Saturday Snippets is a regular weekend Daily Kos feature.
• Check out these letters outgoing presidents wrote to their successors. Then imagine Trump’s letter to Joe Biden: The Atlantic has published letters that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama wrote to the incoming president. Alex Kalman writes: “Each letter humanizes this small but monumental moment in the life of a democracy. Each note graciously acknowledges that one’s duty in office has come to an end, that it is now time to pass the immense power to someone else, and maybe even offer some advice or help while doing so.”
President Obama wrote to Trump in 2017: Congratulations on a remarkable run. Millions have placed their hopes in you, and all of us, regardless of party, should hope for expanded prosperity and security during your tenure. [...] Third, we are just temporary occupants of this office. That makes us guardians of those democratic institutions and traditions—like rule of law, separation of powers, equal protection and civil liberties—that our forebears fought and bled for. Regardless of the push and pull of daily politics, it's up to us to leave those instruments of our democracy at least as strong as we found them.
As Obama and the rest of us have learned since that letter was written, Donald Trump had zero intention of guarding democratic institutions. From him, expect no gracious letter to Biden, not even one penned with a Sharpie. But he probably won’t be able to keep himself from tweeting some nasty lie, the one thing besides relentless grifting at which he has proved competent.
• Here are 277 policies Joe Biden can enact on Day One without Congress.
On their own, none of these 277 policies will fully solve any of the interlinked crises we now face. But they can go a significant way toward immediate harm reduction. Some can even solve longstanding problems, simply by enforcing or fully implementing laws already on the books.
Perhaps most important, all of these policies are ideas that leaders in the moderate and progressive wings of the party broadly agree on, and that Biden should have no excuse not to enact, save for his own policy preferences.
• Meet the guy firing people who Trump considers disloyal: Johnny McEntee is the 30-year-old architect of the post-election purge going on in the White House, an effort amounting to a crusade that he has been working on for months. A team of Washington Post reporters note that McEntee is passing out the pink slips, making clear that disloyalty will be punished, and warning employees not to cooperate with the Biden transition. More dismissals are expected to follow those of the secretary of Defense, a senior climate scientist, two top Homeland Security officials, and the second-in-command of USAID, all of whom were booted in the past nine days. Said Cleta Mitchell, a conservative activist who is a partner at the law firm Foley & Lardner, “Conservatives believe that the president was not well served by the original people staffing [the White House Personnel Office]. They systematically excluded strong Trump supporters,” Of McEntee, she said: “I wish he had been there in the beginning.” Having been ousted from his previous far less powerful White House post because of an online gambling obsession, McEntee was rehired after the impeachment of Trump. He soon axed employees in the personnel office and began an interview process to uncover disloyalty by sussing out their personal views in various matters. For example, an employee at the Environmental Protection Agency was asked his opinion on withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. “I work at the EPA,” the official said, startled.
• U.S. surpasses record high for positive COVID-19 tests: As the coronavirus rages across the nation, data from Johns Hopkins University puts the number of positive tests on Friday at a record 184,514, The university puts the seven-day rolling average for virus-related deaths at 1,047. Another source, Worldometers, has consistently tallied a total that is a few thousand more deaths than the Johns Hopkins’ count. On Friday, it recorded the daily death toll at 1,397 and the seven-day rolling average at 1,107. That’s the highest it’s been since Aug. 5. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation projects that at least 439,000 Americans will have died from the virus by March 1 unless strict mask-wearing orders are enacted and enforced.
• Biden’s climate playbook may echo Trump’s: When the Trump regime came into office nearly four years ago, it asked the courts to stop litigation over the Obama-created Clean Power Plan while it worked to repeal and replace the rule. Since then, Trump has rolled back or weakened more than 125 environmental policies and rules affecting vehicle emissions, air and water pollution, oil and gas development, and public lands. Environmental advocates objected and sued over many of these changes. When Trump is ousted from the White House in January, it appears that President Joe Biden will follow that same path as he seeks to undo most or all of those rollbacks. It’s likely his administration will ask the courts to freeze lawsuits against Trump in these matters as it works to generate its own replacement policies and rules. Jean Su, staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told EnergyWire that the key strategies will be speedy reversals of Trump’s rules and replacement with new ones. Although the federal court system is now brimful of Trump-appointed judges, they will probably agree to requests to freeze pending litigation against old rules, according to Richard Revesz, director of New York University's Institute for Policy Integrity.
• Zuckerberg defends decision not to boot Steve Bannon off Facebook for proposing that two top government officials be decapitated and their heads put on pikes as a warning: According to Reuters, Mark Zuckerberg told an all-staff meeting Thursday: "We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely. While the offenses here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line." Proposing extrajudicial killings of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray is probably just part of Bannon’s apparent campaign to persuade Trump that he should be on the list for a pardon when the squatter in the White House gets around to letting his most wretched minions off the hook for any outlawry they were involved in while serving him. But what “clearly” does cross the line at Facebook? If Bannon Photoshopped himself wielding an ax and posted a doctored image of him lopping off Dr. Fauci’s head, would that do the trick?
• New study shows U.S. generates more plastic waste than any other nation: The researchers calculated that Americans produced up to 1.38 million tons of plastic pollution domestically through illegal dumping and littering. Which means the U.S. may have contributed as much as 2.48 million tons of plastic waste into the global environment, 1.6 million tons of it into ecosystems within 30 miles of a coast. That makes the U.S. the planet’s third-worst contributor to coastal plastic pollution. “All of this points to the need for us to reduce our production of single-use plastics,” said Nick Mallos, senior director of the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas program and one of the new study’s co-authors. “We simply can no longer throw away our things into a recycling bin and assume our job is done.”
