“The Biden administration is privately weighing how to handle the upcoming verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, including considering whether President Joe Biden should address the nation and dispatching specially trained community facilitators from the Justice Department,” the AP reports.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports the jury has begun deliberations.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced that she plans to introduce a resolution to expel Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) from Congress “for her continual incitement of violence,” The Hill reports.
Daily Kos: “With far-right extremists like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert grabbing headlines and arrests continuing in the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Republicans have returned to a favorite move: demonizing a Black Democrat. Rep. Maxine Waters is once again being cast in that role—surprise, surprise—for comments to protesters in Minnesota in the wake of the police killing of Daunte Wright and as former officer Derek Chauvin’s trial for killing George Floyd comes to a close.
Waters traveled to Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, over the weekend, where she pledged to “fight with all of the people who stand for justice,” adding, “We’ve got to get justice in this country and we cannot allow these killings to continue.”
The part that Republicans are really grabbing onto is Waters’ answer when reporters asked her what protesters should do going forward. “We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational,” Waters said. “We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Cue the Republicans screaming about violent protesters.”
President Biden announced that, as of today, every American adult is now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Half of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and about a third are fully vaccinated.
Josh Marshall: “25.4% of the US population is now fully vaccinated. But look a bit deeper and you see that as of this morning 50.4% of Americans 18 and over have now received at least one shot. 32.5% are fully vaccinated. Given the interval of 3 or 4 weeks between injections, we can figure that by mid-May around 50% of all adults will have been vaccinated.
This means we are approaching levels of vaccination where the society wide-impact should become more and more apparent. […] The spring 2021 vaccination campaign has been remarkably successful. But there are signs now that we’ve reached a different tipping point: where the pace of vaccination is controlled not by the supply of vaccines or ability to distribute them but by the number of people willing to take them. That doesn’t mean we’re out of people ready to be vaccinated. But it does mean supply will be less and less of a constraint and public vaccination campaigns, especially among resistant populations, will become increasingly critical.
“Congress’s pursuit of an independent investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection is facing long odds, as bipartisan resolve to hold the perpetrators and instigators accountable erodes, and Republicans face sustained pressure to disavow that it was supporters of former president Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol,” the Washington Post reports.
“Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes a day after he confronted rioters at the Jan. 6 insurrection, the District’s chief medical examiner has ruled,” the Washington Post reports.
“The ruling, released Monday, likely will make it difficult for prosecutors to pursue homicide charges in the officer’s death.”
“President Joe Biden will hold his second infrastructure meeting with Democratic and Republican members of Congress on Monday, as GOP lawmakers push to shrink the president’s more than $2 trillion plan,” CNBC reports.
“Biden aims to approve a package in the coming months that revamps U.S. roads, bridges, airports, broadband, housing and utilities, and invests in job training along with care for elderly and disabled Americans. Republicans have signaled they could support a scaled back bill based around transportation, broadband and water systems.”
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) “said he and his colleagues could support an infrastructure bill of around $800 billion, underscoring GOP interest in a bipartisan fix for the nation’s aging roads and patchy broadband service,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said that Democrats should work to find a bipartisan agreement with Republicans on elements of the White House infrastructure plan before pivoting to a second, broader package that Democrats pass along party lines.”
“The universe of Democratic senators concerned about raising the corporate tax rate to 28% is broader than Sen. Joe Manchin, and the rate will likely land at 25%” Axios reports.
“While increasing the rate from 21% to 25% would raise about $600 billion over 15 years, it would leave President Biden well short of paying for his proposed $2.25 trillion, eight-year infrastructure package.”
“Biden’s plan to increase the rate U.S. multinationals pay on their foreign earnings from 10.5% to 21% is less controversial and stands a better chance of remaining intact in the final legislation. That would raise an additional $700 billion.”
“I saw how hard the first one was. I know this is going to be hard… Why not get as much in one package as we can so we don’t have to do it a third time?” — Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), quoted by the Washington Post, on what he learned from passing the American Rescue Plan Act and why he prefers passing one big infrastructure bill over a series of smaller bills.
Aaron Blake: “For the better part of a year now, Republicans have tried and largely failed to define Joe Biden — or even just to make people dislike him. And with his 100th day as president approaching, they’re admitting as much.”
“Allies of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny unveiled plans on Sunday for what they hope will be the largest protests in modern Russian history on Wednesday as Washington warned Russia it would pay a price if he died in jail from his hunger-strike,” Reuters reports.
“Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who’s been on a hunger strike for more than two weeks to demand proper medical care, has been transferred to a prison hospital,” CBS News reports.
“The move came after a warning over the weekend from the United States that Moscow would face “consequences” if the prominent Kremlin critic were to die in custody.”
USA Today: “The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up three challenges to a federal ban on gun ownership for people convicted of nonviolent crimes, surprising Second Amendment advocates who hoped the court would chip away at the restriction.”
“By not taking the appeals, the nation’s highest court let stand a series of lower court rulings that prohibited people convicted of driving under the influence, making false statements on tax returns and selling counterfeit cassette tapes from owning a gun.”
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has signed a deal to write a series of books “with Barrett paid a reported $2 m for a volume on how judges should not bring their personal feelings into the way they rule,” reports The Guardian.
Politico: “Bill Barr recently sold a book about his time at the Justice Department, according to three people familiar with the deal. This will be Barr’s first book and he started writing it within the last two months.”
“Some other former Trump officials have had a tougher time trying to get decent enough book advances as they try to get published.”
Politico: “The GOP almost certainly can’t stop Joe Biden from getting a lineup of leading progressives confirmed to senior Justice Department posts. But Republicans — especially those eyeing the White House — are eager to make the president’s party pay a political price.”
“Senate Republicans have spent weeks on a messaging binge portraying Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, tapped for high-ranking DOJ positions, as ‘extreme’ and ‘radical’ nominees who will weaken law enforcement. The GOP base is soaking it up, with Fox News host Tucker Carlson showing a keen interest in typically humdrum sub-Cabinet confirmations and focusing several segments on Clarke. … Republicans are betting that their voters are paying attention, despite the high likelihood that both women eventually will be confirmed to Biden’s DOJ.”
I disagree. Videos of police brutality does not traumatize black communities. Police brutality traumatizes black communities. The videos are meant to shock and awaken white communities. To force them not to ignore it any longer.
Washington Post: “Vice President Harris will deliver her first major speech on the economy on Monday in North Carolina as she continues her push to tout the Biden administration’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan.”
“In doing so, she is highlighting at least one piece of the infrastructure plan stemming directly from a 2019 bill she introduced as a former California senator to electrify the nation’s school buses, which make up 90 percent of the nation’s total bus fleet.”
Texas Tribune: “Texas lawmakers have been advancing sweeping legislation to address some of the major issues stemming from February’s deadly winter storm and catastrophic power outages.”
“But some of the legislative moves are targeting renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, which experts and some lawmakers say seems more like a way to protect oil and gas interests than fix problems with the state’s beleaguered power grid.”
“Germany’s Greens drew a sharp contrast to their bickering conservative rivals in the contest to succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor, proposing Annalena Baerbock as their lead candidate for September’s national election,” Bloomberg reports.
“The party, which is nipping at the heels of Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led bloc, picked the 40-year-old political scientist and foreign-policy expert to run their campaign.”
Daily Telegraph: “The Greens are currently second in the polls on 23%. Mrs Merkel’s CDU is still ahead on 27% — but its support has dropped a shocking 10 points since January. A rival coalition of the Greens and left-leaning parties might have the votes to unseat the CDU in September — and the Greens could be the biggest party in the bloc.”
Bloomberg: “Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is proposing a guaranteed income program for poor residents, making it the largest U.S. city to test such a policy.”
“Garcetti will ask the City Council on Tuesday to set aside $24 million in next year’s budget to send $1,000 monthly payments to 2,000 low-income families in America’s second-largest city, the mayor said in an interview. Funds from council districts and other sources could bring the total to $35 million.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed an anti-riot bill into law that protects police budgets from being cut and stiffens penalties against those arrested during a “riot,” Insider reports.
“The new law also prevents ‘rioters’ from being bailed out of jail before their first court appearance and grants immunity from civil legal action for people who drive through protesters blocking a road.”
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