Biden urges Congress to act on economy and Covid with 'dark winter' ahead – as it happened

Busy day if you were an attorney for the Trump team. Thanks for sticking with us while we made sense of all those rulings!

• Donald Trump and his team notched losses in four states in his bid to contest the election results. A Georgia appellate court, the Wisconsin supreme court, a superior court in Arizona and a district court in Nevada all had some choice words for Team Trump.
• A judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore Daca.
• Five counties in the San Francisco Bay Area have pre-emptively adopted the state’s regional stay-at-home order, which will affect 6m Californians.

The Arizona election results ruling came hours after Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers issued a statement that the state legislature would not overturn the presidential election results.

“Under the laws that we wrote and voted upon, Arizona voters choose who wins, and our system requires that their choice be respected,” Bowers said.

However, he also joined Arizona Senate President Karen Fann to call for an audit of Maricopa County election software and equipment.

Donald Trump was appreciative.

Who’s ready for loss No 46? A judge has denied the Trump team’s contest of election results in Arizona.

Randall Warner, a Maricopa county superior court judge, wrote in his ruling that the evidence does not show fraud or misconduct, nor does it show illegal votes or erroneous vote counts. He specifically noted the allegation around mail-in ballots and signature comparisons, writing that “the signature comparison is just one part of the verification process” and that “Maricopa County election officials followed this process faithfully in 2020”.

“Approximately 1.9m mail-in ballots were cast and, of these, approximately 20,000 were identified that required contacting the voter,” Warner wrote. “Of those, only 587 ultimately could not be validated.”

“Plaintiff has not proven that the Biden/Harris ticket did not receive the highest number of votes,” Warner wrote.

Here comes another one. For the Trump legal team, the decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court to deny a petition from a conservative group asking the panel to invalidate the presidential election is loss no. 45, according to a tally by the Democracy Docket.

Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote incredulously that while the unprecedented petition “falls far short of the kind of compelling evidence and legal support we would undoubtedly need to countenance the court-ordered disenfranchisement of every Wisconsin voter”, at least “no one can accuse the petitioners of timidity”.

This passage of his decision is worth a read:

Nonetheless, I feel compelled to share a further observation. Something far more fundamental than the winner of Wisconsin’s electoral votes is implicated in this case. At stake, in some measure, is faith in our system of free and fair elections, a feature central to the enduring strength of our constitutional republic. It can be easy to blithely move on to the next case with a petition so obviously lacking, but this is sobering. The relief being sought by the petitioners is the most dramatic invocation of judicial power I have ever seen. Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election. Once the door is opened to judicial invalidation of presidential election results, it will be awfully hard to close that door again. This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread. The loss of public trust in our constitutional order resulting from the exercise of this kind of judicial power would be incalculable.

I do not mean to suggest this court should look the other way no matter what. But if there is a sufficient basis to invalidate an election, it must be established with evidence and arguments commensurate with the scale of the claims and the relief sought. These petitioners have come nowhere close. While the rough and tumble world of electoral politics may be the prism through which many view this litigation, it cannot be so for us. In these hallowed halls, the law must rule.

Donald Trump notched his 44th loss in post-election litigation on Friday when a district judge dismissed both an attempt by his campaign to contest the election results in Nevada and another in Georgia, according to a count by Democracy Docket.

First off, here’s a recap of all the election challenges happening:

The Nevada dismissal was fairly straightforward, with Judge James Russell ruling that “contestants evidence does not establish by any clear and convincing proof, or any standard of evidence, that ‘the defendant or any person acting, either directly or indirectly, on behalf of the defendant has given, or offered to give, to any person anything of value for the purpose of manipulating or altering the outcome of the election’.”

Trump’s campaign had asked a judge to nullify Nevada’s election results or set them aside and declare him the winner, arguing that illegal or improper votes were cast and the use of optical scanning to process signatures on mail-in ballots violated state law.

The Georgia dismissal was more an issue of jurisdiction. The lawsuit in Georgia involved the state’s presidential electors from Georgia, who sued the governor and secretary of state, among others, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, asserting that Georgia’s certified 2020 presidential election results were suspect because of alleged vulnerabilities in Georgia’s election machines and alleged mathematical and statistical anomalies in the vote count.

Two days later, they sought a restraining order to prevent the erasing or altering forensic data on voting machines, among other things, and a judge granted them a limited restraining order that applied to the machines in three counties. The Trump team appealed that order.

The court had an evidentiary hearing scheduled before the appeal that it was forced to canceled. So the court was fairly scathing in their dismissal of that appeal:

In our judicial system, the district court is the central forum for testing, advancing, proving, or disproving a party’s allegations. It is where trials take place and the parties present their evidence. As a court of appeals, “we are a court of review, not of first view.” Typically, we enter the picture only after the district court has considered the parties’ competing positions and a winner has emerged. Less frequently, we review preliminary injunctions or orders that ask a particularly important, purely legal question.

The district court has not issued one of those appealable orders. In this case, the district court issued an emergency temporary restraining order at the plaintiffs’ request, worked at a breakneck pace to provide them an opportunity for broader relief, and was ready to enter an appealable order on the merits of their claims immediately after its expedited hearing on December 4, 2020. But the plaintiffs would not take the district court’s “yes” for an answer. They appealed instead. And, because they appealed, the evidentiary hearing has been stayed and the case considerably delayed. For our part, the law requires that we dismiss the appeal and return the case to the district court for further proceedings.

A federal court judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore the Daca program that made it possible for undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children to live and work in the US without fear of deportation.

The ruling by US Judge Nicholas Garaufis meant that the administration must reopen the program to first-time applicants and return the period of protections to two years.

A quick recap: Daca is a program created in 2012 under Barack Obama that allowed people brought to the US unlawfully as children the temporary right legally to live, study and work in America, instead of always having to fear deportation. The program allowed them to do basic things like get driver’s licenses, apply for colleges or get work permits.

Donald Trump has ordered all 700 American troops out of Somalia, the New York Times is reporting.

The mostly special operations troops who have been conducting training and counterterrorism missions will be leaving by 15 January, five days before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

A Defense Department official told the Times that many of the troops will be “repositioned” to Kenya.

Virginia is expected to receive 480,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine by the end of December, according to the Virginia Department of Public Health.

The vaccines will come from Pfizer and Moderna.

The five Bay Area counties’ preemptive adoption of the regional stay-at-home order will affect about 6m Californians when it goes into effect on Sunday.

The preemptive order comes as San Francisco averages 142 new Covid-19 cases a day and 900 new cases a week. Hospitalizations have tripled over the last month.

“It takes several weeks for new restrictions to slow rising hospitalizations and waiting until only 15 percent of a region’s ICU beds are available is just too late,” said San Francisco health officer Dr Tomás Aragon. “Many heavily impacted parts of our region already have less than 15 percent of ICU beds available, and the time to act is now.”

This is not the first time that the Bay Area has led the charge on coronavirus measures. The counties of San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Marin, Contra Costa and Alameda were the first in the nation to issue a shelter-in-place order, days before Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, issued the order statewide.

Hey all, Vivian Ho on the west coast, taking over the blog for the rest of the day. And we’re starting off hot with some west coast news.

California announced yesterday new plans to launch regional stay-at-home orders based on intensive-care unit capacity. Once the ICU capacity of a region falls below 15%, a stay-at-home order will be triggered, with the vast majority of the state expected to meet that criteria within the next few days.

The San Francisco Bay Area, one of the state’s five regions, is expected to be the last region to fall below a 15% capacity. But on Friday, San Francisco and four other Bay Area counties pre-emptively adopted the stay-at-home order in an effort to curb the surge taking place in the area.

“Given the steep increase in Covid-19 cases in San Francisco, we must do whatever is necessary in order to get the virus under control,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed. “This is about protecting people’s lives. We see how quickly it moves and how devastating the effects. We need to do everything we can to prevent our hospital system from becoming overwhelmed and to save lives.”

There are 11 counties total in the stay-at-home designation of these early stay-at-home adopters, meaning seven other counties in this region do not have stay-at-home orders while San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin and Santa Clara counties do.

Meanwhile, the other four regions of the state - northern California, the greater Sacramento area, southern California and the San Joaquin valley - are expected to reach the below-15% threshold within the next few days.

• The US saw the worst single-day highs for new Covid-19 cases and deaths of the entire pandemic, at 217,664 new cases and 2,879 deaths.
• President-elect Joe Biden urgently called for Congress to pass a $900bn coronavirus stimulus bill, as the jobs recovery slowed significantly in November.
• The latest jobs report, bad on its own, does not reflect the worst effects a probable surge could have on the economy.
• That is because the November jobs or coronavirus case data does not reflect new cases acquired during the Thanksgiving holiday, which have yet to be diagnosed because of Covid-19’s long incubation period.
• New data on travel over the Thanksgiving holiday showed few Americans heeded warnings to stay at home.
• Public health officials from all quarters are warning Americans the darkest days are still ahead and to delay any Christmas plans people may have.

I’m now handing the blog over to my esteemed colleague Vivian Ho, who will carry us through the evening.

A $2.3m coronavirus contact-tracing contract in Iowa was awarded to a major Republican donor in a 36-hour bidding process critics say smacks of favoritism from the state’s Republican governor.

The man who owns the company has claimed his telemarketing company made 80 million calls to help Trump win the 2016 election. Here is his current pinned tweet:

And here is more from the Associated Press:

MCI is owned by GOP donor Anthony Marlowe, who has boasted that it played a key role in Trump’s 2016 victory and was among the state’s top backers of Trump’s unsuccessful reelection bid.

Marlowe was an Iowa delegate to the Republican National Convention in August who spoke during the roll call vote as the state supported Trump’s renomination. He said his company had grown from 400 employees in 2016 to 4,000 “thanks to your explosive economic policies.”

MCI subsidiary Mass Markets has been paid $1 million by Trump’s campaign for telemarketing and data services since 2016, campaign finance records show.

Marlowe said in 2016 the company made 80 million calls to help Trump get out the vote, raise money and draw crowds to events. This cycle, MCI provided custom software and telephony services to the campaign.

The Republican governor’s campaign paid MCI more than $18,000 for services between 2017 and 2019 to promote rally turnout, and Marlowe’s firm has recently done work for the Republican Party of Iowa.

Marlowe has become a major donor, giving more than $175,000 to Republican Party groups and candidates since 2017, including to Trump, Reynolds and the state party, records show. His wife Julia began working at the White House earlier this year, although the couple has since announced their divorce.

Iowa awarded the contract using federal coronavirus relief funds that must be used by Dec. 31, after contact-tracing workers had been unable to keep pace with new cases. Last month, the state’s third-largest county abandoned contact tracing amid exponential growth.

Democratic state Sen. Joe Bolkcom of Iowa City, ranking member of the appropriations committee, called the bidding process “terrible” because vendors had only 36 hours to apply.

“We knew for weeks and weeks we weren’t keeping up with contact-tracing. Suddenly we have this emergency and a competitive process that’s meaningless,” he said. “Now we have hired this company that has these close ties to the governor. This just reeks of inside dealing.”

He noted the state’s no-bid contracts for a $26 million testing program and $21 million payroll system using coronavirus relief funds also faced favoritism allegations.

Independent experts had long recommended that Iowa hire hundreds or thousands more people to identify, contact and isolate those exposed to infected people to slow the spread.

Facing a virus surge that was overwhelming hospitals, the Iowa Department of Public Health announced Nov. 16 that it was seeking a contact tracing vendor. Citing the urgency, the department said proposals would be due the next day at midnight.

Fourteen companies submitted bids for the work. Marlowe said he wanted MCI, whose proposal was dated Nov. 16, to be the first to apply to demonstrate its nimbleness.

“Simply put, we move quickly and get things done,” he said.

Proposals had to be 10 pages. MCI’s 12-page proposal had one page of references and one page of graphics, which the department considered a “minor deficiency” but not disqualifying, agency spokeswoman Sarah Ekstrand said.

MCI was the top-scoring applicant out of the six that met the minimum score, she said.

Reynolds spokesman Pat Garrett said the governor’s office played no role in the request for proposals or contract selection. Marlowe said that he had not discussed the contract with Reynolds and that he doubted she was aware MCI worked on her campaign.

He released emails showing another MCI official had solicited state officials in March and state epidemiologist Dr. Caitlin Pedati in May to promote its services. MCI’s proposal said it would charge $240,000 per week to provide 200 full-time tracers.

The press conference concludes with Biden saying an enthusiastic “Yes!” when asked if he will go to Georgia, where two key US Senate races are going into runoffs in January.

A reporter has just asked what Biden’s inauguration could look like in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

He said he plans to listen to the science, and they “key is keeping people safe”.

“It is highly unlikely there will be a million people on the mall going all the way down to the monument,” said Biden. “I think you’re going to see something closer to what the convention was like... First and foremost is to keep America safe, but to celebrate, and see one another celebrate,” said Biden.

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