US election 2020: Biden to speak as Trump and the supreme court threaten Obamacare – live updates

The Trump administration’s war of words on the World Health Organisation (WHO) continues, even as the US exit from the body progresses. The US has said today that the terms under which a WHO-led team of experts is to investigate the origins of the new coronavirus were not transparently negotiated or in line with the mandate agreed by member states.

The Trump administration has accused the US agency of being “China-centric”, which WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has repeatedly denied, and has accused China of having hidden the extent of its initial outbreak.

Reuters report that Garrett Grigsby, head of the global affairs office at the US Department of Health and Human Services, told the WHO’s ministerial assembly that member states had been made aware of the investigation’s terms of reference only a few days ago.

“The TOR (terms of reference) were not negotiated in a transparent way with all WHO member states. The TOR and the investigation itself appear to be inconsistent with the mandate provided by member states,” he said, without elaborating.

WHO’s top emergency expert Mike Ryan said on 30 October that the WHO-led team of scientists and their Chinese counterparts had held a first virtual meeting regarding joint investigations into the origin of the novel coronavirus.

Donald Trump has just tweeted about Texas congressman-elect Ronny Jackson giving the president and the administration credit for the potential deployment of a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year. This claim is untrue.

Yesterday vice-president Mike Pence also tried to claim the administration’s Operation Warp Speed programme had helped the vaccine’s development. Pfizer said absolutely not.

“We were never part of the Warp Speed,” Kathrin Jansen, a senior vice-president and the head of vaccine research and development at Pfizer, said in an interview yesterday. “We have never taken any money from the US government, or from anyone.”

David Sirota has this for us today, asking can Joe Biden avoid Obama’s mistakes?

By the end of Obama’s presidency, Democrats held fewer elected offices than at any time since the early 20th century. Trump in 2016 made fraudulent promises to crack down on Wall Street – and he won the White House by flipping disaffected voters in locales that had been particularly hurt by a financial crisis that had never been rectified or reckoned with.

To be sure, Republicans were a powerful and determined opposition to Obama. But Democrats’ capitulations were disasters. They never understood the truism about political capital articulated by Republican strategist Karl Rove: “If you don’t spend it, it’s not like treasure stuck away at a storehouse someplace. It is perishable. It dwindles away.”

With a likely GOP Senate, a prospective Biden administration is certainly in a weaker position than Obama was in 2008 – but there are ways for the new White House to spend political capital on a working class agenda.

Read more here: David Sirota – Can Joe Biden avoid Obama’s mistakes? He must – for the future of the party

There’s an interest take in the Washington Post this morning on the Republican party’s indulgence of Donald Trump refusing to accept the election result. They write:

Only a smattering of Republican senators have acknowledged Biden’s victory, and there has been little coaxing on the part of senior GOP lawmakers to help Trump come to terms with his loss. Some said there is value in ensuring the integrity of this year’s results, while others described a chaotic and scattershot operation that they hoped would eventually push Trump to cooperate in a peaceful transfer of power.

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” said one senior Republican official. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on 20 January. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”

Read more here: Washington Post – Top Republicans back Trump’s efforts to challenge election results

Four years ago today, president Barack Obama welcomed Donald Trump to the Oval office for the first time. Here’s how ABC News reported it at the time.

By the way, in the interest of balance, I should point out that Trump campaign senior advisor for strategy Steve Cortes has written an article for the National Pulse outlining the four reasons why he believes last week’s voting shows evidence of widespread voter fraud.

His key points boil down to this:

• The levels of voter turnout “defy reasonable expectations”.
• He doesn’t believe that “a candidate as doddering and lazy as Joe Biden” could out-perform Barack Obama who “boasted rock star appeal”.
• There were too many ballots cast just for Joe Biden without filling out the Senate and House races.
• States haven’t been rejecting enough mail-in ballots compared to historic levels.

I’ve got to be honest with you, if I was trying to lay out this argument, I would not have started with the opening line “The statistical case is, admittedly, circumstantial rather than conclusive”, but that is possibly why Steve is in Trump’s strategy team, and I’m not.

You can do your research and make up your own mind here: National Pulse – Steve Cortes: The statistical case agains Biden’s win

While we are talking about numbers, you will recall that it has been a constant refrain from Donald Trump that the reason the US has the highest incidence of coronavirus cases in the world is because it tests more than anybody else. Experts have repeatedly pointed out that other benchmarks belie this spurious claim.

Anurag Maan notes today that there were just over 59,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals across the United States on Monday, the country’s highest number ever of in-patients being treated for the disease.

The number of Americans with Covid-19 currently hospitalized has surged around 73% over the past 30 days according to a Reuters tally – to a record level of at least 59,008 that surpasses the previous high of 58,370 on 22 July.

Hospitalizations are a key metric of how the pandemic is progressing, and Texas reported the highest number with 6,103, followed by Illinois with 4,409 and California with 3,668 patients.

The data shows the US is experiencing its worst phase so far of the outbreak. It has reported more than a million new cases in the past 10 days, the speediest surge in infections since the country reported its first cases, in Washington state, 294 days ago.

On 26 February, president Trump boasted that the coronavirus was about to disappear altogether. “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he insisted.

Here’s a reminder of how senior Republican figures have reacted to the election in the last couple of days. Along with the president himself, the vast majority of them have refused to accept Trump’s election loss.

The former president George W Bush was among a handful of Republicans who have congratulated the Biden-Harris team, while the senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said Trump was ‘100% within his rights’ to question election results.

The US attorney general, William Barr, has authorised federal prosecutors to begin investigating ‘substantial allegations’ of voter irregularities despite their being scant evidence.

Just to expand on that point for a minute, I posted earlier the current state of the vote count in the key contested states [see 6:33/11:33]. There’s nowhere that Joe Biden’s lead isn’t currently in at least five figures.

For Trumps’s allegations that the election has been “rigged” or “stolen” to be true, the Trump team need to demonstrate that there has been voter fraud amounting to literally thousands of ballots across multiple US states.

There is simply no evidence to support this.

It should also be noted that Republicans are not contesting the down-ticket results, where they appear to have maintained control of the Senate – fending off several well-funded competitive Democratic party challengers – and increased their representation in the House. These votes were all conducted on the exact same ballot papers.

President-elect Joe Biden is championing the Obama administration’s signature health law as it goes before the supreme court in the case that could overturn it amid the greatest health criss the nation has faced in a century. Biden will deliver a speech on the Affordable Care Act and his healthcare plans later today.

Biden has pledged to build on the Affordable Care Act while championing a “public option” that would allow more people to opt into government-sponsored health insurance, even as millions of others could stick with their current, usually employer-based coverage.

The supreme court ruled eight years ago to leave the essential components of the law known as Obamacare intact, but there is increased concern about today’s challenged as it is now controlled 6-3 by a conservative majority after outgoing president Donald Trump’s unseemly rushed appointment of Amy Coney Barrett.

The suit challenging the healthcare law was brought in America’s largest conservative state, Texas, and is backed by Trump and top Republicans. It asks the supreme court to declare the law’s mandate to buy health insurance unconstitutional because Congress had previously repealed the penalties for noncompliance.

Biden’s speech reflects the importance he is putting on health care, reports Will Weissert for the Associated Press. On Monday, Biden pleaded with Americans to put aside their political differences and wear masks to protect themselves and their neighbors from the virus.

“We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives, American lives,” Biden said. “Please, I implore you, wear a mask.”

Abbe R Gluck puts into perspective what is at stake in the supreme court today, as it hears a case that might strike down the Affordable Care Act.

It is the most challenged statute in modern American history. In addition to the supreme court cases, there have been more than 1,700 cases in the lower courts; Republicans in Congress have tried more than 70 times to repeal it; the Trump administration has engaged in an unprecedented array of executive actions to undermine the insurance markets and financially starve the law; red states rebelled against it from the day it was passed; and state initiatives have been enacted by supporters to force states to effectuate it.

And still the Affordable Care Act, which may be the most resilient statute in American history, has done more than survive: It has transformed our healthcare system and the way Americans think about their right to care.

What is at stake is even more than the nearly one-fifth of our economy that the health care industry represents and what has become a new baseline on coverage for Americans. It is democracy, and the court’s duty to leave political decisions to the elected branches of government.

It’s not just the abstract legal arguments, it is the real world effect in the middle of a pandemic too. Gluck notes:

What would an adverse ruling in this case mean? We now take countless things for granted that come from the law and that so many Americans – not just those on public programs – benefit from: insurance covering childhood vaccines, colorectal cancer screenings with no co-pay, no annual caps on insurance, older people’s vastly expanded drug coverage, no denials based on pre-existing health conditions and much more. All of that and more will be gone if the court strikes down the law.

Already 133 million Americans have benefited from the ban on pre-existing conditions, and Covid-19 might now be deemed a pre-existing condition.

Thanks to the huge national caseload under the Trump administration’s care, that latter point would now impact over 10 million Americans.

Read more here: New York Times – Abbe R. Gluck – Obamacare is back in court. The stakes couldn’t be higher