Daily Political Briefing
July 13, 2021, 3:54 p.m. ET
July 13, 2021, 3:54 p.m. ET
President Biden used the birthplace of American democracy to offer an evisceration of the lie, spread by his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election.
“No other election has ever been held under such scrutiny, such high standards,” Mr. Biden said in Philadelphia. “The big lie is just that: A big lie.”
Mr. Biden used the powerful backdrop to attack Mr. Trump’s conspiracy theory as a “darker and more sinister” underbelly of American politics, and warned that “bullies and merchants of fear” have posed an existential threat to American democracy.
“If you lose, you accept the results,” Mr. Biden said, in the most direct admonishment of Mr. Trump and the events of Jan. 6 that he has issued as president. “You don’t call facts fake and then try to bring down the American experiment just because you’re unhappy. That’s not statesmanship. That’s not statesmanship. That’s selfishness. That’s not democracy, it’s the denial of the right to vote.”
At the same time, Mr. Biden was in Philadelphia to reassure Democrats who say he has not done enough to deliver on a promise to make voting rights a central theme of his presidency. His speech came as Democrats see a worrying increase in efforts by Republican-led state legislatures to restrict voting, along with court rulings that would make it harder to fight back against encroachments on voting rights. A Supreme Court ruling this month weakened the one enforcement clause of the Voting Rights Act that remained after the court invalidated its major provision in 2013. Mr. Biden said a year ago that strengthening the act would be one of his first priorities upon taking office.
“The court’s decision, as harmful as it is, does not limit the Congress’s ability to repair the damage done,” Mr. Biden said. “As soon as Congress passes the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, I will sign it and let the whole world see it,” he added, referring to two Democratic bills seeking to expand voting rights.
But his rallying cry only underscored the impossibility of the task. Neither bill currently has a path to adoption by Congress amid unified Republican opposition. Republicans filibustered the broad elections overhaul known as the For the People Act last month, and are expected to do the same if Democrats try to bring up the other measure, named for a former congressman and civil rights icon, which would restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.
In an interview, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who attended Mr. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia, said that he and several other civil rights leaders pushed Mr. Biden to encourage Democrats to unite in an effort to roll back the filibuster, which would allow both bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority.
“We encouraged him to make a real appeal to all of the Democrats to get in line,” Mr. Sharpton said, recalling a meeting he and several other civil rights leaders had at the White House with Mr. Biden last week. “I think he heard us, but I don’t know.”
Mr. Biden did not broach the topic in his speech on Tuesday, but instead assailed the Republican efforts as “raw and sustained election subversion” and a denial “of the will of the people.”
“The power must always be with the people,” Mr. Biden said, his voice rising. “Have you no shame?”
Mr. Biden’s speech came as a group of Democrats in the Texas Legislature fled their state on Monday and traveled to Washington to prevent State House Republicans from attaining a quorum, a temporary way to delay state lawmakers from taking up restrictive voting measures proposed there.
Both measures would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending out absentee ballot applications to voters who have not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit third-party ballot collection; increase the criminal penalties for election workers who run afoul of regulations; limit what assistance can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.
Representative James Talarico, the youngest member of the Texas State Legislature at 32 years old, said the group of Democrats had come to Washington, in part, to pressure Mr. Biden to do more.
“I’m incredibly proud not only as a Democrat but also an American of what President Biden has accomplished in his first few months in office,” Mr. Talarico said. “But protecting our democracy should’ve been at the very top of the list, because without it none of these issues matter.”
The restrictions mirror key provisions of a restrictive law passed in Georgia earlier this year, which went even further to assert Republican control over the State Election Board and empower the G.O.P. to suspend county election officials. In June, the Department of Justice sued Georgia over the law, the first significant move of the Biden administration to challenge voter restrictions at the state level.
Activists say Mr. Biden’s speech on Thursday would show them just how willing he is to spend political capital on the issue at a time when his other agenda items, including an infrastructure package, are subject to delicate negotiations in Congress.
“I think people are looking for his actions to match his rhetoric on this,” Eli Zupnick, a spokesman for the anti-filibuster group Fix Our Senate, said in an interview. “No amount of turnout operations or D.O.J. actions can make up for failure to pass legislation.”
Outside the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, 47 Texas Democratic state representatives appealed for passage of the For the People Act, which would aims to rein in state restrictions on voting. Back in Austin, Republicans vented their anger and the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, vowed to call “special session after special session after special session” until an election bill is passed.
From the podium in Philadelphia, Mr. Biden sought to emphasize that his administration would be doing more to combat state-level efforts, calling the current landscape “the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
Just days after President Biden called President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and demanded that he act to shut down ransomware groups that are attacking American targets, the biggest of them has gone off-line. The mystery is who made that happen.
The group, called REvil, short for “Ransomware evil,” is believed responsible for the attack that brought down one of America’s largest beef producers, JBS, and it took credit for a hack that affected thousands of businesses around the world over the July 4 holiday. On Friday, describing his ultimatum to the Russian president, Mr. Biden said “we expect them to act,” and when asked later if he would take down the group’s servers if Mr. Putin did not, the president simply said, “Yes.”
But that is only one possible explanation for what happened around 1 a.m. on Tuesday, when the group’s sites on the dark web suddenly disappeared. Gone was the publicly-available “happy blog’’ that the group maintained, listing its victims, and internet security groups said the custom-made sites where victims negotiate with REvil over how much they will pay to get their data unlocked were also missing.
While their disappearance was celebrated by many who see ransomware as a new scourge, one that Mr. Biden has called a critical national security threat, it left others in the lurch — unable to pay the ransom to get their data back, and their businesses back up and running.
“What’s the plan for the victims?” asked Kurtis Minder, the chief executive of Groupsense, a digital risk protection company that was negotiating with the extortionists on behalf of a regional law firm whose data was stolen.
There were three main theories floating around about why REvil, which seemed to revel in the publicity and reaped huge ransoms — including $11 million from JBS — suddenly disappeared.
One is that Mr. Biden ordered the United States Cyber Command, working with domestic law enforcement agencies, including the F.B.I., to bring it down. Cyber Command proved last year that it could do just that, paralyzing a ransomware group that it feared might turn its skills to freezing up voter registrations or other election data in the 2020 election.
The second theory is that Mr. Putin ordered the group taken down by Russia. If so, that would be a gesture toward heeding Mr. Biden’s warning, which he offered, in more general terms, when the two leaders met June 16 in Geneva.
And a third is that REvil decided that the heat was too intense, and took itself down to avoid becoming part of the crossfire between the American and Russian presidents. That is what another Russian-based group, Darkside, did after the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, the U.S. company that had to shut down the gasoline and jet fuel running up the East Coast in May.
But many experts think that Darkside’s going-out-of-business move was digital theater, and that all of the key ransomware talent would reassemble under a different name. If so, the same could happen with REvil.
Just a few months ago, ransomware was considered largely a criminal problem. But after the attack on Colonial Pipeline, Mr. Biden and his advisers began to declare that attacks which threaten critical infrastructure constitute a major national security threat.
The Morning newsletter broke down the major themes in the restrictive state voting measures that Republicans are passing in state legislatures around the country.
Increase partisan control
So far, at least 14 states have enacted laws that give partisan officials more control over election oversight — potentially allowing those politicians to overturn an election result, as Donald J. Trump urged state-level Republicans to do last year after he lost his bid for re-election.
In Georgia, a Republican-controlled commission now has the power to remove local election officials, and has already removed some. Arkansas has empowered a state board to “take over and conduct elections” in a county if the G.O.P.-dominated legislature deems it is necessary. Arizona Republicans took away the Democratic secretary of state’s authority over election lawsuits and gave it to the Republican attorney general.
It’s not hard to imagine how Republican legislators could use some of these new rules to disqualify enough ballots to flip the result of a very close election — like, say, last year’s presidential election in Arizona or Georgia. The election-administration provisions, The Times’s Nate Cohn has written, are “the most insidious and serious threat to democracy” in the new bills.
Making voting harder
Many Republican politicians believe that they are less likely to win elections when voter turnout is high and have passed laws that generally make voting more difficult.
Some of the new laws restrict early voting: Iowa, for example, has shortened the early-voting period to 20 days from 29 and reduced poll hours on Election Day. Other states have made it harder to vote by mail: Florida has reduced the hours for ballot drop-off boxes and will also require voters to request a new mail ballot for each election.
Notably, some of the provisions are targeted at areas and groups that lean Democratic — like Black, Latino and younger voters. Georgia has lowered the number of drop boxes allowed for the metropolitan Atlanta area to an estimated 23 from 94 — while increasing drop boxes in some other parts of the state. Texas Republicans hope to ban drive-through voting and other measures that Harris County, a Democratic stronghold, adopted last year. Montana has ruled that student IDs are no longer a sufficient form of voter identification.
And the impact?
That’s not so easy to figure out. The laws certainly have the potential to accomplish their goal of reducing Democratic turnout more than Republican turnout. In closely divided states like Arizona, Florida or Georgia — or in a swing congressional district — even a small effect could determine an election.
President Biden intends to nominate Dr. Rahul Gupta, who led West Virginia’s response to a devastating opioid crisis, to run the National Office of Drug Control Policy — a choice that may generate opposition from advocates for people with substance abuse problems.
If confirmed by the Senate, he would become the first medical doctor to serve as the nation’s “drug czar” since the role was created in 1988. Dr. Gupta is currently the chief medical and health officer at March of Dimes.
White House officials confirmed Mr. Biden’s choice of Dr. Gupta, which was reported earlier in The Washington Post. The president is expected to make his announcement later on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will publish statistics on drug overdose deaths that, by all indications, will shatter previous records. Overdose deaths rose by nearly 30 percent over the 12-month period that ended in November, from more than 71,000 to over 90,000, according to preliminary federal data released last month.
As West Virginia’s commissioner of public health and state health officer from 2015 to 2018, Dr. Gupta won praise for his aggressive response to the opioid crisis. Mr. Biden’s choice of Dr. Gupta may also be politically strategic: He is an ally of Senator Manchin, the moderate West Virginia Democrat whose vote is crucial to the president’s legislative agenda.
But Dr. Gupta also garnered criticism for failing to stop the city of Charleston from closing its needle exchange program — a key component of the strategy known as “harm reduction,” which has been embraced by the Biden administration.
Instead of helping drug users achieve abstinence, harm reduction aims to reduce their risk of dying or acquiring infectious diseases like AIDS, including by giving them sterile equipment.
While Dr. Gupta was health commissioner, his department issued a report that found fault with the Charleston program and led to its decertification after it had already shut it down. The program had been nationally recognized, but was criticized by the city’s mayor at the time. Public health experts said its closure had a chilling effect on other programs, and kept some from getting off the ground.
“The Biden administration has made enhancing evidence-based harm reduction programs a priority, and it’s my sincere hope that Dr. Gupta will embrace that policy and show clear leadership on that issue,” said Robin Pollini, an associate professor of behavioral medicine of psychiatry at West Virginia University, who has in the past been critical of Dr. Gupta.
In a 2018 interview with West Virginia public broadcasting, Dr. Gupta spoke out against the closure, saying it was “not in the best interest of the community” when needle exchange programs like Charleston’s are shut down “reactively.”
“It plays into that stigma and is more harmful long-term than it is beneficial,” the outlet quoted him as saying.
The son of an Indian diplomat, Dr. Gupta was born in India and grew up in Washington, D.C. He completed medical school at the University of Delhi when he was 21, according to a biography supplied by the White House.
The drug control policy office was created by Congress as part of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan.
Jill Biden, the first lady, will travel to Japan next week to attend the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, scheduled for July 23, her office said on Tuesday.
It will be the first solo trip abroad for Dr. Biden, whose traveling schedule currently outpaces her husband’s. Dr. Biden has been a frequent traveler in service of promoting the Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccine efforts domestically, and her appearance in Tokyo comes as the host city extended a state of emergency in response to a spike in coronavirus cases.
Officials have barred spectators from most of the events and urged residents to watch the proceedings on television at home. The declaration of the state of emergency disrupted carefully laid plans to revive the Games, which have already been delayed a year because of the pandemic.
Mr. Biden will not attend the Games, but he has voiced his support for them to the country’s prime minister, Yoshihide Suga. During an April visit to the White House, Mr. Suga told reporters that Mr. Biden “once again expressed his support” to host the events.
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters last month that the White House would send a delegation from the United States, “but we will continue to also convey the public health guidelines and guidance that we’ve been delivering out there about only essential travel.”
The East Wing did not have further information about what the first lady would be doing while in Tokyo, and administration officials said the White House was still in negotiations with the Japanese over how much access she and her delegation would have to the Games.
A Labor Department report on Tuesday that showed prices rising at their fastest monthly pace since 2008 in June presents a new political challenge for President Biden’s economic team, which has quietly concluded that rising prices could linger in the economy slightly longer than administration officials initially expected.
Mr. Biden’s aides continue to say that the current rate of inflation — a 5.4 percent increase in the Consumer Price Index from a year ago, according to the data released on Tuesday — is temporary and largely a product of special circumstances from the pandemic. They point to snarled supply chains in areas like automobile manufacturing, where a shortage of semiconductor chips is slowing production and contributing to a rapid rise in used car and truck prices. Used vehicles accounted for one third of June’s price increases, the Labor Department said.
Administration officials did not appear to be expecting that magnitude of a surge for June. But they continued to insist on Tuesday that the pressures were not going to lead to 1970s-style calamity.
“Headline inflation is up but we need to look under the hood to understand what’s really going on,” Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “Used cares, new cars, auto parts, and car rentals accounted for 60% of month-over-month price increases.”
The Biden team sees early signs that the used-car market is beginning to cool off and that other supply pressures, like a jump in lumber prices earlier this year, were also starting to ease, an official said Monday on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the inflation report publicly.
Officials were also hopeful that consumers were beginning to shift more of their spending from goods that have been affected by the supply chain disruptions, like lumber and cars, toward services like dining and tourism.
The official repeated the administration’s long-running view that the sharp uptick in prices this spring and summer was the product of those supply constraints, and that it will prove temporary and not the start of a sustained cycle of wage and price increases like the 1970s.
The administration also continues to view the price increases as being inflated by data quirks given that prices fell substantially last year during the depths of the recession, making their rebound this year look larger than it actually is. Those “base effects,” as they are known, are still affecting the inflation data, though they began to moderate in June.
Still, administration officials have subtly shifted their views on how long the so-called transitory price effects will linger in the economy, according to two administration officials, even before this month’s report was released.
In Mr. Biden’s official budget request, released this spring, officials forecast an inflation rate that stayed near historical averages for 2021 and never rose past 2.3 percent per year over the course of a decade. But internally and publicly, administration officials have now begun to acknowledge the possibility that higher inflation could stay with the economy for a year or more.
A recent post from Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, titled “Historical Parallels to Today’s Inflationary Episode,” concludes that the past period of inflation most comparable to today’s economy in the United States came immediately after World War II, when supply disruptions drove up prices. That period, the post notes, lasted about two years.
Democrats in Iowa have been increasingly locked out of power, and with major offices on the ballot next year, the party’s bench is thin. On Tuesday, one of the state’s best known Democrats, J.D. Scholten, took himself out of the running for governor or U.S. Senate in 2022, instead saying he will work for a progressive group that seeks rural votes in battleground states.
Mr. Scholten nearly defeated former Representative Steve King in 2018, setting up Mr. King’s eventual demise as the House’s most outspoken white nationalist. Mr. Scholten considered running for statewide office in 2020, but also passed that year.
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, is expected to seek a second term in 2022. Senator Charles E. Grassley, also a Republican, has said he would announce in the fall whether he will run for an eighth term next year, when he would be 89 on Election Day.
The lone Democrat in Iowa’s congressional delegation, Representative Cindy Axne, who survived major losses for her party last year, is Democrats’ top choice for a statewide run. She has said she is considering challenging for either Mr. Grassley’s or Ms. Reynolds’s seat, but has made no public decision. Other Democrats eyeing statewide runs are State Representative Ras Smith, who has declared his candidacy for governor, and Rob Sands, the state auditor.
Winning either seat will be a tough slog for the party, which in 2020 lost two congressional seats in Iowa and a U.S. Senate race.
Mr. Scholten came within three percentage points of defeating the divisive Mr. King in a deep red district in 2018. The Republican establishment in Washington and Des Moines, fearing for the loss of the seat in 2020, backed a more conventional candidate in that year’s primary, who ousted Mr. King and easily cruised to victory in the general election against Mr. Scholten.
Now, Mr. Scholten, 41, a former professional baseball player, will become executive director of RuralVote.org, a super PAC that aims to “improve the Democratic brand in rural communities” and counter what it calls Republican “misinformation.’’ In 2020, the group’s first election cycle, it raised $313,000 and says it placed 42,500 yard signs in rural areas. For the midterms, it is targeting 39 counties in battleground states.
“Democrats need to stop ignoring rural voters,” Mr. Scholten said in a statement. “One of the reasons why we continue to lose statehouses across the country is because we’re ceding rural America to Republicans. If we want to win over hearts and minds for progressive policies everywhere, we need to up our game in rural America big time.”
A federal judge in Michigan held a nearly six-hour hearing on Monday seeking to determine whether nine pro-Trump lawyers — including Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood — should face sanctions for making unverified arguments in a lawsuit that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The judge, Linda V. Parker, repeatedly pressed the lawyers about how — and even whether — they had verified the statements of several witnesses who took part in the suit by filing sworn statements making claims of widespread fraud and tampering with voting machines. Several times, Judge Parker expressed astonishment at the lawyers’ answers, telling them they had a responsibility to perform “minimal due diligence” and calling some the lawsuit’s claims “fantastical.”
After the election, Ms. Powell, a Dallas-based lawyer, led an effort to attack President Biden’s victory by filing several suits in courts across the country claiming that tabulation machines made by Dominion Voting Systems were tampered with by a bizarre set of characters — from the financier George Soros to Venezuelan intelligence agents — in what she baselessly described as a covert plot to flip votes from President Donald J. Trump to Mr. Biden.
Dominion subsequently filed a defamation suit against Ms. Powell and others, including Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, accusing them of launching “a viral disinformation campaign” about the election and seeking damages of more than $1 billion.
Judge Parker, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, is considering a separate motion, filed by the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit, on whether to levy punishments against Ms. Powell, Mr. Wood and the other lawyers that could include disbarment. A ruling is not expected on the motion until later this summer.
President Biden took office with bold warnings for Russia and China about human rights as he pressed democracies around the world to stand up against autocracy. But this week, he is facing a string of similar challenges in America’s neighborhood.
On Monday, a day after huge protests across Cuba, Mr. Biden accused officials there of “enriching themselves” instead of protecting people from the coronavirus pandemic, repression and economic suffering.
An hour later, the State Department announced it was revoking visas that had allowed 100 Nicaraguan politicians, judges and their family members to travel to the United States, as punishment for undermining democracy, suppressing peaceful protests or abusing human rights.
By early afternoon, Mr. Biden refocused on Haiti, urging its political leaders to “come together for the good of their country,” less than a week after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his bed.
“The United States stands ready to continue to provide assistance,” Mr. Biden told reporters at the White House. He promised more details on Haiti and Cuba later: “Stay tuned,” he said.
The turmoil presents a potential crisis closer to home, with a possible exodus of Haitians as the Biden administration contends with a surge of migrants at the southwestern border. It is also forcing the White House to focus on the region more broadly after years of indifference — or limited attention — from previous Republican and Democratic administrations.
But U.S. influence began waning in the region over the past decade, as it turned toward fighting terrorism in the Middle East and as Russia and especially China moved in to finance projects and offer political support and other incentives.
Ryan C. Berg, a senior fellow and scholar in the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that China was now the top trading partner for at least eight Latin American nations, and that 19 countries in the region were participating in Beijing’s extensive infrastructure and investment project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative.
If all goes as planned, the Treasury Department will begin making a series of monthly payments in coming days to families with children, setting a milestone in social policy and intensifying a debate over whether to make the subsidies a permanent part of the American safety net.
With all but the most affluent families eligible to receive up to $300 a month per child, the United States will join many other rich countries that provide a guaranteed income for children, a goal that has long animated progressives. Experts estimate the payments will cut child poverty by nearly half, an achievement with no precedent.
But the program, created as part of the stimulus bill that Democrats passed over unified Republican opposition in March, expires in a year, and the rollout could help or hinder President Biden’s pledge to extend it.
While the government has increased many aid programs during the coronavirus pandemic, supporters say the payments from an expanded Child Tax Credit, at a one-year cost of about $105 billion, are unique in their potential to stabilize both poor and middle-class families.
“America is dramatically behind its industrial peers in investing in our children,” said Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey.
Among America’s 74 million children, nearly nine in 10 will qualify for the new monthly payments — up to $250 a child, or $300 for children under six — which are scheduled to start on Thursday. Those payments, most of which will be sent to bank accounts through direct deposit, will be half of the year’s subsidy. The rest will come as a tax refund next year.
Mr. Biden has proposed a four-year extension in a broader package, called the American Families Plan, but the program’s fate may depend on whether Democrats can unite and advance it through the evenly divided Senate.
The unconditional payments — what critics call “welfare” — break with a quarter century of policy. Since President Bill Clinton signed a 1996 bill to “end welfare,” aid has gone almost entirely to parents who work.
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, recently wrote that the new payments, with “no work required,” would resurrect a “failed welfare system,” and provide “free money” for criminals and addicts.
A few conservatives, however, support subsidies for children, on the theory they might boost falling birthrates and allow more parents to raise children full-time. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, has proposed a larger child benefit, though he would finance it by cutting other programs.
