Trump U-turns to condemn Capitol violence as calls for removal grow – live

The power shift also means Biden won’t have to negotiate with Mitch McConnell over top administration personnel or judicial nominees — nor will Republicans have the power to vote them down. Cabinet secretaries and other jobs that require Senate confirmation need simple majorities.

Biden has promised to put a Black woman on the Supreme Court. Justice Stephen Breyer, 82, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, is seen as a potential candidate to retire. McConnell and Senate Republicans changed the rules in 2017 to require only 51 votes to confirm Supreme Court nominees.

Current and former Democratic aides said the best bet to pass new programs is through the budget reconciliation process, in which policies of taxing and spending can pass with simple majorities. That could mean unemployment assistance and aid to state and local governments, as well as spending on infrastructure and clean energy and bolstering the Affordable Care Act. It is the same process Republicans used to enact a major tax cut in 2017.

Kapur reminds us though that a tightly-balanced 50-50 Senate has its own drawbacks:

Republicans will still have the power to filibuster and force a 60-vote threshold for most legislation. That means that to secure policies like a higher minimum wage, gun control, voting protections and changes to the immigration system, Democrats will need bipartisan support.

Read more here: NBC News – Biden’s agenda gets a fighting chance after Democrats capture Senate control

And that’s it from Martin Belam in London. Joan Greve will be here to take you through the rest of the day. Have a good weekend, take care and stay safe…

The complaint filed Friday by Dominion Voting Systems Inc. seeks $1.3 billion from Powell, who filed numerous unsuccessful court cases seeking to overturn the election results. She was dumped by the Trump campaign not long after a Nov. 19 press conference in which she claimed that agents from Iran and China infiltrated Dominion’s voting machines to help Biden, and that the software had ties to Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013.

The court filing is public, and I think you’ll enjoy it. I’ve only got to page two and it already includes this gem:

Powell’s wild accusations are demonstrably false. Far from being created in Venezuela to rig elections for a now-deceased Venezuelan dictator, Dominion was founded in Toronto for the purpose of creating a fully auditable paper-based vote system that would empower people with disabilities to vote independently on verifiable paper ballots.

Read more here: Bloomberg – Sidney Powell sued by Dominion voting over election-fraud claims

Many of those in that mob are believers in a ridiculous conspiracy theory, and others were lied to. Lied to by politicians that were telling them that the vice president had the power to change the election results. And the result is that now four people have died, police officers were seriously injured. And our country was embarrassed before the entire world.

But before you think Rubio is making a clean break with Trumpism, he goes on to say:

This country needs a viable and attractive alternative to the agenda of the radical left. We welcome legal immigrants, but we have to enforce our laws. We have to take the threat of China seriously. We have to investigate what went wrong in the last election and fix our election laws, so people can have faith and confidence in the,. We must continue to call out the media bias instead of being bullied by it. And we must oppose political correctness and social media censorship and identity politics and this cult of wokeness. And we can do all these things without indulging the darkest instincts, or inciting the most destructive impulses and without the rhetoric and behaviour that keeps the millions of Americans who agree with us from joining us in this right.

He also at one point claims that “state officials mutilated election integrity laws to help the Democrats.” You can watch it here:

It was one of Donald Trump’s most controversial early moves as president: to radically shrink two national monuments in the American west. Now indigenous peoples are hopeful that Joe Biden will undo that decision – and more broadly effect a sea change in how the US treats the interests of tribal nations.

On the campaign trail, the president-elect pledged to reverse Trump’s reduction of two monuments in Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante national monument and Bear’s Ears national monument. Adding to the hopes of conservationists and indigenous tribes is Biden’s recent nomination of the New Mexico congresswoman Deb Haaland to head the US interior department. Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, would be the first indigenous person appointed to a cabinet position and is widely expected to work closely with tribes, including those in the coalition that helped establish Bear’s Ears in the first place.

Bear’s Ears, designated by Barack Obama, and Escalante, designated by Bill Clinton, were reduced in 2017 by Trump by a combined 2m acres. Bear’s Ears alone was reduced by a total of 85%.

While many locals who saw the monument designations as federal intrusion cheered Trump’s move to reduce the boundaries, environmentalists, archeologists and tribal citizens with ties to the land were outraged at the loss of federal resources to protect the lands. The conflict led to a federal lawsuit challenging the presidential power to reduce national monuments.

The history of who has access to lands in the south-western US, and how they are treated, means that whatever path Biden takes will be fraught. Many arguments in this part of the country concerning national monuments are grounded in the history of how Mormon settlers took lands through force, as well as in government policies, boarding schools and foster care systems that stripped indigenous families of their traditions and languages.

Both the distrust of federal control harbored by Mormon settlers and their descendants, as well as the grievances of indigenous peoples subjected to genocide, are at the center of every discussion.

Read more of Graham Lee Brewer’s piece here: Hope grows that Biden will restore US national monuments shrunk by Trump

“It can’t happen here” is a phrase that, even as it was used in conjunction with darker warnings about Trump, betrayed a bedrock faith in American democracy that overlooks its savage foundations. The white supremacist project, still going strong as an overt tenet of even liberal government policy well into the 20^th century – black Americans were largely cut out of the New Deal – should at least have raised as a possibility a white mob storming the government at the behest of a racist president. The fact that they looked, in their costumes and homemade gas masks, so utterly ridiculous wasn’t even out of keeping with precedent: that end of the extra-political spectrum has always gone in for fancy dress and flaming theatrics.

From a processing point of view, what was stranger, on Wednesday, was that an event with the force of a foregone conclusion still broke a fundamental rule of superstition: that by anticipating the worst, we invite the universe to pleasantly surprise us. The word “coup” has been used in relation to Trump plenty of times since November. Prior to the president’s incitement of the mob, however, it was, even in sincere contexts, used if not as hyperbole, then at least with the expectation that by naming it we lessened the likelihood it would happen. You could take Trump seriously as a threat to national security, believe wholly in his efforts to corrupt the election and still not get fully behind the notion he would encourage a power grab – not just because he is lazy, chaotic and a fool, but because, as an extremely broad principle, nothing ever tends to unfold as predicted.

Read more here: Emma Brockes – We should have been ready for it, yet the spectacle at the Capitol came as a shock

Presumably impeaching Donald Trump will be very high on the agenda, following assistant House speaker Katherine Clark’s words on CNN earlier this morning.

Donald Trump needs to be removed from office and we are going to proceed with every tool that we have to make sure that that happens to protect our democracy.

The FBI underestimated the number of protesters, predicting a maximum of 20,000, which turned out to be less than half the number who showed up. The Capitol Police didn’t stand their ground at the perimeter or at the Capitol itself. The mayor was slow to request additional troops from the D.C. National Guard. The acting attorney general was similarly tardy in ordering elite FBI units into the Capitol. And the Pentagon brass worried more about avoiding politicization of the military than about stopping an insurrection.

But as we look for who to blame in this catastrophe, let’s focus on the real culprits: President Trump, who incited the rioters and urged them toward the Capitol; the 13 Republican senators and 138 House members who challenged President-elect Joe Biden’s victory and egged on the insurgents; and the smug, self-appointed patriots who trashed the people’s house. Trump should face legal action for fomenting this riot. The members who risked the lives of their colleagues by encouraging the fanatics should be censured. The insurgents who ransacked the Capitol should be arrested and prosecuted.

He ultimately casts it as a defeat for the MAGA mob:

Trump’s ragtag army of sedition has lost big. Their narrative of victimization has turned upside down; their claims of election fraud have been demonstrated to be false. Biden’s election has been certified, and leading Republicans such as vice president Pence and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell have finally broken from Trump.

Read more here: Washington Post – What went wrong with the protection of the US Capitol