WASHINGTON – President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised on Friday an accelerated response to a series of frightening and growing challenges, as the economy showed new signs of weakness, the coronavirus pandemic killed more Americans than never and Congress considered President Trump’s impeachment second half.
While Washington remained consumed with the aftermath of the Capitol attack on Wednesday and Democrats stepped up their efforts to hold Trump accountable for his role in inciting the attack, Biden signaled that he intended to focus on jobs and the pandemic, refusing to consider whether the House should accuse Trump.
In one day, the Labor Department reported that the economy lost 140,000 jobs in December, ending a seven-month streak of growth after the country’s fall into the spring recession, Biden said there was “a dire need to act now. “
He promised to act quickly as soon as he became president to push a stimulus package to Congress to provide relief to struggling individuals, small businesses, students, local governments and schools.
Mr. Biden and his advisors have not yet completed the proposal or agreed on the total amount. Meteorologists expect more job losses this month, a victim of the new outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and imposition of blockages and other restrictions on economic activities by local and state authorities to slow the spread.
“The price will be high,” Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Del.
“You have to spend the money now,” he said, apparently referring to his entire batch of economic plans, including immediate aid and a larger account that includes infrastructure spending. “The answer is yes, it will be in the trillions of dollars.”
The Biden team is also preparing a wave of economic actions that will not need Congressional approval. Biden’s advisers said on Friday that the president-elect would instruct the Department of Education to extend a pause in student loan payments that were initially issued under the Trump administration. Biden asked Congress on Friday to take “immediate action” to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $ 15 an hour.
He also promised to step up efforts to slow the spread of the virus, which now claims 4,000 lives a day – more than those who died during the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the terrorist attacks in 11 September 2001. Biden’s team said the president-elect would immediately provide more vaccines to states when he took office, breaking drastically with Trump’s practice of withholding a few doses for the second doses.
“People are very, very, very desperate,” said Biden.
Although he said that the issue of Trump’s impeachment fell to Congress, he attacked the president once again for his conduct in office, even as he sought to position himself as focused on the issues of greatest immediate concern to voters: his health and economic security.
“For a long, long time I thought President Trump was in no position to hold office,” said Biden. “I am focused on the virus, the vaccine and economic growth. What Congress decides to do is they decide. “
“But,” he added quickly, “they are going to have to start running.”
Along with the powers of the presidency that he will assume at midday on January 20, Biden will assume the responsibility of guiding the country through a collision of crises more varied and intense than any other faced by his recent predecessors. In addition to the pandemic and the faltering economy, they include racial tensions that demand reconciliation after simmering for decades and a deep political divide that turned into violence on Wednesday and undermined the country’s assumptions about its tradition of peaceful transfer of power.
“It is bigger than his presidency. It will take a generation working on it all, ”said Rahm Emanuel, who was chief of staff to former President Barack Obama when he took office during the economic crisis more than a decade ago.
“He will take the first steps,” said Emanuel of Biden. “But you don’t deal with 20 years of change in a week or two. This is the work of a generation ”.
Biden – who on Friday repeated his pledge to work with Republicans to advance his agenda – now faces the real prospect that Trump could be tried for sedition in the Senate when he takes office.
That job starts in earnest in 12 days, and Biden’s aides said he expects lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to start working quickly, even with the question of Trump’s fate dominating the conversation in Washington.
The Presidential Transition
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s steps toward impeaching Trump for the second time came after a wave of anger by members of both parties in what many called an insurrection by the supporters of the president. On Friday, Biden called them “a band of bandits, rebels, white supremacists, anti-Semites” who had “the active encouragement of an incumbent United States president”.
But Biden seemed aware of the political risk of becoming the main spokesman for the punishment and removal of his predecessor, and the danger that a protracted impeachment and trial process could delay or hinder his hopes for quick approval of his main agenda items. .
He said he could have openly supported the impeachment if the Capitol’s attacks had happened when Trump had six months left of his term. But he repeatedly suggested that the best way to get rid of the current president was to wait until Biden took office.
“The question is, what happens to 14 days left or 13 days left?” Biden said, adding later that “I am focused now on taking control, as president and vice president, on the 20th, and getting our agenda moving as quickly as possible.”
The president-elect said he thinks the events on Capitol Hill on Wednesday could serve as a moment that brought people together, and he singled out Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Mitt Romney of Utah, both Republicans, as examples of political opponents they shared your anger over what happened.
“Many of them are just as outraged and disappointed and ashamed and mortified by the president’s conduct as I am,” said Biden.
But at the same time, he underscored the divisions that remain in Washington, attacking Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz for leading the effort to overthrow the election on Trump’s behalf and for spreading disinformation to the supporters of the president who helped whip them in a frenzy.
He said he agreed with some Republicans who said “what a shame is the way Ted Cruz and others are dealing with it, as they are also responsible for what happened”.
When asked if Cruz should resign, Biden said: “I think they should be defeated the next time they run. I think the American public has a very good and clear view of who they are. They are part of the big lie. “
Biden said he was scheduled to reveal his legislative program to deal with the coronavirus crisis and its economic consequences on Thursday, six days before his inauguration as 46th president.
Biden’s economic team is immersed in the process of developing proposals for a second stimulus bill and a larger economic package, including spending on infrastructure and raising taxes for the wealthy. Congressional advisers and top Democrats hope to accelerate the package in Congress as soon as Biden takes office.
“A devastating pandemic, an economic crisis, a country divided by political division and mistrust, seriously damaged institutions and broken global alliances,” said David Axelrod, who served as Obama’s political advisor during his first two years at the White House. “He has his hands full.”
Biden and his aides were hit particularly hard by two gloomy numbers in the jobs report on Friday: the loss of nearly 500,000 jobs in December in the leisure and hospitality industry, and thousands of jobs in public education – a warning sign from that state budget cuts could further hinder the recovery in the coming months.
They are particularly focused on direct checks on individuals, a policy that Biden and Democratic Senate candidates applied in the second round of the Georgia elections, which gave his party control of the chamber, and in efforts to fight the pandemic by accelerating tests for the virus and the implantation of vaccines.
The contours of these proposals are beginning to be outlined. The stimulus package will include Biden’s request for an additional $ 1,400 in direct payments to adults and children who qualified for $ 600 payments approved on the approved lame duck stimulus last month, bringing the total benefit to $ 2,000 per individual.
The challenge of driving his stimulus plans to a narrowly divided Senate was on display on Friday, when a moderate Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said $ 2,000 in direct payments should not be the first priority for legislation. and that he preferred checks to be stamped “for those who need. “
The package will also include additional benefits for the nearly 11 million Americans who are still classified as unemployed by the Department of Labor, assistance for tenants and help for small business owners, with a focus on companies owned by women and minorities. He will present what Biden has promised to be tens of billions of dollars to help schools reopen safely, tens of billions to help state and local governments keep essential workers at work and “billions of dollars to bring vaccines from one bottle to the next. someone’s arm. ”
Senate leaders – such as Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who will lead the Budget Committee, and Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, who will chair the Finance Committee – said in interviews this week that they were preparing to work quickly with the Mr. Biden’s team to draft new economic bailout legislation.
Sanders said he had spoken to Biden on Thursday about proposals and that Sanders’ team was already working on details.
“He will, I know, do everything he can to resolve the economic and health crises facing our country,” said Sanders of Biden. “The crisis is extremely serious and we have to act as quickly as possible.”