Politico

President Joe Biden will announce plans on Wednesday to nominate four new ambassadors, moving to fill vacancies at U.S. embassies in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Chad and Denmark.

Three of the nominees are former ambassadors, including Jane Hartley, an adviser and former ambassador to France and Monaco whom Biden will nominate as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. Her tenure in Paris included a string of terrorist attacks — including the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks in 2015, and the Nice attack in 2016 — as well as efforts to strengthen the U.S.-France relationship by bolstering counterterrorism efforts. Those efforts earned her the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest honor, from then-French President François Hollande.

Hartley will be the first woman to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom in over 40 years. The announcement ends months of speculation, as Hartley’s nomination to the U.K. ambassadorship was reported as early as July of last year.

Biden’s pick for ambassador to Brazil is Elizabeth Bagley, a longtime diplomat and attorney. Bagley served as ambassador to Portugal during the administration of former President Bill Clinton, during which she was given the Grand Cross of Prince Henry the Navigator, Portugal’s highest civilian honor.

Following her time in Portugal, Bagley served as senior adviser to secretaries of State Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Other federal appointments include special representative to the United Nations General Assembly in 2012, and the first special representative for global partnerships in the Office of the Secretary of State from 2009 to 2010.

Another former ambassador was tapped for the ambassadorship to Chad. Alexander Laskaris, a senior adviser in the Bureau of African Affairs, served as ambassador to Guinea during the Obama administration. His career in the State Department and as a minister-counselor in the Senior Foreign Service has included posts in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Biden’s selection for the ambassadorship to Denmark comes from the private sector. Alan Leventhal is the founder, chair and CEO of Beacon Capital Partners and a Boston-area philanthropist.

One year ago, President Joe Biden stood in front of a U.S. Capitol that still bore the wounds of an insurrectionist siege, taking the oath of office at a time when the nation faced its greatest array of crises in nearly a century.

He pledged that day to prove that the nation’s very democracy still worked, that he could restore unity to a divided country, tame a killer pandemic and steady a shaky economy. In the 12 months that have followed, unemployment has been slashed, a pair of transformative spending bills have been passed and life-saving vaccines were made available to nearly all Americans.

For all that, however, the president ends his first year undeniably weaker than he began it, with his poll numbers having plummeted and his party in danger of being swept out of power on Capitol Hill. His team insists they aren’t thrown by their turn of fortune and that history will be on their side.

“It does not surprise me that despite progress on Covid, despite progress on the economy, voters are not going to give us a passing grade yet,” White House chief of staff Ron Klain said in an interview. “But President Biden was elected to a four-year term, not a one-year term.”

Biden’s first year in office was almost evenly bifurcated between success and struggle.

In his first six months, he successfully steered a $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill to passage, surging funds to American families, schools and businesses battered by the pandemic. His administration rolled out a massive vaccine distribution program that made the protective shots available to every American just months after they were approved for use. He unveiled a series of economic policies that, by the end of his first year in office, would help cut unemployment from nearly 9 percent on Inauguration Day to 3.9 percent now.

Biden declared that America could have faith in its government again, as he sought to turn down the temperature in a Washington overheated by his predecessor, Donald Trump.

But in the late summer, the Biden administration was dramatically derailed, thrown off course by both unanticipated events and political missteps of their own making.

Only weeks after Biden used July 4 to declare America’s independence from the Covid virus, the lethal and highly transmissible Delta variant deluged the nation, preying largely on the unvaccinated to send death totals and hospitalizations soaring. Then the world watched in horror as the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan was filled with images of tumult and violence.

The administration tried to pitch each development as a testament of their mettle—they’d ended the nation’s longest war and were confronting the virus. But for a president that had made competency central to his message to the American public, the pair of missteps was politically damaging. His poll numbers have yet to recover.

In late November, reports emerged from South Africa about another new, even more highly transmissible Covid variant. As the holidays came, Omicron brought much of the nation to a halt, forcing Biden to end the year facing a new round of questions about his ability to handle the job.

“It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. You can divide his year pretty evenly, with the president starting by doing some important things to get the country back on track,” said Robert Gibbs, former press secretary to President Barack Obama. “But what started in August with Afghanistan, to me, is that since then this is a White House that has been shaped by external events, it isn’t doing the shaping of those events.”

Winning the White House on his third try, Biden took the helm of a nation worn down by the pandemic, which had claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives and reshaped the norms of everyday life. Trump’s combative term ended with a refusal to accept the results of the election, his torrent of lies igniting a deadly riot at the nation’s Capitol.

Biden was meant to be a steadying hand, a president welcomed in part for simply not being his predecessor. But citing the pandemic and the insurrection, Biden and his aides believed they needed to go big out of the gate. The president and his team invited comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society.”

A party-line vote turned the Covid relief bill into law. And Biden managed to secure an elusive bipartisan win with the passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure package this fall that is poised to be a godsend to the nation’s decaying roads, bridges and water pipes.

But the legislative process has been marked by intense Democratic infighting and the failure to move the rest of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Increasingly, the president’s ambition felt more like an overreach, out of step with the Democrats’ slim margins in Congress. Biden made repeated, personal attempts to move the Senate’s two centrist Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). There were some breakthroughs. But on the big ticket items, including voting rights, there has not been success. It has left Biden appearing, at times, as president of the Senate rather than the nation as a whole, as his administration became bogged down in the legislative morass. Republicans, with few exceptions, were eager to play obstructionists and polling suggested a nation nervous about inflation also wanted Biden to scale back.

“They misread their mandate,” said Alice Stewart, a Republican strategist and veteran of several GOP presidential campaigns. “Their mandate was to unify the country and put an end to Covid. But he has been persuaded by the left to try to enact transformational change and social spending and election reform that the public does not want.”

The White House has made no apologies for the scale of its agenda.

“The president became president at a time of great crises in the country. A Covid crisis, an economic crisis. The voters didn’t say ‘Go do a little bit,’” said Klain. “We put forward three key proposals: Covid relief, infrastructure, and Build Back Better. We had a bold agenda and achieved two of the three.”

The challenge, Klain continued, “is not that we have tried to do too much, but that we have more to do.”

For as shaky as the end of Year One was, the White House sees reasons for optimism as Biden begins his second in office. Though voting rights legislation seems stalled, the Build Back Better spending agenda could be revived, albeit a scaled back version. There are signs that the Omicron variant, less deadly than Delta, has peaked in parts of the country it first hit. And some economists believe that inflation will ease before voters head to the polls for November’s midterm elections.

Some Democrats take comfort in the knowledge that their party’s last two presidents — Obama and Bill Clinton — each struggled their first year only to win reelection. But historic trends and current polling both favor Republicans this November, and Trump has begun a return to the political stage, fueling talk of a 2024 comeback.

“He has some big accomplishments but his agenda seems to have no path forward and inflation really looms as a problem for the country,” said Julian Zelizer, presidential historian at Princeton University. “It is certainly not a stalled presidency, but he starts the new year with lots of trouble.”

The Biden administration’s website to order free rapid Covid-19 tests is up, and some users trying to get the tests delivered to apartments and other multi-unit residences ran into problems.

The website, COVIDtests.gov, went live a day earlier than anticipated in a “beta test” on Tuesday, sending millions of users to sign up for the tests from an order form ahead of a Wednesday morning launch. A White House official said this was “standard practice to address troubleshooting” to make Wednesday’s launch “as smooth … as possible.”

Some residents in multi-unit dwellings tried to register to have tests delivered but received error messages saying tests already had been ordered for their address. An administration official said the problem was not widespread and that orders are being prioritized for people in areas facing disproportionate Covid-19 cases and deaths — the first 20 percent of test orders processed will be for people in vulnerable ZIP codes.

“This will help ensure those most in need of the tests are receiving them as quickly as possible,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about the site.

The U.S. Postal Service said the issue stems from buildings not being registered as multi-unit complexes and affected only a “small percentage of orders.”

The issue raises concerns about access for the millions of Americans who live in apartment buildings and other multi-unit dwellings. Equity, and particularly health equity regarding Covid-19, has been a priority for the Biden administration. A planned phone hotline for people without internet access wasn’t yet available on Tuesday. The administration official emphasized that the site hasn’t been officially launched and the call line would be ready by week’s end.

The administration said last week that Americans would be able to order up to four tests per residential address through the website and see tests ship within 7 to 12 days of ordering via the U.S. Postal Service. Critics also have noted that four tests per address might not be enough for larger households with multiple generations or extended families living under one roof.

“The issue is if you’re lower income, and you have more than one family in the same household at that same address,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

The administration’s website points users to more than 20,000 free testing sites nationwide, as well as insurance reimbursement for at-home tests.

“We’ve been pretty clear that there are a range of ways that you can access free testing,” the official said.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday in a press briefing not to necessarily expect a perfect rollout.

“Every website launch in our view comes with risk. We can’t guarantee there won’t be a bug or two,” Psaki said. “But the best tech teams across the administration and the Postal Service are working hard to make this a success.”

Government websites haven’t always worked as planned, from the failed HealthCare.gov, which crashed on the first day of open enrollment under the Obama administration, to a national Covid-19 testing website former President Donald Trump announced that didn’t come to fruition.

Experts had warned standing up the Covid-19 testing website would be a challenge, though not to the level of the failed Obamacare exchange website, which was a more complex task. But taking millions of orders and shipping hundreds of millions in the middle of a raging pandemic is no small logistical task, experts said.

So far, traffic to the testing website has been high, with more than a million people on at one point Tuesday afternoon. Anil Dash, CEO of software company Glitch, in a tweet noted the website’s capacity to hold a surge in users, calling it a “really technically impressive pre-launch.”

Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, argued that given potential hiccups with getting tests delivered to everyone’s addresses, there needs to be alternative ways to get testing. Tests at local pharmacies or libraries could be options, she said.

“But perfect cannot be the enemy of the good,” Wen said. “Home delivery of rapid tests is an excellent way of getting tests to people who want them, and it’s a lot simpler than the cumbersome process of insurance reimbursement.”

David Lim contributed to this report.

The Biden administration will announce Wednesday a plan to distribute hundreds of millions of free, high-quality masks through pharmacies and community sites, three people with knowledge of the matter told POLITICO.

The masks will be N95s that are sourced from the government’s Strategic National Stockpile, the people said, as part of an effort to ensure Americans can access the more-protective masks during a record surge of Covid-19 cases.

The initiative comes in response to growing pressure on the administration to encourage Americans to abandon cloth masks in favor of more protective versions, amid evidence that the cloth coverings do not work as well against the more transmissible Omicron variant.

Public health experts and former Biden transition advisers have also lobbied the White House in recent weeks to give out masks, arguing that cheap and genuine N95s are still difficult for people to find, POLITICO reported last week.

The White House declined to comment.

But the plan is expected to lean heavily on pharmacies — which have become an integral part of the administration’s vaccination campaign — to also distribute the N95s at no cost.

HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dawn O’Connell told the Senate HELP Committee during a Tuesday hearing on the pandemic response that the federal government has 737 million N95 masks in the Strategic National Stockpile sourced from 12 domestic manufacturers.

“We are also in the process of putting out an agreement for warm base manufacturing so we’re able to keep this capacity that we currently have going, even when demand diminishes,” O’Connell testified.

President Joe Biden last week signaled that the administration planned to distribute masks for free, acknowledging that for some individuals, obtaining high-quality masks is “not always affordable or convenient.”

“I know we all wish that we could finally be done with wearing masks,” Biden said during a speech announcing a new effort to use the military to support hospitals. “I get it. But they’re a really important tool to stop the spread, especially of a highly transmittable Omicron variant.”

Biden on Wednesday is also slated to hold a press conference where he’s expected to tout the administration’s efforts to tamp down the Omicron surge and make Covid-19 tests and masks more widely available.

House Republicans are edging toward harder hits at President Joe Biden while he struggles to contain Covid’s Omicron variant. Just don’t expect it to become a centerpiece of their midterm-election messaging.

That’s in part because the GOP has to walk a fine line on the pandemic — thanks to Donald Trump.

After Biden and Democrats campaigned on a vow to help steer a virus-weary nation back to normalcy, arguing that the GOP failed to quickly respond when Covid first descended, Republicans now say Biden has proven himself unprepared to deal with the Omicron surge. It’s an argument that Republicans are eager to fling back at the White House after more than a year on the back foot, accusing Biden’s party of politically weaponizing Covid against them.

“President Biden’s learned a valuable lesson: Be careful who you criticize and what you criticize them for, because it may come back to you,” Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) said.

But going on offense against Biden isn’t the same as building an election-year message around his handling of Covid. And the GOP likely won’t do that for several reasons: Members say it wouldn’t resonate well with their base, compared with issues like the economy, education and national security. Republicans also see it as a tough point to underscore given their broad dismissal of Covid precautions after the nation’s first round of vaccinations, as well as their growing rebukes of mask and vaccine mandates.

Not to mention that the party is still trying to minimize Trump’s actions when the pandemic first shut down the country nearly two years ago. The former president downplayed the virus at first, repeatedly undermined his own infectious disease experts, suggested the use of unproven and dangerous treatments, and at times embraced suggestions his administration should let the virus run largely rampant through a still-unvaccinated country.

Trump later hid his own vaccination status and rebuffed pleas last year to promote Biden’s initial vaccine rollout. Only this month did he reveal that he is fully boosted against Covid and urge people to get vaccinated, while calling politicians who aren’t transparent about their status “gutless.” The remarks, however, were seen as a verbal jab at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has chafed Trump in recent months with his lack of deference related to the next presidential election.

That backstory makes Trump — the GOP’s national leader in the eyes of most House Republicans — a deeply inconvenient standard-bearer on Covid policy.

Still, in an effort to shield Trump from criticism over his handling of the pandemic, Republicans argue that he shouldn’t be compared with Biden, who inherited an entire infrastructure in place to deal with the virus. Biden’s failures to contain Covid could have been avoided more easily than Trump’s — and should have — been avoided, GOP lawmakers contend.

“The Biden administration inherited a set of tools that were the necessary ingredients to address the crisis. They got tests. They got the vaccines. They got the infrastructure in place. And all the Biden administration needed to do was step up that innovation, distribute those things and organizing it,” said Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, a member of GOP leadership.

“And they’ve handled it in a very disorganized fashion, where now everyone is confused their promises have not been upheld,” he added.

Despite their members’ growing anti-lockdown and anti-mandate rhetoric, House Republicans say they can fold a cogent critique of Biden’s handling of Covid into a broader case that he has failed to deliver, alongside soaring inflation, the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and a rise in illegal southern border crossings.

“We watched President Trump and Republicans get blamed for Covid … President Biden is seeing right now that his rhetoric is clearly not matching the actions, and he needs to face accountability,” Davis said.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s office, meanwhile, has sent out messaging emails that hit Biden for failing to “live up to his own assurances” or deliver “a realistic response to the virus.”

But other Republicans took a more even-handed view. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said it’s fair to criticize both Biden and Trump for fumbling the virus at various points, though he contended Democrats struck the first low blow by turning the virus into a 2020 election issue.

“It’s worth noting, they politicized it, and they have done worse,” added Bacon, who held onto his seat in 2020 as his district swung towards Biden. “But I think we would be better off if we didn’t politicize it to begin with.”

Still, most on Capitol Hill think neither party can afford to back off on partisan wrangling over the virus — especially with polls showing Biden at a weak point politically when it comes to Covid. And while Democrats maintain voters will ultimately blame GOP governors and the unvaccinated population for the prolonging the pandemic, exhaustion with the public health crisis could ultimately bolster Republicans’ case.

Some Democratic governors are hesitant to reimpose public health restrictions, like mask mandates, for fear of a backlash. The White House has repeatedly emphasized that it won’t return to lockdowns.

At the same time, Biden allies have grown frustrated about Democratic criticism of the White House’s stumbles on testing and isolation guidelines, believing those intraparty blows only strengthen GOP messaging.

Some Biden supporters have zeroed in on senators’ insistence on hauling in top public health officials for regular hearings, venting that it accomplishes little beyond giving Republicans a platform to amplify bad-faith criticism.

The sessions in front of the Senate’s health committee are often dominated by erroneous yet headline-grabbing attacks on Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — attacks that, according to Biden allies, can force the administration to burn time tamping down misinformation and defending its own officials. That displeasure has been communicated to Democrats on the Senate panel, said one person with knowledge of the matter, though it’s unlikely to spur any changes to the committee’s practices.

A Democratic committee aide, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity, described health panel hearings under Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) as opportunities for the chair to blast “right-wing misinformation“ and Republicans’ opposition to Biden’s policies.

Inside the administration, officials are eager to keep the focus on the public health response, betting that the best thing they — and the country overall — is to get more people vaccinated.

Yet politics is more than a distraction for the administration. Even as Democrats dismiss the GOP attacks as anti-science, major party players are calling for a more aggressive villainizing of Republicans over opposition to Biden’s policies that they see as responsible for prolonging the pandemic.

The GOP is “actively fighting known successful mitigation efforts all across the country,” said Brad Woodhouse, executive director of Democrat-aligned Protect Our Care. “It’s part of a political strategy.”

The intensifying Republican focus on Biden’s pandemic response comes amid a roaring resurgence of the virus that’s demoralized the nation and sent the administration scrambling for a reset.

For much of Biden’s first year, Democrats wagered that voters would reward the administration’s clear progress in fighting Covid — passing trillions of dollars in aid, rolling out a successful vaccination campaign and suppressing the virus without resorting to lockdowns. The rise of the Delta variant, followed by Omicron, has all but wiped out that hope.

Biden’s approval ratings are falling, and early White House efforts to project what aides referred to as “consistent competence” on Covid have been swamped by growing confusion over the administration’s plans to rein in an out-of-control virus.

“If you look at the whole world, everyone’s having the same problems,” Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota epidemiologist and former adviser to the Biden transition, said as Covid cases hit record levels. “This is the time when we just need to level with the public.”

Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has tested positive for Covid, according to his spokesperson, just days after being in contact with President Joe Biden.

Milley, who attended Gen. Raymond Odierno’s funeral on Jan. 12 with Biden, tested negative every day leading up to Sunday’s positive test, a statement said. He is working remotely and isolating after he tested positive on Sunday.

“He is experiencing very minor symptoms and can perform all of his duties from the remote location,” Col. Dave Butler, the Joint Chiefs spokesperson, said in the statement issued Monday. “He has received the COVID-19 vaccines including the booster.”

The statement also noted that all the joint chiefs, except for one, had tested negative — though it’s not clear whether the “one” refers to Milley or another individual.

Biden was also exposed in December, when he came in contact with a White House official who later tested positive for Covid. White House press secretary Jen Psaki has noted multiple times that the president is tested regularly. Biden is fully vaccinated and received his booster dose in September.

As the highly contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus surges in the U.S., Psaki has acknowledged an increase in cases in the White House and in other government agencies. A number of public officials have announced positive cases in recent weeks.

The White House has limited the size of gatherings and has continued to test anyone who will be in close contact with Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, Psaki said last week. The White House Correspondents’ Association has also temporarily reduced capacity in the White House briefing room to 14 journalists because of rising cases.

The Biden administration will begin making free at-home Covid-19 tests available through a government website starting Jan. 19 — but the public may have to wait a week or longer to receive them.

Households will be able to order four tests at a time through the website COVIDTests.gov and the tests will “typically ship within 7-12 days of ordering,” according to a fact sheet.

A senior administration official told reporters the government has 420 million tests under contract and tens of millions already in its possession. Officials are finalizing contracts for the 80 million tests remaining out of an initial order of 500 million. The effort to procure and distribute the tests will have a total cost of about $4 billion.

Asked if the government can meet demand as soon as the website goes live, the senior administration official said the Biden administration is confident “that we can meet all of our timelines and get these to all Americans that want them.”

“We anticipate the first tests going out at the end of this month, with the remaining tests going out over the next 60 days,” Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Dawn O’Connell told the Senate HELP Committee during a Tuesday hearing on the pandemic response.

Data: Nearly three million results from Covid-19 tests are being logged daily, according to a tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University. But public health experts warn that number does not include millions of unreported results from at-home tests, which are not frequently shared with public health departments.

A White House spokesperson told POLITICO the federal government will not be putting new systems in place for Americans to report results from the free at-home tests being distributed outside existing reporting structures.

What’s next: The Biden administration announced this week it is working to procure an additional 500 million at-home tests, in an effort to up the total procured to one billion.

President Joe Biden gave a thunderous voting speech in Georgia this week and never once mentioned the one reform that has a serious chance of passing.

He touted legislation to, among other things, impose same-day voter registration on the entire country and water down voter ID requirements in dozens of states as the alleged solution to budding autocracy, without bothering to address the plausible threat of a sitting vice president or congressional majority trying to subvert an election result.

He called opponents of his voting bills the equivalent of Bull Connor and Jefferson Davis, a rancid and demagogic charge, even as some of those same opponents are actively trying to fix the weakness in the system that he studiously ignored.

He declared his support for ending the filibuster on a narrow partisan vote, in order to enable the passage of his voting bills on narrow partisan votes, heedless of ongoing, constructive negotiations on Capitol Hill.

The bipartisan effort Biden steered clear of is, of course, the push to tighten up the Electoral Count Act, the muddled 140-year-old law setting out how Congress considers electoral votes from the states in presidential elections. Members of the Senate GOP leadership, most importantly Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have expressed an interest in getting something done, while Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) has been working with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) on a proposal.

No one, Republican or Democrat, should want a repeat of Donald Trump’s attempt to exploit ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act to get the vice president to delay or change the count unilaterally. Yet, this simple imperative was not only absent from Biden’s purportedly historic address; many Democrats have sounded positively hostile to the idea.

Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias senses a plot to use reform of the Electoral Count Act to scuttle the Democratic voting bills, even though the bills are unlikely to pass regardless of whether Congress reforms, repeals or leaves untouched the 1887 law. On similar grounds, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last week called a focus on the Electoral Count Act a “cynical” attempt to “divert attention from the real issue,” alleged voter suppression in Republican states. According to Schumer, a simple reform of the Electoral Count Act is “unacceptably insufficient and even offensive.”

That Schumer professes to be offended by a proposal for a useful, incremental change that he could get to Biden’s desk relatively easily tells you all you need to know about Democrats’ priorities. Biden was supposed to be the old legislative hand who could forge compromise on Capitol Hill as he worked assiduously to unify the country. Instead, after failing on his Build Back Better spending agenda, he is staking his credibility once again on a probably impossible legislative lift, even as he raises the stakes by saying our democracy depends on the Democrats’ voting proposals and by denouncing opponents of them as “enemies.”

It would be much more in keeping with the image Biden cultivated in the 2020 campaign to get in front of the parade on the Electoral Count Act, hail reforms to the law as the sort of consensus approach he promised, sign a bill at a ceremony with some Republicans present and hope the small-scale success bumps up his dismal approval rating a bit. It was once considered a cardinal rule of politics that success is better than failure. But on voting, the White House has once again put the accent on the almost-sure-to-fail over the likely-to-succeed.

Perhaps this would be defensible if Jim Crow 2.0, the term Biden has used for Republican voting laws, were really afoot in the land. It’s not. Biden’s case against Georgia in his speech was laughably weak.

The Georgia voting law that passed last year didn’t make it more difficult to vote absentee; it asked voters to provide a driver’s license number as a more reliable way to verify ballots (the prior method, signature match, had been reasonably criticized as too subjective). It’s true that there will be fewer ballot drop boxes in the state going forward, but there will still be more than in any election prior to 2020, since they didn’t exist before then. Finally, the infamous provision of Georgia’s law that forbids third-party groups from passing out food and water to voters standing in line is meant to prevent electioneering at the polls — Georgia lawmakers got the idea from a similar rule in New York State.

Overall, Georgia has seen hugely robust turnout in recent elections. The League of Women Voters noted in the fall of 2020 that so many voters had already registered in the state that it was hard to find anyone new to sign up. This isn’t what you’d expect if the Peach State were really the harbinger of a new age of voter suppression.

Biden also complained in his speech of the new ability of Georgia’s State Election Board, an independent body with appointees from the state legislature, to take over county election boards. Perhaps the state board could use this authority to swoop in and change the vote tally in select counties after an election? Given that there’s due process built into this mechanism — there has to be an investigation, and the county has the ability to appeal to the courts — it’s unlikely the state board could pull this off even if it wanted to.

This gets to a substantive objection to changing the Electoral Count Act, raised by well-meaning skeptics of the idea. If the law is changed to make it harder for Congress to object to a state’s electors, as proponents of reform on the right and left have suggested, won’t that simply make it easier for state legislatures to rig vote counts without any pushback? It’s appropriate to limit the role of Congress, though, to keep one party from ever again trying delay or monkey with the electoral vote counts without legitimate justification.

There are already substantial political and legal obstacles preventing state legislatures from disregarding election results. For one thing, if, after holding a popular vote on Election Day, a state legislature decided to choose its electors by a different method on a different day, that legislature would be in violation of the federal law that sets out when Election Day is. Various state laws stand in the way, as well. As we saw in the 2020 election controversy, the courts are also a bulwark against tossing or otherwise distorting election results.

A critical mass of Senate Republicans seems to be coalescing in support of changing the Electoral Count Act, in some fashion or other — roughly 10 at this point, but it could conceivably become a couple of dozen. There are some complaints from the right about cooperating with Democrats at all, and Trump is likely to denounce any proposal — which, of course, is largely aimed at him. Republicans shouldn’t let him dissuade them, though, and should keep in mind that what Vice President Mike Pence was being urged to do yesterday might become a possibility for Vice President Kamala Harris tomorrow.

Changing the Electoral Count Act makes sense on its own terms, even if it’s unlikely that the exact same scenario we saw 2020 is going to repeat itself in 2024. All is flux, as the philosopher Heraclitus said. Indeed, given Biden’s poor standing with voters and poor instincts on political strategy, as demonstrated once again this week, Democrats might have to start worrying less about Trump stealing the 2024 election from Biden (or some other Democrat) than about winning fair and square.

After spending four years on the defensive about Donald Trump’s often-conciliatory posture toward Moscow, Republicans are hoping for their own Russia reset this week.

Their vehicle for that pivot is an imminent Senate vote on sanctions for a Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline. With the Biden administration vehemently opposed to the sanctions, the debate gives GOP senators an opening to squeeze centrist Democrats and those in competitive reelection races this fall who are eager to show they’re tough on Russia.

More broadly, though, Republicans see an opportunity to turn the page on an era that found them struggling to defend the former president’s periodic coziness with Vladimir Putin’s government amid Russia’s documented meddling in the 2016 election.

What won’t happen, however, is an outright win for the GOP. The White House is aggressively pushing Democrats to reject Sen. Ted Cruz’s bill financially walloping the pipeline known as Nord Stream 2, and Democrats are expected to block the legislation as soon as Thursday.

But Republicans are eager to leverage the issue to their political advantage as President Joe Biden navigates delicate talks with Russia over its military buildup on the border with Ukraine.

Democrats have “just spent an enormous amount of political capital holding all their people together who do not want to be in that position” of opposing the sanctions, said Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee. “I mean, this absolutely doesn’t make sense.”

Biden and his national-security deputies contend Cruz’s bill would undercut their push for unity with European allies against Russia’s aggression, in Ukraine and elsewhere. Yet the administration’s lobbying against the Cruz bill, paired with Democrats’ counter-proposal to it, strikes Republicans as frantic maneuvering to prevent an embarrassing loss.

And the GOP’s approach is backed by top Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has publicly urged senators to back Cruz’s legislation. (Ukraine has long opposed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which circumvents its territory, worrying that the energy project would strengthen Moscow’s footing in Europe.)

Cruz crowed that “the White House is scrambling. They are trying very hard to put political pressure on Democrats.” The conservative Texan, who has been leading the pipeline sanctions push for months, added that the forceful Biden administration response comes after Democrats “spent five years with Donald Trump as president screaming, ‘Russia Russia Russia.’”

Indeed, the Biden administration is working hard to ensure that there are as few Democratic defections as possible on the sanctions vote. Senior State Department officials briefed on-the-fence Democrats on Monday night, and a trio of officials from the Defense, State and Treasury departments came to the Capitol on Wednesday to persuade senators and aides. The State Department also blasted out a memo on the matter to Senate offices.

The Biden administration’s arguments appear to be resonating with Democrats, even those who have been the most vocal about the need to sanction Nord Stream 2. Nearly all Democrats have thus far resisted Cruz’s approach, citing the need to allow Biden to engage in diplomacy with the Kremlin over concerns that it will move to re-invade Ukraine in the coming days.

Democrats have also accused Cruz of abusing the Senate’s rules in order to force a debate on his sanctions package. The Texas Republican secured a vote on his bill as part of an agreement last month with Democratic leaders after Cruz held up quick confirmation of dozens of Biden’s ambassador nominees.

The Biden administration faced bipartisan criticism last year when it decided to waive mandatory sanctions on the pipeline out of a desire to repair relations with Germany, which supports the project as a means to bolster its natural gas resources. But the new German government has since changed its position on the issue, agreeing to hold off on final certification of Nord Stream 2 while Putin threatens an invasion of Ukraine.

Democrats had previously backed sanctions on the pipeline but now contend that the circumstances surrounding the issue have changed, requiring a shift on their part as well.

In response to Cruz’s gambit, a large group of Democratic senators unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would impose biting sanctions on Russia — including on Nord Stream 2 — if Moscow invades its neighbor. The plan, Democrats say, preserves Biden’s ability to use the not-yet-operational pipeline as leverage to convince Putin to back down.

“That’s the first and foremost reason I did it,” Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who introduced the counter-proposal on Wednesday, said in an interview. “We face an immediate challenge — the potential of Russia invading. So which is the better course to deter Russia?”

The clash between the two legislative courses on Russia may not break along easy party lines this week. Democrats warn that Cruz’s bill would splinter the U.S. from European allies, undermining Biden’s push for trans-Atlantic unity in the face of Russia’s aggression. They say Cruz is rooting for Biden to fail and hoping to prop up his own presidential ambitions.

Yet even as Republicans blast the Menendez-led effort as a bid for political cover designed to give Democrats an opportunity to oppose Cruz’s bill while maintaining a tough posture toward Russia, some of them could end up voting for it. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) is among those in the GOP expressing openness to the severe sanctions prescribed in Menendez’s bill, which lawmakers believe would be justified if Russia invades Ukraine.

“You might get 95 senators voting for that, maybe 99,” added Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a top Foreign Relations Committee member, said of the Menendez proposal, which is backed by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “There’s a view that that’s being used for cover on the Cruz vote, which I don’t see it as that.”

Republicans would prefer to keep the focus on Democrats who have backed away from Cruz’s bill, noting that nearly all senators previously supported the exact sanctions outlined in the legislation.

“At this point, the only thing that’s changed is that instead of a Republican in the White House, there’s a Democrat in the White House,” Cruz said. “And an awful lot of Senate Democrats right now seem perfectly willing to put partisan loyalty above national security.”

The Senate GOP campaign arm is already using the vote to squeeze vulnerable Democrats who are up for reelection this year.

At least one of those Democrats, Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, plans to support Cruz’s bill. But it’s unclear if more Democrats will join her, and Republicans are conceding that it’s unlikely they’ll secure the requisite 60 votes for passage.

The White House detailed plans Thursday to double the number of rapid Covid tests it will order and make available to to the general public.

The Biden administration previously announced plans to procure 500 million at-home Covid tests, part of a White House effort to ease the strain on the nation’s health care infrastructure brought on by surging caseloads across the country.

In remarks on Thursday, President Joe Biden announced an additional commitment to bring the total number of tests his administration will order up to 1 billion.

The order for additional at-home tests represents a further shift in the administration’s strategy only a short while after White House press secretary Jen Psaki and others downplayed the need for such widespread at-home testing measures to battle the virus’ transmission.

Earlier this week, the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury jointly issued guidance requiring private health insurers to reimburse people for up to eight over-the-counter tests per month, starting mid-January. On Wednesday the White House also rolled out an expansion of its effort for in-school Covid testing.

Top health officials have also mulled whether to distribute high-quality masks to people nationwide, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has resisted calls to revise its guidance in order to promote usage of more effective N-95 or KN-95 style masks.

The CDC itself has come under increasing fire for seemingly muddled messaging in recent weeks, particularly around recent changes to its advice regarding the amount of time people infected with the virus should isolate before reentering society.