earlier than the new 12 months started, he signed it into regulation.
President Trump is about to carry a rally in Dalton, Ga., on Monday, the day earlier than Election Day, and Georgia Republicans are hoping he’ll focus his feedback on how essential it’s for Republicans to vote in giant numbers for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the state’s two incumbent Republican senators.
But Mr. Trump has continued to make the false declare that Georgia’s election system was rigged in opposition to him in the Nov. 3 common election. Some Republican leaders are afraid that his supporters will take the president’s argument severely, and determine that voting in a “corrupt” system is just not price their time, a growth that would hand the election to the Democrats.
Some strategists and political science specialists in the state have stated Mr. Trump’s assault on Georgia’s voting system could also be no less than partly accountable for the comparatively gentle Republican turnout in the conservative strongholds of northwest Georgia, the place Dalton is, in the early voting interval that ended Thursday.
More than three million Georgia voters participated in the early voting interval, which started Dec. 14. A robust early-voting turnout in closely Democratic areas and amongst African-American voters means that Republicans will want a robust Election Day efficiency to retain their Senate seats.
Since shedding the election to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in November, Mr. Trump has directed a sustained assault on Georgia’s Republican leaders — together with Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — saying they haven’t taken severely sufficient his claims of voter fraud. He has known as Mr. Kemp “a fool” and known as for him to resign. At a rally for Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue final month in Georgia, the president spent appreciable time airing his personal electoral grievances, whereas devoting much less time to supporting the two Republican candidates.
On Sunday morning, the president claimed on Twitter that he had spoken with Mr. Raffensperger a day earlier about voter fraud in Georgia, together with Fulton County, which incorporates most of Atlanta and had been the subject of some of the conspiracy theories around the election. But the secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions” about allegations of fraud, Mr. Trump asserted.
“He has no clue!” the president stated.
Mr. Raffensperger responded with his own tweet later in the morning.
“Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true,” he stated. “The truth will come out.”
WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s alternative for Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, collected more than $7 million in talking charges over the previous two years from main firms and Wall Street banks which have a eager curiosity in the monetary insurance policies she’s going to oversee after her anticipated affirmation to guide the Treasury Department.
Ms. Yellen’s paid talking appearances — which included $992,000 from the funding financial institution Citi for 9 appearances — had been amongst the profitable funds from a variety of Wall Street, Big Tech and company pursuits to a few distinguished potential members of the incoming Biden administration.
The funds, revealed in disclosure statements protecting the earlier two years and launched in current days, have triggered consternation amongst progressive activists concerned about the influence of special interests round Mr. Biden, who they see as a part of a Democratic institution that has not sufficiently embraced liberal priorities.
Mr. Biden’s alternative for secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken, was paid nearly $1.2 million by a consulting agency he helped discovered, WestExec Advisors, the place he suggested a variety of firms together with Facebook, Boeing, the non-public fairness large Blackstone and the asset administration firm Lazard.
Mr. Biden’s alternative for director of nationwide intelligence, Avril Haines, was paid $180,000 to seek the advice of for the data-mining firm Palantir, which has raised liberal hackles for offering data and surveillance services to regulation enforcement, together with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Along with their disclosure statements, Ms. Yellen, Mr. Blinken and Ms. Haines every filed ethics agreements pledging to keep away from involvement in particular issues that would have an effect on any holding they nonetheless personal, or with which that they had labored in the previous 12 months, except they obtain a written waiver from ethics officers.
A commerce pact with 14 different Asian nations. A pledge to affix different nations in lowering carbon emissions to battle world warming. Now, an funding settlement with the European Union.
China’s chief, Xi Jinping, has in current weeks made offers and pledges that he hopes will place his nation as an indispensable world chief, even after its dealing with of the coronavirus and elevated belligerence at house and overseas have broken its worldwide standing.
In doing so, he has underlined how troublesome it will likely be for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to forge a united entrance with allies in opposition to China’s authoritarian insurance policies and commerce practices, a central focus of the new administration’s plan to compete with Beijing and verify its rising energy. The picture of Mr. Xi becoming a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Emmanuel Macron of France and different European leaders in a convention name on Wednesday to seal the deal with the European Union additionally amounted to a stinging rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to isolate China’s Communist Party state.
The offers present the leverage Mr. Xi has due to the energy of the Chinese financial system, which is now the fastest-growing amongst main nations as the world continues to wrestle with the pandemic.
It was additionally yet one more demonstration of how China pays little or no diplomatic price for abuses that violate European values. The Europeans finalized the funding settlement, for instance, a day after the European Union publicly criticized the harsh prison sentence handed all the way down to a Chinese lawyer who reported on the preliminary coronavirus outbreak in the metropolis of Wuhan.
China needed to make solely modest concessions to beat more and more vocal considerations about China’s harshest insurance policies, together with the crackdown on Hong Kong and the mass detentions and compelled labor of Uighurs in Xinjiang, the western Chinese area.
China’s huge financial and diplomatic affect, particularly presently of worldwide disaster, implies that nations really feel they’ve little choice but to engage with it, no matter their unease over the character of Mr. Xi’s hard-line rule.
The funding settlement should be ratified by the European Parliament earlier than it could possibly take impact, and it faces signification opposition that would derail it.
Claire Fu contributed analysis.
