Walter Shapiro: “Just a handful of sentences into his speech commemorating the insurrection a year ago on January 6, President Joe Biden unveiled the biggest political decision of his presidency.”
“Instead of tiptoeing around the specter of Donald Trump, Biden went after the former president directly with an intensity unparalleled in modern political memory.”
George Conway: “Garland must not fear that prosecuting Trump would be viewed as a partisan act. He need only look to the words of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who, after voting against an impeachment conviction on the (meritless) ground that Trump had left office, all but called for Trump’s prosecution.”
Said McConnell: “We have a criminal justice system in this country. President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office.”
“He added: He didn’t get away with anything yet. Yet.”
“Nicholas Kristof, a former New York Times columnist who in October announced a Democratic campaign for Oregon governor, is ineligible to run for the office, the Oregon secretary of state has announced, upending the journalist-turned-politician’s nascent campaign,” the Washington Post reports.
Janan Ganesh: “A year on from the US Capitol siege, there is talk, even among unexcitable scholars, of a second civil war. That remains an epic stretch. Red and Blue America do not map on to contiguous geographic blocs, as the Confederacy and the Union did. The central state is unrecognizably stronger than it was in 1861. There is (for now) no single precipitating issue to equal South Carolina’s declaration of secession.”
“In the medical parlance of today, what is more plausible than war is disorder of a chronic and endemic nature. What is plausible is an “acceptable” level of violence.”
Washington Post: “Federal judges in D.C. have gone below the government recommendation in 49 out of 74 sentencings held for Capitol riot defendants one year after the attack, about two-thirds of the cases. In eight cases where prosecutors asked for jail time, the judges instead opted for probation. Of the 74 people sentenced so far, 35 have been given jail or prison time, 14 home detention and 25 probation alone.”
New York Times: “About 62 percent of Americans — about 206 million people — are fully vaccinated, according to federal data. But according to a C.D.C. database, only about 35 percent of Americans have received a booster since mid-August, when additional shots were first authorized, even as eligibility has greatly expanded.”
“A group of former Trump administration officials are banding together in an effort to block their former boss from entering office again,” Politico reports.
“The meeting of the group, announced by former White House press secretary and chief of staff to the first lady Stephanie Grisham, is scheduled for next week where they will discuss how to ‘try and stop’ former President Donald Trump and the ‘kind of violence and rhetoric that has been talked about and continues to divide our country.’ In an interview with CNN on the morning of Jan. 6, Grisham said about 15 former Trump administration officials — some she said, who ranked higher than her — have held informal discussions and plan to meet in person.”
“On the day President Biden was inaugurated, the advisory board of health experts who counseled him during the presidential transition officially ceased to exist. But its members have quietly continued to meet regularly over Zoom, their conversations often turning to frustration with Mr. Biden’s coronavirus response,” the New York Times reports.
“Now, six of these former advisers have gone public with an extraordinary, albeit polite, critique — and a plea to be heard. In three opinion articles published on Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they are calling for Mr. Biden to adopt an entirely new domestic pandemic strategy — one that is geared to the ‘new normal’ of living with the virus indefinitely, not to wiping it out.”
Edward Luce: “There is no reason to think that Biden is suffering from anything more than traits that characterised him in younger decades, such as foot-in-mouth disease and a tendency to talk too much. Neither of these is degenerative. In fact, Biden’s malapropisms have noticeably dropped off since he became president while his prolixity is limited by the White House teleprompter. There are some grounds to suspect he is getting more forgetful — he implied twice last year that Taiwan was a formal ally of the US, a claim his staff had to correct. But there are none to suggest he is senile or suffering from dementia.”
“Yet that will not stop Biden’s age from becoming a liability. It already is. The president’s official line is that he is planning to run again. Just 41 per cent of Democratic voters believe Biden would have a better chance of winning the 2024 election than another Democratic candidate. The equivalent number for Donald Trump among Republican voters is 57 per cent. Some of that gap is to do with age. Although Trump is only four years his junior, Biden will become the first sitting US president to turn 80 in November. It strains credulity to believe he could have sufficient energy at the end of his second term, when he would be 86.”
Carl Zimmer: “It’s striking that we are not better able to deal with a new surge two years into the pandemic. Scientists have been warning that this virus, like all viruses, would mutate, so we needed to be ready for change… And yet, in the U.S., we’re in this latest surge without a strong testing capacity to deal with it, without a system to get people good masks, which we know can help. And so there’s just chaos.”
“The Biden administration is now saying it’s going to give out 500 million tests. Those tests aren’t going to be coming in for at least a couple of more weeks — deep into this surge. And it’s not enough. It’s basically like waiting until half the house is burned down before you send in the firefighters — and you send one small fire engine.”
America’s faith in the integrity of the election system remains shaken by the events of Jan. 6, with only 20% of the public saying it’s very confident about the system, a new ABC/Ipsos poll finds.
This is a significant drop from 37% in an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in the days after the insurrection last year.
John Harris: “Only in recent years have we seen foundation-shaking political conflict — both sides believing the other would turn the United States into something unrecognizable — with no obvious and easily summarized root cause. What is the fundamental question that hangs in the balance between the people who hate Trump and what he stands for and the people who love Trump and hate those who hate him? This is less an ideological conflict than a psychological one.”
“The U.S. Postal Service has asked federal labor officials for a temporary waiver from President Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate, setting up a showdown on pandemic safety measures between the president and one of the government’s largest agencies,” the Washington Post reports.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) told Axios he stands by his condemnation of the January 6 Capitol attack as a “disgrace,” as well as his certification of Joe Biden as the election winner.
But Kemp said he’s continued to “thank” former President Donald Trump for “all the things that he did to help Georgia. I have never said a bad word about him.”
“A year ago, while Republican lawmakers tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by blocking the certification of the results, President Donald Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol in an effort to obtain the same objective,” NBC News reports.
“Now, with official Washington observing the anniversary, Republicans are accusing Democrats of politicizing the attack and blaming them for what the GOP describes as lax Capitol security.”
Florida has more citizens involved in federal cases regarding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol than any other state by far, Axios reports.
President Biden gave the best speech of his presidency — and perhaps of his entire political career — this morning at the U.S. Capitol.
If you missed it, I urge you to watch it.
President Biden will mark the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by placing responsibility on Donald Trump and telling Americans that “the way forward is to recognize the truth and to live by it,” Axios reports.
From his prepared remarks: “Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people?”
Biden will address the nation from Statuary Hall in the Capitol at 9 a.m. ET.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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