Power Up: President Biden’s leverage at home and abroad is being put to the test
3 years ago
Biden #Biden
with Tobi Raji
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At the White House
TESTING BIDEN’S THEORY OF THE CASE: The premise of President Biden’s presidency – leveraging personal relationships to get things done with allies and adversaries alike at home and abroad – is being seriously tested.
“President Biden sold himself as the man with the relationships — not just with Democrats and Republicans at home, but with allies and leaders across the globe who were alarmed and exhausted by four years of Donald Trump,” our colleagues Anne Gearan and Ashley Parker report.
“The domestic relationships are still playing out. But as Biden embarks on his first foreign trip this week, it will quickly become evident whether his brand of personal diplomacy and oft-mentioned familiarity with foreign leaders can produce results for the United States.
“Along the way, we’re going to make it clear that the United States is back,” Biden told American forces stationed at RAF Mildenhall, a British air base, shortly after landing in the U.K. yesterday. “And democracies of the world are standing together to tackle the toughest challenges and the issues that matter most to our future.”
Biden’s efforts to “leverage his personal familiarity with fellow leaders in an effort to reestablish American engagement abroad” might hit some snags this week, Anne and Ashley write.
“…Biden may also find himself confronting the limits of personal diplomacy. The world has tilted in a sharply populist direction since he left the vice presidency, and several influential leaders — including Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron — have taken office since Biden’s last stint in power.”
Biden meets with Johnson for the first time in person on Thursday, “with hopes over a new US-UK ‘Atlantic Charter’ undermined by ‘deep’ concerns in Washington over the post-Brexit situation in Northern Ireland,” per the Financial Times’s George Parker, Lauren Fedor and Katrina Manson.
“President Biden ordered US officials to issue Boris Johnson with an extraordinary diplomatic rebuke for imperiling the Northern Ireland peace process over Brexit, The Times can reveal.”
“Yael Lempert, America’s most senior diplomat in Britain, told Lord Frost, the Brexit minister, at a meeting that the government was ‘inflaming’ tensions in Ireland and Europe with its opposition to checks at ports in the province.”
“In a move without recent precedent, Lempert said she had been told to take the step of issuing London with a demarche, a formal diplomatic reprimand seldom exchanged between allies.”
And at home, his infrastructure talks with GOP lawmakers, led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), collapsed amid some serious differences. Generally reliable members of his own party started to express reservations about the direction negotiations are headed in at the moment.
After Biden’s National Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy told Politico’s Zac Colman on Tuesday that some of the more ambitious proposals to combat climate change might not make it into the infrastructure package, Democrats expressed concern.
“In an interview with POLITICO, McCarthy acknowledged the political difficulties in passing aggressive climate change legislation, but said Biden was still ‘going for it’ on climate in his $2 trillion infrastructure plan,” Colman writes.
“I think a lot of people have concerns,” McCarthy said. “We have concerns about whether we’re going to meet the moment in the kind of bold way in which President Biden knows we have to.”
“While every piece like a clean electricity standard may not end [up] in the final version, we know that it is necessary, we know that the utilities want it, we are going to fight like crazy to make sure that it’s in there. And then we’re going to be open to a range of other investment strategies,” she said.
“Democrats in both the House and the Senate responded to McCarthy’s comments by warning the White House not to take their votes for granted in any outreach to win Republican backers,” per Colman. “They cautioned that strong climate provisions were necessary to keep their support for any plan in the evenly split Senate, with Sens. Martin Heinrich (N.M.), Michael Bennet (Colo.) and Brian Schatz (Hawaii) all weighing in on the matter.”
Where things currently stand: “On one track are newly emerging conversations between Biden and the bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Sinema and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who are ‘trying to put something together that might be close to what the president needs,’” our colleagues Seung Min Kim and Tyler Pager reported earlier this week. “It’s unclear what size that package might be.”
“At the same time, however, Schumer said Democrats are getting to work on a reconciliation package that might only need support from Democrats, acknowledging that their party is unlikely to accomplish everything they hope in a bill crafted alongside the GOP.”
“Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), the co-chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus, spoke Monday night with the White House about bipartisan efforts to reach an infrastructure deal, and Gottheimer has been working closely with Cassidy and Sinema in the Senate, an aide familiar with the conversations said.”
Reading tea leaves: Meanwhile, lawmakers are started to consider a $547 billion road, transit and rail funding package, our colleague Ian Duncan reports:
“The bill is advancing as President Biden is seeking to secure $2.3 trillion in new funding for infrastructure programs branded as the American Jobs Plan. While the bill is separate from that push — funding core programs at the Department of Transportation and Amtrak that Congress typically renews about every five years — it embodies many of the ideas proposed by Biden, such as funding electric vehicle chargers and a program to heal wounds left by urban highway construction. The proposal also would set rules on how states can spend federal transportation dollars.”
“…the bill’s environmental focus — and its partisan drafting process — were assailed by committee Republicans, who cast Wednesday’s meeting as a dead-end that would deliver a proposal that had no chance of becoming law because of opposition in the Senate.”
The campaign
THE ESTABLISHMENT STRIKES BACK: “Democratic primary voters have been turning away this year from the anti-elite furies that continue to roil Republican politics, repeatedly choosing more moderate candidates promising steady leadership over disrupters from the party’s left wing,” our colleagues Michael Scherer, Gregory S. Schneider and David Weigel report.
“Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, which brought the renomination of former governor Terry McAuliffe and primary losses by three of the Democrats’s most outspoken liberal delegates, only underscored a pattern that was previously apparent in special House elections in Louisiana and New Mexico.”
“In the crowded Democratic primary in New York City, a similar crop of contenders, including Eric Adams and Andrew Yang, have emerged as front-runners by pushing platforms that include an embrace of police as an essential component of public safety, a far cry from the ‘defund the police’ mantra that some liberal activists embraced in 2020.”
‘Prac-tactical’: “There is nothing wrong with being one of those trailblazers who shakes up the status quo, but you can do it in a way that brings people along with you,” Michelle Maldonado, a small-business owner from Bristow, Va., who defeated the state House of Delegates’s only self-described democratic socialist in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, told our colleagues.
“Prac-tactical — you’ve got to be practical and tactical at the same time.”
Centrist successes and liberal losses. “Such rhetoric has left some liberal politicians fuming, as they see the dream of remaking the Democratic Party slipping away like it did during the 2020 presidential campaign, when perceived electability became the most valued commodity and voters coalesced around Joe Biden.”
“The centrist successes contrast with the sharp rightward turn in the Republican Party, which has largely adopted the rhetoric of former president Donald Trump. Rank-and-file members, at the state and local levels, continue to rail against the nation’s institutions, passing censure resolutions against the few leaders who have contradicted Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen — a rallying cry that has been widely repeated by GOP candidates across the country.”
The investigations
WATCHDOG SAYS POLICE DIDN’T CLEAR LAFAYETTE SQUARE FOR TRUMP: “The US Park Police did not clear racial injustice protesters from Lafayette Square to allow for Trump’s march to St. John’s Church last June, but instead did so to allow a contractor to install a fence safely around the White House,” CNN’s Whitney Wild and Liz Stark report.
A video timeline of the crackdown on protesters before Trump’s photo op
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The report by Interior Department inspector general Mark L. Greenblatt, “found that preparations to clear the protesters and erect a fence began two days before the park clearing,” our colleagues Tom Jackman and Carol D. Leonnig report.
“But the idea may have gained greater urgency on the morning of June 1, in a meeting Trump held in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, military advisers, Attorney General William P. Barr and other law enforcement officials.”
“The Washington Post has previously reported that Trump was furious at reporting that revealed he had been taken to an emergency bunker on the first night of protests and the poor impression created that he had no control over the protests.”
“The group agreed the Park Police and supporting teams of law enforcement officers would extend the perimeter and gradually push protesters further away from the White House and St. John’s Church. By midday, Trump was working with close confidants on a plan to project his control over the city by walking across Lafayette Square to the church.”
In the agencies
ADMINISTRATION SAYS VACCINATIONS AREN’T REQUIRED FOR FEDERAL WORKFORCE: “The Biden administration has told federal agencies that they generally should not require their employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus to work on-site in federal buildings or to disclose whether they are vaccinated,” our colleague Eric Yoder reports.
“Employees who disclose they are unvaccinated or refuse to answer a voluntary question about vaccination status should be subject to safety requirements such as mask-wearing and social distancing, new guidance says.”
“The guidance is the latest evolving workplace policy regarding the 2.1 million-employee federal workforce as pandemic conditions ease and vaccination rates rise. It comes as the Biden administration is expected to release a broader policy about when and how federal employees can return to the office and remote work going forward.”
The numbers: “Out of a civilian workforce of some 770,000, about 250,000 are fully vaccinated and an additional 60,000 are partly vaccinated.”
MAY MIGRANT NUMBERS ARE IN: “U.S. authorities intercepted 180,034 migrants along the Mexico border in May, and a growing share have been arriving from nations outside Central America and Mexico, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data published Wednesday showing illegal crossing at a new 20-year high,” our colleague Nick Miroff reports.
“Border arrests have soared since Biden took office, and the CBP figures show May was the busiest month yet. While the administration was overwhelmed this spring by a record influx of migrant teenagers and children crossing without parents, their numbers continued to decline last month, as did family groups.”
“Those declines were offset by another increase in single adult migrants, with 121,082 apprehended last month. U.S. authorities have used a provision of the public health code to promptly ‘expel’ the majority of those adults to Mexico, but the circular pattern has allowed many to attempt entries again and again without fear of legal consequence or jail time.”
Changing demographics: “The latest CBP data show a major increase in the number of non-Mexican and non-Central American migrants encountered along the border. CBP detained 40,067 migrants from other nations last month, up from 9,671 in January. Those migrants included large numbers of Cubans, Haitians, Ecuadorans, Brazilians and citizens of African nations.”
ADMINISTRATION TARGETS MAJOR TRUMP-ERA ROLLBACK: “The Biden administration is set to toss out Trump’s efforts to scale back the number of streams, marshes and other wetlands that fall under federal protection, kicking off a legal and regulatory scuffle over the fate of wetlands and waterways around the country, from the arid West to the swampy South,” our colleague Dino Grandoni reports.
“EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced Wednesday that his agency will formally repeal the 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which removed federal pollution oversight from tributaries of iconic waterways and broad swaths of the arid West. [The] EPA will then begin crafting its own, more expansive definition of waterways subject to federal water protections,” Politico’s Annie Snider reports.
“It marked the latest in a series of decisions by Biden to restore environmental protections that Trump had weakened or repealed, and it sets the stage for a regulatory and legal battle over an issue that has pitted environmental groups against agricultural interests for decades,” the New York Times’s Lisa Friedman reports.
“The effort also will be a test for Regan, who came to Washington with a reputation as a consensus builder who could find common ground between industry and environmentalists.”
In the media
TRUMP VS. CNN: “The Trump administration battled with CNN for half a year to obtain [Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr’s 2017 email logs] and insisted it all take place under an extraordinary order of secrecy,” CNN’s Katelyn Polantz and Evan Perez report.
The administration also put “CNN general counsel David Vigilante under a gag order prohibiting him from sharing any details about the government’s efforts with anyone beyond the network’s president, top attorneys at CNN’s corporate parent and attorneys at an outside law firm.”
Why this is different: “It’s not uncommon for a media organization to receive a subpoena from the Justice Department for reporter records and to negotiate protections for its journalists. What stands apart is the total secrecy that surrounded the order, the months-long court proceeding and the Trump administration’s unwillingness to negotiate.”
