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Twenty former U.S. attorneys ― all appointed by GOP presidents ― gave 2020 Democratic nomineeJoe Bidentheir “strongest endorsement”in an open letterslamming PresidentDonald Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department.
Trump “has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests in the handling of certain cases – such as the investigations into foreign election interference and the prosecution of his political associates – and has taken action against those who have stood up for the interests of justice,” says the letter signed by ex-prosecutors who served in Republican administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
Biden, the attorneys wrote, has “devoted his career to supporting law enforcement, protecting the independence of the Justice Department, and working to ensure that the federal government exercises its law enforcement powers fairly and impartially and in the interests of all Americans.”
The former attorneys who signed an open letter condemning President Donald Trump served in Republican administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, pictured. (Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
They also hailed Biden for appearing to understand “that unity — and not division — is the key to meeting the challenges that our country is facing.”
Biden would “make every effort to unite law enforcement and the nation in the pursuit of justice – to defend the rule of law, to serve and protect all Americans, and to build a criminal justice system that provides equal justice under the law,” they added.
The letter adds to Biden’s backing from figures or groups that would traditionally be expected to endorse the GOP candidate.
'Safer than your local grocery store': How the Pentagon kept the virus at bay as the White House struggled
The COVID-19 outbreak sweeping through the White House, most recently among the staff of Vice President Mike Pence, has underlined the fact that in Washington’s halls of power there has been a tale of two pandemics.
The contrast between the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the White House and the limited impact it has had on the health of the 25,000-strong Pentagon workforce, which has rigorously followed CDC guidelines, could not be more pronounced. President Trump has continually downplayed the severity of the virus and mocked those who took steps to protect themselves from it.
Trump at the White House on Tuesday. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
By Sunday, at least five people linked to Pence, including his chief of staff, Marc Short, had tested positive for COVID-19. They are only the most recent victims of the disease that seems to have been circulating at the White House since at least early May, when one of Trump’s personal valets tested positive. More recently in the White House complex, where the workforce numbers in the hundreds, rather than the thousands at the Pentagon, an outbreak that blossomed in late September hospitalized the president, sickened the first lady and forced several of Trump’s most senior advisers to quarantine at home after they tested positive.
Meanwhile, three miles away in the Pentagon, one of the world’s largest office buildings, life went on.
The Defense Department does not release the numbers of COVID-19 cases at individual installations, but the Pentagon’s numbers are “significantly statistically lower” than those in the surrounding northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., said Tom Muir, director of the Defense Department’s Washington Headquarters Services.
In an interview with Yahoo news, Muir, whose job makes him the unofficial mayor of the Pentagon, listed several factors behind the Pentagon’s success, including an embrace of telework and a disciplined workforce willing to follow orders based on CDC guidance.
From the start, the Defense Department in general, and the Pentagon in particular, took the threat of COVID-19 seriously. On March 15, about two weeks after Trump had predicted that “like a miracle” the virus would “disappear,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper raised the health protection condition for the Pentagon Reservation from “Alpha” to “Bravo,” reflecting an increased spread of the coronavirus in the surrounding community. (The Pentagon Reservation consists of about 80 buildings in the greater Washington area and has a work force of 75,000, roughly a third of whom work in the Pentagon building itself.) Eight days later, Esper raised it again, to “Charlie,” signifying a sustained COVID-19 transmission in the wider community.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. (Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images)
Each change brought with it a series of actions in the Pentagon, including a reduction in the number of building entrances and increased cleaning and disinfecting of both public spaces and offices. “Our guidance is aligned with what the CDC believes to be the best science available,” Muir said.
But the most notable difference was an increased reliance on telework.
With the shift to health protection condition (HPCON) Charlie, the number of people coming to work in the Pentagon dropped by about 85 percent, to about 3,750. The remainder worked from home.
What happened next surprised Pentagon managers: Despite the challenges inherent with a workforce that uses a lot of classified material, the productivity of the teleworkers exceeded expectations. “Many employees and their supervisors have found that they’re extremely productive outside of the current workspace,” Muir said. “They’re actually more productive working from home sometimes.”
Many supervisors in the building now rotate their staffs, with individuals coming into the office every other day, according to Muir.
The high number of people working from home freed up large swathes of the Pentagon’s usually jam-packed 67 acres of parking lot, which can fit 8,770 cars. In what Muir acknowledged was “a huge logistics challenge,” he and his staff made the newly empty spaces available to employees who were still coming to work, but who carpooled or used public transport to commute (both of which carry a much higher risk of transmission than driving alone).
Even though masks are required on Washington-area mass transit, “we still find that many feel much more comfortable driving themselves, whereas prior to COVID they were exclusively using mass transit to get to the office,” Muir said, adding that he is not aware of anyone who wants to drive to the Pentagon being denied a parking space.
Even before they get in their cars, however, Pentagon employees are expected to take their temperatures at home. An elevated temperature means a worker should stay at home and inform their boss, according to Muir. “We ask them to not come to work if they’re sick or if they’ve been exposed to someone with COVID-19,” he said.
A driver takes a thermal scanning test. (Getty Images)
When the employees arrive at one of the Pentagon’s many entrances, 10-15 percent of them (down from 25 percent at the height of the pandemic) are selected at random to receive no-touch temperature checks and asked a series of questions about any symptoms they might have and whether anyone in their household has been diagnosed with, or might have, COVID-19. “If the answer to any of those questions is yes, we refer them to secondary screening,” while contacting the employee’s supervisor who directs him or her to return home immediately and to see a doctor, Muir said. “We do not allow them entrance to the Pentagon.”
Inside the building, things have also changed significantly. No more than two people are allowed in an elevator at one time, and people must stand at least 6 feet apart on the building’s 19 escalators, with no passing allowed, according to Muir.
Throughout the building’s 17.5 miles of corridors, signs tell readers to maintain social distancing, wear their masks and wash their hands. That behavior “is engrained now in our daily work activity,” Muir said. There are hand sanitizer stations at every entrance, as well as at most offices and conference rooms, he said.
Visitors from the White House complex adhere to the same standards as Defense Department employees, according to Muir, who at no time compared the steps the Pentagon has taken to those the White House has or has not chosen to adopt. Because so many White House personnel are tested frequently, “there’s not a requirement for them to get tested before they come here,” he said. However, “we do test many of our senior leaders prior to them visiting the White House,” he added.
President Trump during a news conference in the Oval Office on Friday. (Leigh Vogel/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Throughout the Pentagon, crews have been installing plexiglass shields, first for workers whose jobs require them to deal face to face with people, and then for other workspaces, Muir said. In addition, cleaning crews are routinely disinfecting surfaces, as opposed to their previous practice of just dusting them, according to Muir. “We’ve increased our cleaning of bathrooms, common areas, elevator buttons, escalator rails,” and have also equipped offices with their own cleaning supplies, he said.
The steps the Pentagon has taken have all contributed to what Muir termed a “very effective” effort to prevent any significant outbreaks. “The numbers of COVID-positive cases in the Pentagon have been significantly less than right outside in local counties,” he said. “Evidence has shown that the wearing of masks, the washing of hands and the maintaining of social distance ... are very effective to stop community spread, either in the installation or while people are doing their commute.” As a result, Muir said, the Pentagon is now “safer than your local grocery store.”
But no plan is 100 percent foolproof. “There’s no secret bubble around the Pentagon that keeps us immune from COVID,” Muir said. “We have had cases in the Pentagon.”
Muir declined to give exact numbers but said that while “scores” of the Pentagon’s 26,000-member workforce had tested positive since March, between a third and a half of those were cases in which someone caught the disease in their home community while teleworking and did not bring it to the Pentagon. In “a couple of instances,” confirmed cases in the Pentagon involved multiple people from the same office, according to Muir. “Either they share a car together or they share a workspace together,” he said, adding that in those cases, all the workers from the office are told to telework.
Whether it’s a single individual who tests positive or a mini outbreak, each COVID-19 case in the Pentagon itself prompts a “very aggressive action” in response, according to Muir. As soon as someone who works in a Pentagon office tests positive, that office is immediately notified and temporarily shut down so that it can be deep cleaned while the contact tracers go to work, he said.
“We’ve got a very robust contact-tracing program” that operates out of the Pentagon’s on-site medical clinic, Muir said. Led by the clinic’s medical staff, the “eight or nine” full-time contact tracers have a 24-hour standard for reaching out to everyone who has been in close proximity with someone who is suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19, he added.
The contact tracers are helped by the fact that everyone who works in the building uses a Defense Department common access card that unlocks both doors and work computers. “We know when you come into the Pentagon entrance, we know when you badge into your office, we know when you log onto your computer, we know when you leave your office, we know when you badge out” of the building, Muir said. “We’ve got a pretty good read on where you’ve been during the time period that you may have been positive.”
Gen. Mark Miller, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Capitol. (Erin Schaff/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
The most high-profile Pentagon personnel to be forced to work from home have been members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of whom went into quarantine earlier this month after attending meetings with a Coast Guard admiral who had tested positive. The irony, however, was that circumstantial evidence suggested that the admiral had contracted the disease while visiting the White House.
Unlike their Pentagon counterparts, officials at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are reluctant to discuss the details of their efforts to prevent spread of the coronavirus. The press office, which was hard hit by the outbreak, declined even to say how many people worked at the White House complex, let alone how many were teleworking, referring questions on such matters to the Office of Personnel Management, which did not respond to requests for comment.
“President Trump’s top priority has been the health and safety of the American people, which is why we have incorporated current CDC guidance and best practices for limiting COVID-19 exposure to the greatest extent possible, including staying home if you are positive or have symptoms, social distancing, good hygiene, regular deep cleaning of all work spaces and face coverings,” deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement to Yahoo News.
Deere said the “White House Medical Unit leads a robust contact tracing program with CDC personnel and guidance to stop ongoing transmission,” and added that anyone expected to come in contact with the president is tested beforehand.
As at the Pentagon, not everyone who enters the White House complex is tested or has their temperature checked. But Pence’s recent behavior has been in marked contrast to that of the Joint Chiefs following their meetings with the Coast Guard admiral. Choosing not to self-isolate, despite having exposure to Short, his chief of staff who tested positive, the vice president instead immediately returned to the campaign trail.
The White House insists it is hewing closely to the CDC’s guidelines, but Pence’s refusal to quarantine is just the latest in a long line of White House actions that seem to contradict CDC guidelines.
Vice President Mike Pence in Greensboro, N.C., on Tuesday. (Grant Baldwin/AFP via Getty Images)
For example, Trump returned to his office from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center within days of testing positive. The vice president’s rally in Minnesota on Monday, like many Trump campaign events, violated local social distancing regulations. According to the press pool, masks were distributed at the event and temperatures were checked, but it also featured a packed crowd of “more than 650 people,” well over the cap of 250 allowed by state guidelines. Back in Washington, there have been multiple large events in the White House at which staff and visitors have gone unmasked, including some after the recent outbreak. Testing, while likely more widespread than in the Pentagon, given the smaller staff and higher priority, is not universal.
Deere noted many White House staffers are considered essential workers, who the CDC says “may be permitted to continue work following potential exposure to COVID-19.” However, the CDC adds that this should only be allowed “provided they remain asymptomatic and additional precautions are implemented to protect them and the community.”
One of the most striking differences between the Pentagon and White House may be in the use of masks. While Pentagon employees are required to wear masks in public spaces and whenever they are unable to maintain 6 feet of separation in workspaces, at the White House, the staff is often seen without face coverings.
Deere indicated the sporadic mask use was in line with best practices. “The White House follows CDC guidance for face coverings — recommended but not required,” he said. However, the CDC, which does not have the authority to require people to wear masks, only to recommend that they do, in fact recommends that Americans wear masks “anywhere they will be around other people.”
The White House, like the Pentagon, refuses to say how many staffers have tested positive for COVID-19. But according to an Oct. 7 ABC News report, a Federal Emergency Management Agency memo said that “34 White House staffers and other contacts” were infected. That number presumably does not include the Pence staffers who have tested positive more recently.
The Pentagon, one of the world's largest office buildings. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
The Pentagon, meanwhile, is looking ahead to a future that likely involves a much higher percentage of the workforce telecommuting than was the case before the pandemic. Defense Secretary Esper’s decision to revert to HPCON Bravo on June 29 was expected to result in about 80 percent of employees working in the building. But so far, that number is steady at 60 percent, meaning that roughly 10,000 Pentagon workers are still telecommuting, according to Muir.
In some cases, these are workers who are either in vulnerable populations themselves due to underlying health conditions or who have such a person in their immediate family. The Defense Department wants those people to stay home for now, according to Muir, who predicted that the pandemic will have a lasting impact on the Pentagon in much the same way that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forever changed life in the building.
“We all long for the day when we can go back to the way things were,” Muir said. “But I don’t think we’ll ever be there.”
Hundreds of Trump supporters stuck on freezing cold Omaha airfield after rally, 7 taken to hospitals
Hundreds of President Donald Trump's supporters were left in the freezing cold for hours after a rally at an airfield in Omaha, Nebraska, on Tuesday night, with some walking around 3 miles to waiting buses and others being taken away in ambulances.
Seven people were taken to area hospitals, suffering from a variety of conditions, and there were a total of 30 "contacted" for medical reasons, the Omaha Police Department said in a statement. The Omaha Airport Authority had a slightly different figure of the number taken to hospitals — it said six were "throughout the duration of the event" and added that it could not confirm that the people were taken to hospitals because of the cold.
The temperature in the area was in the mid-30s at the time, but as low as 27 degrees with wind chill.
Image: President Donald Trump looks out at supporters at a campaign rally in Omaha on Tuesday. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)
Many of those at the rally at the Eppley Airfield faced hours in long lines to get in and clogged parking lots and busy crowds to get out, hours after Air Force One departed around 9 p.m. The police said the last person was loaded onto a bus at the rally site at 11:50 p.m. — about three hours after the event had ended.
On Wednesday, Joe Biden said the incident was emblematic of "Trump's whole approach."
"Just look what happened last night in Omaha, after the Trump rally ended, hundreds of people, including older Americans and children were stranded in sub-zero freezing temperatures for hours," Biden told reporters during a brief speech in Wilmington, Delaware. "Several folks ended up in the hospital...It's an image that captured President Trump's whole approach in this crisis...he makes a lot of big pronouncements, but they don't hold up."
The police department said 25,000 people had been taken to the rally site by 40 buses running from 10:00 a.m. until the rally began at 8:00 p.m.
According to dispatches from the department, recorded by the radio communications platform Broadcastify, at least 30 people including the elderly, an electric wheelchair user and a family with small children were among those requiring medical attention after hours of waiting in the cold.
The Supreme Court decision Monday effectively barring the counting of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin that arrive after Election Day was not a surprise for many Democrats, who had pressed for it but expected to lose.
But a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh set off alarms among civil rights and Democratic Party lawyers, who viewed it as giving public support to President Donald Trump’s arguments that any results counted after Nov. 3 could be riddled with fraudulent votes — an assertion unsupported by the history of elections in the United States.
The decision also unnerved Democrats and local election officials in Pennsylvania, where Republicans are asking the Supreme Court to weigh in again on whether the state can accept ballots received up to three days after Election Day. While Democrats in Wisconsin had been appealing for an extension, the current rules in Pennsylvania allow for ballots to arrive three days after the election. Any change could threaten the more than 1.4 million absentee ballots not yet returned.
In his opinion, attached to the 5-3 ruling against the deadline extension in Wisconsin, Kavanaugh wrote that Election Day mail-in deadlines were devised “to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election.”
He added, “Those states also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.”
Kavanaugh’s statement mirrored in some ways Trump’s efforts to suggest that only ballots counted by Election Day should decide the result, and more generally to push unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud.
Earlier Monday, the president had posted on Twitter that election officials “must have final total on November 3rd,” alleging without evidence that there are “big problems” with mail-in ballots. Twitter labeled the tweet “misleading.”
The Wisconsin ruling was the latest in a series of court decisions setting the rules for how voters in different states can cast their ballots during the coronavirus pandemic and when the cutoff is for receiving them.
The Wisconsin ruling revealed a stark divide among the justices in their understanding of the role of the courts in protecting the right to vote during a pandemic and left voting rights activists concerned about how the court’s conservative majority would rule in any postelection fights.
With Trump indicating that he plans to challenge a loss, Democrats have kept a particularly wary eye on the Supreme Court.
It was the court that rendered the final decision in the Florida recount of 2000, effectively delivering the state to George W. Bush over Al Gore by just 537 votes and, with it, the presidency. In rushing to name a successor to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg upon her death last month, Trump indicated that he believed the Supreme Court might again determine the winner, saying, “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court, and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”
He suggested that he expected the court to weigh in on his charges of election fraud, saying: “The scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.”
The concept expressed by Kavanaugh that counting late-arriving ballots could “flip the results” misconstrues the voting process, where official results often are not fully tabulated for days or even weeks after an election.
And, this year, both sides expect that Democrats will vote by mail in greater numbers than Republicans will, and that Republicans will vote in person in greater numbers than Democrats will — leading to a potential scenario in which initial results could appear to favor Trump, only to move in the direction of Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, as the counts of mailed ballots are made public.
Because of a surge in mail-in ballots due to the pandemic, as well as delays at the Postal Service, civil rights groups and Democrats have been pressing for the suspension of certain rules regarding mail-in balloting to ensure that as many ballots as possible arrive on time and so that states and counties will have more time to count them.
Republicans have been pressing to keep the more restrictive rules in place.
Kavanaugh’s concurrence was met by a dissent from Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote that “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.”
Kagan wrote that nothing could be more suspicious or improper “than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night.”
“To suggest otherwise,” she added, “especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.”
Kagan chastised the majority for disregarding the overriding effects of the pandemic, adding, “What will undermine the ‘integrity’ of that process is not the counting but instead the discarding of timely cast ballots that, because of pandemic conditions, arrive a bit after Election Day.”
Democrats have openly worried that Trump’s attacks would create the false impression that fraud is a serious threat to the integrity of the election and use that as a basis for a challenge to the mail-in vote. To Democrats, Kavanaugh’s opinion appeared to reward the approach, treating voters’ perceptions of fraud — which Trump is trying so hard to influence — as potentially pivotal.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Wisconsin case came in response to an emergency petition, and therefore it lacked the weight of a case that had been fully argued before it. But it took on added importance for both sides coming ahead of an election many expect to be contested, and because it came on a day that Trump secured a sixth conservative vote on the court with the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, said Kavanaugh’s reference to “suspicions of impropriety” revealed a “Trumpian mindset.” More substantively, Hasen said, his opinion augured a harder climb for civil rights groups and Democrats in election-year cases that go before the Supreme Court.
The president’s success in placing his nominees throughout the federal judiciary has led to a rightward shift in the ideological balance of several important federal appellate circuits as well as cemented the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
They have joined with the other conservatives to stay several lower court rulings that had been in favor of expanding access to voting during the pandemic, including in Wisconsin, where a District Court judge, William M. Conley, had decided for Democrats by extending the deadline for counting ballots.
This was the second time the Supreme Court intervened in a decision by Conley this election year. In the spring, it stayed his decision granting an extension for mail ballots on the eve of the primary election, which included races for the Democratic nomination and an important race for state Supreme Court justice. In that case, however, the court did allow election officials to continue counting ballots for several days after Election Day as long as ballots were postmarked on or before Election Day.
Kavanaugh took a prominent role in both cases and showed himself to be in line with the other conservatives on voting rights cases, deferring to state legislatures and their rights to enact strict measures to institute safeguards against the potential for voter fraud, even though it remains exceedingly rare.
The opinions offered by Kavanaugh have unsettled voting rights groups.
“Even without the reasoning, it’s very clear that what the court has done throughout this election season has made it clear that federal courts are not going to be significant sources of voting rights protection in the lead-up to elections,” said Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“It’s the unique constitutional role of the courts to protect individual rights like voting rights and they’re treating it like policy decisions,” Weiser added.
Democrats had anticipated the court’s ruling in the Wisconsin case, and on Tuesday they focused on efforts to persuade voters not to wait until the last minute and risk not having their mail ballots arrive on time to be counted.
The opinion by Kavanaugh also further worried voting rights groups in Pennsylvania.
Previously, the court had deadlocked 4-4 on a challenge to a similar ballot deadline extension in the state, though it was Republicans who were appealing a state Supreme Court decision, rather than a federal court decision.
The deadlocked decision meant that the state Supreme Court decision held, and that ballots postmarked by Election Day could be counted as long as they arrived within three days afterward.
Republicans in the state, however, immediately returned to the federal court in the Western District of Pennsylvania, with a nearly identical argument against the ballot extension. Their apparent plan was a return appearance before the Supreme Court with newly installed Justice Barrett, who they hoped would side with the other conservative members and undo the extension.
Former tech CEO Carly Fiorina ran for president in 2016 as a small-government Republican. Four years later, she’s comfortable with Democrat Joe Biden’s social-spending plans, and the higher taxes needed to finance them.
“Not all taxation is bad taxation,” the former Hewlett-Packard CEO said at the Oct. 26 Yahoo Finance All-Markets Summit. “This issue is, is the level of taxation reasonable? And for what purpose are we taxing? And I think what Joe Biden has proposed is certainly a reasonable level of taxation on corporations and on those individuals making over $400,000.”
Biden is proposing a range of new programs on affordable housing, health care, climate change, infrastructure and child care. He’d pass around $2.4 trillion in new tax hikes over a decade to help pay for his agenda. He’d raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, and raise income taxes on households earning more than $400,000 per year, among other things.
Some business operators worry that higher taxes would cut into growth and hiring. But the corporate tax rate was 35% from 1993 to 2017, a period that included the boom of the late 1990s and the recovery from the Great Recession starting in 2009. The corporate rate fell to 21% in the tax-cut law President Trump signed at the end of 2017. That law also cut individual tax rates for most workers.
Supporters cheer as President Donald Trump tosses ball caps as he arrives for a campaign rally at the Altoona-Blair County Airport in Martinsburg, Pa, Monday, Oct. 26, 2020. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)
The Trump tax cuts remain unpopular, however, because many Americans feel they favor businesses and the wealthy too much, with only modest savings for the middle class. Various analyses support that view. The law, for instance, lowered the annual tax bill of the top 1% of earners by about $51,000, while the savings for a middle-class family were only about $930.
‘It’s all about Trump’
Fiorina, who ran against Trump as a Republican in 2016, endorsed Biden earlier this year. “In the Trump Republican party, it’s all about Trump,” she said at Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit. “We are not asked, as citizens of this country, to pledge allegiance to a party, and we’re certainly not asked to pledge allegiance to a president. We’re asked to pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Constitution.”
Biden’s top priority, she says, should be ending the partisan hostility Trump loves to stoke: “Unifying the country is hugely important. One of the reasons I endorsed him is he is seen as someone who has been willing to reach his hand across the aisle and work in a bipartisan fashion. The only way you solve problems in business or in politics is by working with other people, some of of whom you may not agree with all the time.”
Also important: More stimulus spending, to help end the coronavirus recession. Addressing income inequality. Supporting small businesses under intense pressure amid coronavirus.
Economists question whether Biden’s tax hikes would be appropriate with the economy in a recession, or just barely out of one. Biden, in response, has signaled he wouldn’t pursue that part of his agenda until the second or maybe even third year of his presidency, when the economy is on more stable footing. Trump, for his part, has proposed more tax cuts, such as reducing or ending the payroll taxes business and workers both pay. But those taxes fund Social Security and Medicare and it’s unlikely Congress would cut funding for two cherished programs for seniors.
Watch the All Markets Summit
Investors seem comfortable with a Biden win, even if it brings tax hikes down the road. Biden would be more likely than Trump to pass a huge stimulus bill early in 2021, especially if his fellow Democrats retake the Senate, giving them full control of Congress. Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic advisor in 2017 and 2018, said at the All Markets Summit, that he too would be comfortable with Biden’s higher tax rate on businesses. “To me, 28% is probably a good number to land on,” he said.
One of Trump’s reelection challenges is a revolt from prior allies and many fellow Republicans, including groups such as the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump. When asked if she still considers herself a Republican, Fiorina said, “The honest answer is, I don’t know, because I do not see myself in the current Republican party.” Biden is the likely beneficiary.
"We easily will hit six-figure numbers in terms of the number of cases," Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told CNN Friday night. "And the deaths are going to go up precipitously in the next three to four weeks, following usually new cases by about two to three weeks."
This comes as the country's seven-day average of new daily cases surpassed 63,000 Friday -- an 84% increase since the average started ticking back up in mid-September, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
So far Saturday, Johns Hopkins reported 55,537 new cases and 562 deaths across the nation. At least 8,547,198 cases and 224,537 deaths have been reported this year.
Health officials say the steep inclines follow the reopening of schools and colleges across the US and have been largely driven by small gatherings -- often family events -- that are increasingly moving indoors, where the virus is likely to spread.
In Maryland, the governor said this week family gatherings were the No. 1 source of transmission in the state, followed by house parties. In North Carolina, health officials reported its highest daily case count Friday and said they continue to see clusters "from social and religious gatherings."
Unlike many European countries that are also experiencing spikes, the US never lowered its daily case baseline very far, meaning the compounding of cases could be worse, experts say.
And that's ahead of several popular holidays, when health officials worry more Americans could let their guard down and opt to visit family and friends and further drive surges.
In North Dakota, with the highest per capita new case rate in the country, Gov. Doug Burgum called for a "Thanksgiving challenge," urging residents to follow mitigation guidance like masks and social distancing to bring numbers down by the holiday.
"It would be really great to be sharing with all of you at Thanksgiving that our numbers are going down as we head into the holiday period," he said Friday. "That we've got increasing amounts of hospital capacity. That our schools have remained open, that our businesses are open during that holiday season."
34 states report rise in cases
The President has said in recent days the country is rounding the corner when it comes to the pandemic. But alarming patterns across the country tell a different story.
At least 34 states reported more new Covid-19 cases in the last week than the week prior, according to Johns Hopkins data. In Georgia, health officials reported their highest one-day case count Friday since early September. Ohio health officials reported a record-high of daily new cases for the third day in a row, and in Oklahoma, officials reported more than 1,000 new infections for the fourth consecutive day.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy on Saturday reported an additional 1,994 coronavirus cases -- the highest single-day total since May.
"We're still in the midst of a pandemic and need everyone to take this seriously. Wear a mask. Social distance," Murphy tweeted.
New Jersey had eight new virus-related deaths, bringing the state's total fatality toll to 14,492.
"This virus has not gone away simply because we are tired of it," Murphy said.
In Florida, health officials on Saturday reported 4,471 additional cases and 77 new resident deaths. That's the third day this month the state has reported more than 4,000 new cases in a single day, according to a CNN tally.
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‘She was so nasty to him’ Trump says of Biden-Harris relationship
Florida has had a total of 776,251 Covid-19 cases and 16,417 state residents have died, the health department said. There have also been 203 fatalities of non residents.
Pennsylvania, as of Saturday, saw 2,043 new cases, bringing the statewide total to 192,622.
"Daily increases are now comparable with what we saw in April 2020," the state health department said in a statement. An additional 29 virus-related deaths were reported Saturday for a total of 8,654.
Michigan, with 3,338 new cases Saturday, marked its highest single-day total during the pandemic, according to state Department of Health and Human Services spokeswoman Lynn Sutfin. The state also reported 35 new deaths.
Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, Michigan's Chief Medical Executive and Chief Deputy for Health, said the data showed "alarming increases" in new infections.
"If rates continue like this, we risk overwhelming our hospitals and having many more Michiganders die," Khaldun said in a statement.
And more than 41,000 Covid-19 patients were in US hospitals Friday, according to the Covid Tracking Project. In Illinois, the number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients increased by at least 17% over the last week, the governor said Friday.
On Saturday, Illinois reported 6,161 new cases, the highest number since the pandemic began. More than 4,000 new cases have been reported in the state for six of the last nine days, according to health department data. There were 63 new deaths for a total of of 9,481.
Illinois Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike made an emotional appeal to residents on the importance of face coverings.
"As we see the numbers go up in the hospitals, people are bringing more beds, trying to prepare for the Covid units again. And these staff that went through all that pain to try to save as many people as they can are seeing history repeat itself," she said. "We don't have a vaccine yet, but we have a mask, and we're asking people to use that, and I don't know what else we can say."
In Tennessee, hospital officials said new cases in metro Nashville have increased 50% in the last two weeks, and hospitals in the area saw a 40% increase in patients over the same time period.
And Colorado officials issued a new order limiting gatherings to 10 people from no more than two households in response to climbing infections and hospitalizations.
"We need to keep gatherings smaller and with people from fewer households — we are asking everyone to 'shrink their bubble' to reduce the spread," Colorado Department of Health and Environment Executive Director Jill Hunsaker Ryan said in a Friday news release.
'This is not a drill'
Despite the troubling trends, health officials maintain basic public health measures can help turn things around: masks, social distancing, avoiding crowds and frequent hand washing.
"They sound very simple, but we're not uniformly doing that and that's one of the reasons why we're seeing these surges," Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday. "We can control them without shutting down the country."
A new modeling study from the forecasting team at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows if 95% of Americans wore masks in public, more than 100,000 lives could be saved through February.
"I think that would be a great idea to have everybody do it uniformly," he said. "If people are not wearing masks, then maybe we should be mandating it," he said.
A leading World Health Organization official on Friday also urged country leaders to "take immediate action to prevent further unnecessary deaths, essential health services from collapsing and schools shutting again."
"As I said it in February and I'm repeating it today, this is not a drill," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a news conference.
Expert: Vaccine may not come this year
While many experts and officials have worked to give hopeful estimates on when a Covid-19 will be available, that timeline remains uncertain.
National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said Friday that while he's "cautiously optimistic" about the US having a vaccine authorized by the end of the year, he said it "might not happen and it might take longer."
But Collins added it was good news that the US has more than one vaccine candidate in development.
"If you were betting the whole thing on one vaccine, I'd be a lot more worried," he said.
And when a vaccine does get approved, experts have said it's crucial that enough Americans get it. If only half of the country is willing to get vaccinated, Collins warned, Covid-19 could stick around for years.
"When I look at the attitudes that are out there now about this vaccine, and about who would be interested in taking it -- it's really, really troubling," Collins said at a National Press Club virtual event. "I've been talking so optimistically about how we are likely to have a vaccine by the end of the year, but if only 50% of Americans are interested in taking it, we're never going to get to that point of immunity across the population where Covid-19 goes away.
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