Biden Clashes With the Left

Where things stand

• The seams in the Democratic Party have been showing this week, with progressives and moderates fixing their attention on President-elect Joe Biden’s major staff choices. All the while, eyes are locked on Georgia, where the Senate majority — and with it the Democrats’ legislative agenda, no matter how centrist or progressive — hangs in the balance.

• Biden this week argued that the rallying cry to “defund the police” was a political third rail, saying in a private call with leaders of civil rights groups that it could hurt the Democratic candidates in Georgia’s two Senate runoffs next month.

• “That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police,” Biden said on Tuesday, referring to down-ballot races last month, according to audio obtained by The Intercept. “We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable.”

• Over the summer, Biden resisted the calls of demonstrators and progressive organizers to defund police departments and shift funding to social services, though his website promises to “reform our criminal justice system.”

• A separate, intraparty battle is brewing on another issue: student loan debt. Biden has endorsed canceling up to $10,000 per person in federal student debt, but Democrats in Congress are pushing him to multiply that number by five. Both sides of the debate acknowledge that tackling the $1.7 trillion in student debt nationwide, which is spread among more than 43 million borrowers, would go far toward jump-starting the economy.

• “There are a lot of people who came out to vote in this election who frankly did it as their last shot at seeing whether the government can really work for them,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “If we don’t deliver quick relief, it’s going to be very difficult to get them back.”

• But economists also argue that above a certain point, most student loan debt is held by relatively affluent borrowers, given who tends to attend costly colleges and universities without being covered by financial aid. The fundamental problem, they say, is the high cost of tuition — something that debt forgiveness may not do much to combat.

• Progressives are expressing concern over Biden’s pick to head the Agriculture Department, Tom Vilsack, since news emerged this week that Biden plans to bring him back to run the agency he’d led throughout President Barack Obama’s two terms.

• His appointment was met with some disappointment from progressives, Black farmers and some farm groups that had pushed for an appointee who would bring a fresher perspective and shift the department’s focus more firmly toward confronting poverty and food scarcity.

• Vilsack drew some criticism during the Obama years for hiring people with ties to Monsanto, and for his relative leniency on labeling genetically engineered food. Since 2017, Vilsack has led the U.S. Dairy Export Council, which pushes the dairy industry’s interests abroad.

• Many progressives had aligned themselves with Representative Marcia Fudge, Democrat of Ohio, who represents an urban district and has made food access and equity a major theme of her work. Biden instead named Fudge as his pick for secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

• Biden also announced yesterday that Denis McDonough, who was Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, will be his nominee for the secretary of Veterans Affairs. Susan Rice, who was national security adviser when Mr. Biden was vice president, will become the director of his Domestic Policy Council, overseeing a large part of the new president’s agenda.

• The latest picks underscore a theme running through Biden’s appointments thus far: He tends to be choosing people he has worked with, most often in the Obama administration.

• The implications are varied. He has managed to assemble a diverse team, full of “firsts” and at least somewhat representative of the country’s demographic makeup. He has also signaled that in his quest to “Build Back Better,” he intends to hand the keys back to many of the officials whose work helped to define what came before.

• And he is also drawing upon a number of figures who, after leaving the White House, made their way in private industry, often serving in lucrative positions for companies with direct contracts with the federal government.

• An independent advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration recommended approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine yesterday, by a vote of 17 to 4.

• Some committee members expressed some reservations about possible allergic reactions reported in Britain, which authorized the vaccine last week but recommended this week that people with a history of severe allergic reactions should not take it.

• In the Senate, hopes of a bipartisan stimulus compromise faded a bit on Thursday, as reports emerged that aides to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, had told colleagues that they didn’t expect Republicans to get behind a bill.

• Republicans have been particularly resistant to Democrats’ demands for aid to struggling state, local and tribal governments. In exchange, Republicans have sought liability protections for businesses that have reopened during the pandemic — anathema to Democrats.

• Only a few days remain before the 116th Congress ends and both chambers are scheduled to adjourn for the holidays. The prospects for a one-week stopgap government funding bill intended to avert a shutdown were unclear in the Senate late yesterday.

Photo of the day

Members of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance drove past the Capitol yesterday during a protest for more pandemic relief aid.

Seven in 10 Republican voters think Biden’s win is illegitimate, poll finds

Biden has made a message of national unity central to his presidential transition, but he faces a challenge in bringing together a country that simply can’t agree on basic facts anymore.

The depth of the divide can be seen in a smattering of recent polls, which have found a fundamental disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over the very legitimacy of Biden’s win.

In a Quinnipiac University poll released yesterday, 70 percent of Republican registered voters said Biden’s win was not legitimate, while just 23 percent said it was. Among white male registered voters, only 47 percent said Biden had won fair and square.

Comparatively, 98 percent of Democrats said Biden had won legitimately.

Asked about whether there had been significant voter fraud — as the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed, but failed to find — 77 percent of Republicans said yes. Ninety-seven percent of Democrats said no.

The results of this poll dovetail with those of a Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-November, after most major news outlets had called the election but before President Trump’s legal team had suffered some of its most humiliating losses in court.

While 94 percent of Biden voters said they were at least somewhat confident the election had been “run and administered well,” just 21 percent of Trump voters said the same. And whereas 82 percent of Biden voters were very confident that their own vote had been accurately counted, that number plummeted to 35 percent among Trump voters.

The Pew poll, published on Nov. 20, found that most Trump voters were uninterested in letting bygones be bygones: Eighty-five percent said the president should continue his “legal challenges to the voting process in several states.”