The Daily 202: Biden kicks off new ‘rescue’ messaging with prime-time speech

As President Biden ramps up a messaging campaign advocating for his $1.9 trillion economic rescue package, he may have an easier time of it than President Barack Obama had 12 years ago in justifying his $787 billion stimulus.

With passage of the plan this week all but assured, Biden plans to escalate his administration’s outreach to Americans over the coming weeks to defend the measure and lay out other priorities. It starts with his first prime-time address.

Biden’s remarks on Thursday aren’t the starting gun for a new communications campaign — for weeks, aides have done scores of interviews with national, local, and specialized media in an effort to muscle the legislation to the Resolute Desk.

But they will mark a new, more intense phase, including the president’s first formal press conference, sometime this month, which White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced on Friday.

Biden’s 2021 strategy calls for spending “the coming weeks and months” highlighting some of the popular package’s most popular measures — the $1,400 checks heading to 85 percent of households, more money to accelerate vaccinations, and the like, a White House official told me on condition of anonymity.

The Biden administration will be “making the case directly to the American people through engagement with local media and by leveraging the coalition of groups and leaders who have endorsed the [American] Rescue Plan, including over 400 bipartisan mayors and governors, organized labor and the business community, as well as economists and experts from across the political spectrum,” the official said.

Democrats are trying to protect themselves from a repeat of 2009, which helped lead to the rise of the tea party and a crushing midterm defeat in November 2010. That era holds warnings for the president’s party, as well as reasons to hope this time will be very different.

It’s early yet. Republicans and right-wing media have yet to unify behind a line of attack against the legislation, and on any given day appear more preoccupied with Dr. Seuss, the Molded Plastic Toy Previously Known As Mr. Potato Head and other cultural battlefields.

In the aftermath of the 2010 midterms, Obama aides used to grouse to reporters they should have taken a page from George W. Bush. Bush sent millions of Americans a 2001 tax rebate by check. He did the same in his 2008 stimulus. 

The tax cuts in Obama’s 2009 package left people’s paychecks a little fatter, but without the attention-grabbing checks, tangible evidence they were better off thanks to the law. (In addition to the political benefit, there’s some science saying people who get a direct payment are more likely to spend it than those who get a tax credit.)

“Ninety-five percent of you got a tax cut.  You may not notice it — because it’s appearing … every time you get a paycheck, as opposed to you getting a lump sum,” he said.

“We didn’t do enough to explain to the American people what the benefits were of the rescue plan and we didn’t do enough to do it in terms that people would be talking about it at their dinner tables,” she told reporters.

Biden could also benefit from a psychological boost — the sense that, unlike in March 2009, things are getting better.

The unemployment rate was 8.3 percent when Obama signed his stimulus. It rose steadily over the next few months, peaked at 10 percent in October 2009, and stayed stubbornly above 9 percent through the mid-term elections.

Democrats say privately they hope Biden will benefit from rising numbers of Americans vaccinated against the coronavirus and improving — though still terrible — jobs numbers.

“The upshot is that Americans overall have appeared largely supportive of Biden’s stimulus blitz, which would push the total national debt beyond $23 trillion. This change has helped speed Biden’s massive relief package through Congress with relative ease, despite unified Republican opposition and last-minute changes pushed by moderate Democrats.”

Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) put holds on Rep. Deb Haaland’s (D-N.M.) nomination to be interior secretary, forcing additional debate before the full Senate votes on her confirmation. In a statement, Daines said Haaland’s “views will hurt the Montana way of life and kill Montana jobs. We must consider the impact she will have on the West,” while Lummis said Haaland would be a champion of “radical policies,” John Wagner reports. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) will now have to file a cloture motion, which will provide time for additional debate. A final vote could be pushed into next week. 

The House will meet to start consideration of the Senate-passed stimulus bill at 9a.m. Wednesday morning.

Jury selection began this morning in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd. Both sides are still awaiting “a decision by the state court of appeals on whether a charge of third-degree murder should be reinstated in the case,” Holly Bailey reports.

The Chinese government’s alleged actions in the Xinjiang region violated every single provision in the U.N.’s Genocide Convention, according to a new report by the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy, CNN reports. “China’s policies and practices targeting Uighurs in the region must be viewed in their totality, which amounts to an intent to destroy the Uighurs as a group, in whole or in part,” the report says. 

• “Brazil’s growing coronavirus outbreak poses a threat far beyond its borders,” by Terrence McCoy: “The question in Brazil, which has suffered more coronavirus deaths than any country outside of the United States, is no longer how it got into this mess. … The question is whether the failure to control the virus poses an international threat that will undermine the hard-won gains other countries have made against the virus. … The situation is unpredictable for both Brazil and the world.”
• “Amazon fights aggressively to defeat union drive in Alabama, fearing a coming wave,” by Jay Greene: “A worker who picks items from the shelves of an Amazon warehouse in the area here was recently inspired to unionize. The worker had been watching the push by thousands of Amazon warehouse employees in Bessemer, Ala., to join a union. He became one of more than 1,000 Amazon workers in the United States who contacted the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in recent weeks to see what it might take to start an organizing drive at his facility. And he says that an Alabama victory would inspire more of his co-workers to join the fight.”

• “We already got rid of the filibuster once before,” by the Atlantic’s David Litt: “The demise of the House filibuster ought to be better remembered, and not just because it’s one of the most dramatic episodes in American political history. The procedural battle that took place more than a century ago holds an important lesson for lawmakers of both parties today: Ending the filibuster may be messy, but it won’t destroy a legislative body. In fact, in a polarized age, the only guaranteed cure for political dysfunction is majority rule.”
• “Nearly $50 million in federal COVID aid flowed to Lexington. Here’s how it was spent,” by the Herald Leader’s Beth Musgrave: “That money has helped shore up the city’s current-year $378 million budget. The city is currently running a surplus of about $20 million and has yet to tap $30.6 million in various city savings accounts that were used to balance the lean budget, which included more than $12 million in cuts. That $44.6 million in various federal relief programs has kept the city in the black during the bleakest of times, city officials said this week.”
• “Harry and Meghan: The union of two great houses, the Windsors and the Celebrities, is complete,” by the Irish Times’s Patrick Freyne: “Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

• Garland will “inherit a department overseeing several high-profile political cases, the outcomes of which probably will leave wide swaths of the country unhappy. And he’ll inherit a department that has for the past four years vigorously implemented Trump’s conservative agenda — instituting an aggressive charging policy and reviving use of the federal death penalty,” Matt Zapotosky reports.
• Analysts say Garland will have to “improve morale and restore the traditional barriers between his agency and the White House on criminal matters, while shepherding the department’s leftward policy shift that seemed to begin immediately after Biden took office.”
• Garland has said his top priority will be criminal cases emanating from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. When he last worked in the DOJ, Garland supervised two high-profile domestic terrorism cases: the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing, and the investigation into the Unabomber.
• Still, Some GOP lawmakers have questioned whether the DOJ “is appropriately respecting people’s civil liberties in its aggressive pursuit of rioters, and Garland could face particularly tough questions as the case grows,” Zapotosky writes.

• The bill would benefit Black farmers “in a way that some experts say no legislation has since the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Laura Reiley reports. Approximately $5 billion will “go to disadvantaged farmers, according to estimates from the Farm Bureau, an industry organization. About a quarter of disadvantaged farmers are Black. The money would provide debt relief as well as grants, training, education and other forms of assistance aimed at acquiring land.”
• Black farmers “have lost more than 12 million acres of farmland over the past century, mostly since the 1950s, a result of what agricultural experts and advocates for Black farmers say is a combination of systemic racism, biased government policy, and social and business practices that have denied African Americans equitable access to markets.”

• An estimated 320,000 Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. will be eligible for temporary protective status, a category of legal residence that would open a path to U.S. citizenship for them under Biden’s immigration bill, Karen DeYoung and Anthony Faiola report.
• Biden will have to go to bat for more TPS recipients soon. The temporary protection expires later this year for hundreds of thousands of refugees from other countries living in the U.S. Biden’s immigration bill would put TPS recipients on a pathway to citizenship, but it’s got an uphill road in Congress.

• State Senate Republicans passed “a bill repealing no-excuse absentee voting, which 1.3 million voters used to cast ballots by mail in 2020, including 450,000 Republicans,” Mother Jones’s Ari Berman reports.
• “The Senate bills follow the passage of a sweeping House bill last week that cuts weekend voting days — including on Sundays, when Black churches hold ‘Souls to the Polls’ get-out-the-vote drives — restricts the use of mail ballot drop boxes, prevents counties from accepting grants from nonprofits to improve their elections, adds new voter ID requirements for mail ballots, gives election officials less time to send out mail ballots and voters less time to return them, and even makes it a crime to distribute food and water to voters waiting in line,” Berman writes. “These bills represent the most sustained effort to roll back access to the ballot in Georgia since the Jim Crow era.”
• It’s not just Georgia: Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law shortening the state’s early voting period and closing the polls an hour earlier on Election Day, the Des Moines Register reports. The state’s legislature approved the measure last month, with every Democrat voting against it.
• Meanwhile, Trump has already requested a mail ballot. The former president, who pushed false allegations of mail-in ballot fraud, will vote in Palm Beach’s municipal election. He requested a mail ballot last week for the third time in his Palm Beach County voter history, the Palm Beach Post reports.

• Trump wants the RNC and other GOP committees to stop using his likeness in fundraising appeals, but the RNC refuses to leave behind its money-making star. The committee denied a cease-and-desist order from Trump’s attorneys, Politico reports, with RNC chief counsel Justin Riemer saying last night the committee “has every right to refer to public figures as it engages in core, First Amendment-protected political speech, and it will continue to do so in pursuit of these common goals.”
• Still, the RNC moved part of its spring donor retreat next month to Mar-a-Lago, Josh Dawsey reports. Trump will headline a dinner speech at the event.

• “Prosecutors issued the grand jury subpoena to Fortress Investment Management late last year, the people said, as part of their wide-ranging investigation,” CNN reports. Fortress is the investment company that loaned Trump $130 million needed for the building. “District Attorney Cy Vance’s office [is] looking into whether Trump and the Trump Organization recorded the loan forgiveness as income, as required by the Internal Revenue Service, and paid the appropriate taxes.”

• A review of Capitol security commissioned after the deadly riot found that Capitol Police are too “‘understaffed, insufficiently equipped, and inadequately trained’ — and woefully lacking in intelligence capabilities — to protect Congress from a similar future attack,” Karoun Demirjian reports.
• The 15-page draft report from retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who was tasked with leading the review, “outlines recommendations to address the identified shortfalls in physical and operational security,” including a “rapid-response units to be on duty when Congress is in session, additional bomb-sniffing dogs on campus, and a revival of a mounted police force, to act as ‘moving walls’ that can break up crowds.”
• A man linked by prosecutors to right-wing group the Oath Keepers and Republican strategist Roger Stone was arrested and charged with involvement in the Capitol breach. Roberto Minuta, from Texas, upon his arrest, questioned why antifa and Black Lives Matter adherents were not being targeted instead, Rachel Weiner, Shayna Jacobs and Spencer Hsu report.
• Prosecutors alleged that Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers’ founder, was in direct contact with members who participated in the Capitol attack before, during and immediately after the breach.Those members have since been charged with plotting to prevent Congress from confirming the election results, Spencer Hsu and Aaron Davis report. 
• Kenneth Hubert, a Missouri man who prosecutors said threatened to lynch Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), a Black congressman, on Jan. 7, and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a Jewish congressman, in 2019, was ordered by a federal judge to remain in custody.

“The statements defendant has made to the public from jail show that defendant does not fully appreciate the severity of the allegations against him,” U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote about the so-called “QAnon Shaman” who last week said the Capitol riot was “not an attack on this country.” “To the contrary, he believes that he — not the American people or members of Congress — was the victim on January 6th.”

The entire staff of the Nevada Democratic Party quit after a Democratic Socialist slate won every seat, the Intercept’s Akela Lacy and Ryan Grim report. “Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point. She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.” 

The Supreme Court sided with a Christian student who sued his school after it stopped him from expressing religious views in a campus free-speech zone. “The 8-1 decision, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, said that Chike Uzuegbunam — who was silenced by Georgia Gwinnett College officials even after he had obtained a permit to proselytize and handout religious literature — can seek nominal damages despite the fact that the school ultimately changed course and Uzuegbunam subsequently graduated,” ABC News reports. “In a very rare alignment of votes, Chief Justice John Roberts was the lone dissenting justice in the case. … Roberts argued that the courts had no place getting involved in the dispute because it was no longer an issue.”  

The Senate Budget Committee will on Wednesday consider Shalanda Young’s nomination to be deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Young has been floated by Democrats as a replacement for Neera Tanden to the lead the OMB.

They’ve been buried — alive — for 17 years, and now they’re ready to rise all over D.C. Get ready for the Brood X cicadas. “When the ground warms to 64 degrees, they’ll stop gnawing on tree roots and start scratching toward the surface by the hundreds of billions,” Darryl Fears reports. “Georgia and other Southern states will probably be where they first emerge around the end of March, experts say. But residents of the Washington area are standing at ground zero. The District, Maryland and Virginia are likely to host more of these animals than any other of the 14 states that share the experience.” 

And Seth Meyers went after the Democrats who voted against the $1.9 trillion stimulus: