FEATURING NATALIE MEBANE – President Joe Biden, as candidate, made tackling climate change a key part of his platform, and in his first week in office appears to be staying true to his pledge. He has taken steps for the U.S. to rejoin the Paris climate accord, cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, and halted new oil and gas drilling leases on public lands. 

Biden, as Vice President to Obama, was part of an administration for 8 years that paid lip service to taking on the issue but didn’t go far enough. Donald Trump’s 4 years in office set the United States back seriously. Will Biden as president move fast enough and far enough to stave off catastrophic climate change? 

Read the list of climate executive orders sent to the Biden administration at https://buildbackfossilfree.org.

Natalie Mebane, US Policy Associate Director at 350.org. 

FEATURING JENNIFER E. COSSYLEON – President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed a series of executive orders intended to address racial injustice in many realms including housing. In remarks delivered at the White House he said, “Housing is a right in America,” and that he was, “directing the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs — and Urban Development to redress historical racism in federal housing policies.”  

Coinciding with Biden’s actions, the organization Community Change has just released its “Housing Playbook’s New Deal for Housing Justice,” intended as a, “blueprint for achieving racial equity in housing policy within the first 200 days of the new administration and Congress.”

Read the New Deal Housing Justice blueprint, HERE. 

Jennifer E. Cossyleon, Policy Advisor and Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow with Community Change.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed a sweeping new executive order on climate change, that includes a moratorium on oil and gas leasing for drilling on public lands. In a 1-page fact sheet released by the White House, the Biden Administration announced a “Leaders’ Climate Summit on Earth Day” of this year, and establishes a “White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy,” and a, “National Climate Task Force.” The executive order also, “directs the Director of National Intelligence to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on the security implications of climate change,” and “directs the Secretary of the Interior to pause on entering into new oil and natural gas leases on public lands or offshore waters to the extent possible.” There will also be a “review of all existing leasing and permitting practices related to fossil fuel development on public lands and waters.” Significantly the order also includes an emphasis on environmental justice, “delivering justice for communities who have been subjected to environmental harm.” 

In other news, 45 out of 50 Republican Senators on Tuesday voted to block the Senate Impeachment trial of Donald Trump, saying it was unconstitutional because he was no longer in office. Democrats need 17 Republicans to join them in order to convict Trump and so far there it does not appear if that will happen. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer rejected the GOP logic saying it is, “flat-out wrong by every frame of analysis — constitutional context, historical practice, precedent and basic common sense.” The only Republican Senators to join Democrats in the test vote were Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Patrick J. Toomey. Former Labor Secretary and progressive activist Robert Reich responded to the vote by suggesting a secret ballot. 

Indicating the depth of Republican fear of Trump and his loyalists, several GOP Senators have announced their retirement ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, including Rob Portman of Ohio. Meanwhile, one House Republican named Adam Kinzinger of Illinois who is openly critical of Trump is speaking out about the political fallout he knows will come from being the only representative from his party urging former Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th amendment against Trump. He told the Washington Post, “I’ve felt very isolated in my party.” Meanwhile, a new report found that 30,000 registered Republicans left their party in the state of Colorado alone in the week after the January 6th Capitol riot. Among those who remain, 50% say in a new survey that they want Trump to play a serious role i...

FEATURING LAWRENCE LESSIG – President Joe Biden hasn’t been in office for a week yet and Republicans are already working hard to undermine the democratically elected president. Not only do far too many GOP officials at the federal and state level back the lie that the 2020 election was won by Donald Trump, but many are laying the groundwork for theft of the next election. In Georgia where Trump’s loss and the loss of two GOP Senators caused political earthquakes, the Republican Party is busy trying to change voter ID laws and make it harder for people of color and Democrats to cast votes. 

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, host of the podcast Another Way, founder of equalcitizens.us, and co-founder of Creative Commons. He has written many books including his latest They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy. 

FEATURING ELLIOTT YOUNG – The Trump administration’s immigrant family separation brought to light the horrors of the U.S.’s imprisonment of immigrants. But most Americans might be unaware that immigrant detention has a long and sordid history in the United States going back as far as the late nineteenth century. Many have challenged the application of the U.S. constitution to non-citizens, thereby greatly limiting the ability of those incarcerated to advocate for themselves and have any recourse for justice or freedom. 

Elliott Young, Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. He is the author of Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII and Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border and co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is co-founder of the Tepoztlan Institute for Transnational History of the Americas. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 200 asylum cases. His new book is called Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System. 

House impeachment managers on Monday evening delivered their article of impeachment against former President Donald Trump to the U.S. Senate, formally kicking off the process for a Senate trial. The New York Times conducted a survey of all Senate Republicans on where they stood with respect to convicting Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” and found that out of 50 lawmakers 27 have already decided to acquit. None have committed to conviction including those who are openly critical of Trump like Mitt Romney, or privately critical like Mitch McConnell. Sixteen Republican senators say they are undecided and ten did not respond. Democrats need all those in their ranks to vote yes and 17 Republicans to join in, in order to convict Trump over the January 6th riot. A conviction would be the first step in ensuring that the twice impeached president could never run again for the nation’s highest office. President Joe Biden said it was important for the Senate trial to take place even if it hampered his ability to enact his agenda quickly. Biden said there would be, “a worse effect if it didn’t happen.” Meanwhile Trump, stripped of his social media bullhorns, sent a message to his fellow Republicans, essentially threatening them to fall in line behind him. 

Democrats won a victory on Monday evening after Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell moved to end a standoff between the two parties over ending the filibuster. The former Majority leader cited two Democratic Senators: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who had verbally supported preserving the filibuster, as enough assurance to move forward. A spokesperson for the new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “We’re glad Senator McConnell threw in the towel and gave up on his ridiculous demand…We look forward to organizing the Senate under Democratic control and start getting big, bold things done for the American people.”

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Antony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for State Secretary. Blinken was confirmed in a vote of 78 to 22 and follows Janet Yellen’s Monday confirmation as the new Treasury Secretary. The nominee for Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimundo, on Tuesday appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee for a hearing ahead of a full Senate vote. 

President Biden is preparing to sign a series of executive orders to fight climate change, including a federal ban on new oil and gas leases of public lands. The New York Times explained that, “An eventual ban on new drilling leases would fulfill a campaign promise that infuriated the oil industry and became a central theme in the fight for the critical battleground state of Pennsylvania, where…fracking, has become big business.”

Biden also plans to sign several orders related to racial justice and criminal justice reform.

FEATURING JOHN NICHOLS – The United States Senate has ground to a halt just days after President Joe Biden was inaugurated. Because the Democratic Party controls only 50 seats and, by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris is technically considered the majority party, lawmakers are fighting over the rules by which the body can legislate. Republicans want to preserve the use of the Senate filibuster. Meanwhile Independent Senator Bernie Sanders who caucuses with the Democrats, and who has a new role as the powerful Senate Budget committee chair, wants to use a process of budget reconciliation to pass major legislation without GOP support. To top it all off, the second impeachment of Donald Trump looms large. 

John Nichols, national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine and host of the podcast, ‘Next Left.’ He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times. He is also the author of numerous books including Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America (Nation Books) and The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: The Enduring Legacy of Henry Wallace’s Anti-Fascist, Anti-Racist Politics. 

FEATURING ROBERT ELLIOTT SMITH – When Donald Trump’s supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, egged on by their president, it seemed like the last straw for social media companies like Twitter and Facebook which for years had refused to hold Trump to the same standards as everyone else. Twitter suspended Trump permanently from using its platform, cutting his main bullhorn abruptly. Facebook merely suspended him indefinitely. 

Now, as citizen Trump wants to resume fomenting hate and violence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has turned over the decision about Trump using his platform to an “Oversight Board” of 40 academics and thinkers, who will issue a binding decision. The Trump suspension is being seen as a test case for how social media companies expect to deal with the proliferation of hate and violence on their platforms. 

Robert Elliott Smith, an expert in Artificial Intelligence who has worked on projects for Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and more. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. He is the author of Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All. 

The House of Representatives on Monday is sending its impeachment article against the former U.S. President to the full Senate ahead of a trial even as Republicans in the Senate are split over how to respond. The article that all House Democrats and ten House Republicans voted to pass in the last weeks of Donald Trump’s Presidency, accused him of “incitement of insurrection” in the Capitol riot of January 6th. The trial is expected to begin on February 9th. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren warned in an interview on CNN that, “We need accountability, accountability for Donald Trump and accountability for everyone who participated in that insurrection.” Republican Senator Mitt Romney said on Fox News, “It is pretty clear that over the last year, there has been an effort to corrupt the election in the United States, and it was not by President Biden, it was by President Trump.” But Mr. Romney appears to be in the minority within his party where a majority of elected Republicans still seem intent on questioning the election results and defending the former president. The Washington Post reports that, “Members of the Republican National Committee also were in a heated debate over the weekend on how to respond to impeachment — and how fiercely to defend Trump, who maintains support among a majority of the 168 committee members.” What is remarkable about the Trump loyalists is that members of Congress continue to receive violent threats from pro-Trump people. According to Associated Press, “Federal law enforcement officials are examining a number of threats aimed at members of Congress as the second trial of former President Donald Trump nears, including ominous chatter about killing legislators or attacking them outside of the U.S. Capitol.” 

Reflecting the battle at the federal level, Arizona’s Republican legislators appear firmly in the Trump camp as the state-party moved to censure those officials they felt were not loyal enough to the former president, including Gov. Doug Ducey, former Sen. Jeff Flake and the late Sen. John McCain’s wife Cindy McCain. There is little acknowledgement of the on-going emergence of Trump’s various coup attempts. The Inspector General of the Department of Justice on Monday announced he will probe allegations that Trump colluded with a DOJ official named Jeffrey Clark to oust the Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen in order to force the state of Georgia to invalidate Joe Biden’s election win in that state and thereby overturn the presidential election.

Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was the president’s most vocal surrogate in efforts to overturn the election, is now facing a $1.3 billion lawsuit by the tech company Dominion. The company accuses Giuliani of spreading lies about their voting machines being involved in fraud and helping Biden win. The complaint says, “The harm to Dominion’s business and reputation is unprecedented and irreparable because of how fervently millions of people believe it.”

FEATURING MEDEA BENJAMIN – President Joe Biden’s first few days in office have been a welcome relief for a nation weary of political strife, dangerous and incessant lies, and a violent insurrection. On the international stage, European leaders have signaled their pleasure at the change, and even the Russian, Iranian, and North Korean governments have been cautiously open to negotiations. 

But, the antiwar group Codepink has vociferously opposed at least some of Biden’s picks for key positions that will determine U.S. foreign policy: namely newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

Medea Benjamin, Co-founder of human rights group Global Exchange and the peace organization CODEPINK. She is a long-time political activist who has also written a number of books including Saudi Arabia, Kingdom of the Unjust, Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control and Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.