The nine justices are to hear three cases testing the president’s right to keep his taxes and financial records secret – the implications are far-reachingOn Tuesday morning the supreme court will assemble via conference call to hear oral arguments in three cases involving President Donald Trump’s claimed right to keep his taxes and financial records secret. These are in fact this generation’s most important tests of the nature and limits of presidential prerogative.One case arises out of the efforts of the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, to obtain tax records and other financial information from the Trump Organization as part of a grand jury investigation. More particularly, it raises the question of whether the president can refuse to comply with Vance’s subpoena in order to shield those records.The other two involve the question of whether a congressional committee has the legal power to subpoena Trump’s accountant and some of his lenders.President Trump’s term in office has been marked by repeated refusals to comply with subpoenas, whether from law enforcement officials or from congressional oversight committees. He also used this strategy of defiance to frustrate Congress’s impeachment investigation.His insistence that he does not have to follow the rule of law is perfectly in keeping with his assertion during the last Republican national convention, that “I alone” can fix America’s problems and with his outrageous belief, as he said later in the campaign, that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”Trump has taken this inflated view of his importance into the Oval Office, recently claiming that he had total authority to supersede governors in dealing with the current pandemic and that the constitution’s article II, which defines the executive branch’s powers, means that he can “do whatever” he wants.The president is supported by an attorney general who believes in the so-called “unitary executive” theory: the fate of the country, on this theory, depends on virtually unchecked presidential power.On Tuesday, in the New York case, the president’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow who also represented Trump during the Senate impeachment trial, will make the breathtaking argument that the supreme court should recognize what he calls “temporary absolute immunity”. That he will be joined in this argument by Noel J Francisco, solicitor general of the United States, is further indication of the complicity of the attorney general, William Barr, in this effort to create an environment in which this president can behave with impunity.In their view, article II and the supremacy clause, mean not only that the president cannot be indicted or put on trial for committing a crime, but also that he cannot be subject to any criminal investigation during his term in office.In the other two cases, the president’s lawyers will contend that the constitution limits Congress’s authority to investigate the president.And, as if these theories of presidential immunity were not extreme enough, Trump’s lawyers will try to persuade the court that the constitution immunizes not only the president himself but also the businesses that he owned before becoming president as well as people they hire to handle their financial affairs.The president’s lawyers made these same claims before the federal district court for the southern district of New York and second circuit court of appeals, neither of which were persuaded of the wisdom and legality of these positions. Courts in the District of Columba also ruled against the president in his dispute with Congress.All of those courts were unpersuaded because the applicable legal precedents do not line up in Trump’s favor. Two cases seem particularly relevant.In 1974, a unanimous supreme court ruled that “executive privilege” (the right to withhold information from other branches of the government to protect confidential communications within the executive branch) could not be invoked to permit presidential non-compliance with a grand jury subpoena. President Richard Nixon, from whom Trump recently said that he had learned a lot, had to surrender documents and tapes pertaining to the possible criminal conduct of members of his staff during the Watergate affair.Chief Justice Warren Burger, whom Nixon appointed to the court, spoke for all the justices when he said that “the allowance of the privilege to withhold evidence that is demonstrably relevant in a criminal trial would cut deeply into the guarantee of due process of law and gravely impair the basic function of the court.”> The court has experienced both a deepening of partisanship and an emboldening of its conservative majorityTwenty-three years later, in 1997, the supreme court returned to the question of the scope of presidential immunity. In Clinton v Jones it again decided unanimously that a president, this time Bill Clinton, could be forced to testify in a civil case during his term in office.Because of the strengths of these precedents, some commentators confidently predict that the court will rule against President Trump.But a lot has happened in the supreme court since the United States v Nixon and Clinton v Jones decisions. The court has experienced both a deepening of partisanship and an emboldening of its conservative majority. Moreover, in several areas, the John Roberts court has been eager to defer to presidential power.In the face of these developments, the chief justice has tried to convince observers of his investment in and concern about the court’s institutional legitimacy. Thus he memorably spoke out when President Trump impugned the integrity of a ninth circuit court of appeals judge calling him an “Obama judge”.Roberts responded by insisting that “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges … [only] dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”The outcome of the cases argued on Tuesday hinges on the chief justice’s willingness to make good on those words when the stakes for the future of America’s constitutional design are high. It will also depend on his skill in marshaling the court to join him.The stakes in the cases are heightened by the failed effort to impeach the president and remove him from office. Having survived that effort to hold him accountable for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power, Trump is all the more emboldened in 2020. If he were to prevail in the current cases, little would be left of America’s vaunted system of checks and balances. The country would inch closer to the fulfillment of Trump’s authoritarian designs.The president has worked hard to appoint to the supreme court justices and to other federal courts Trump-friendly judges, believing that they would provide legal cover for his often corrupt arrogation and abuse of power. Tuesday will provide an important glimpse into the justices’ thinking and a chance to see whether they will muster the wisdom, courage and commitment to prove him wrong, and to defend the rule of law.

The Supreme Court is about to hear cases about whether Congress and Manhattan’s district attorney can subpoena Donald Trump’s tax returns and other financial records. Trump has lost his challenges to the subpoenas repeatedly in the lower courts, and for good reason: his arguments against them are exceedingly weak.  But Trump, a profoundly transactional man who is desperate to keep his tax returns from seeing the light of day before the election, plainly expects the high court’s protection as a reward for packing the federal bench, including the Supreme Court itself, with young right-wing extremists. If Justice John Roberts and the court’s other right-wing jurists twist the law to do Trump this favor, they will deal a heavy blow to the court’s already compromised legitimacy, and potentially to their own power as well.This Decision Could Be Bigger Than ImpeachmentIf Trump loses in November, court packing might be his most enduring legacy (apart from mass death). Trump failed to pass any historic legislation during his first two years in office, while his party controlled both houses of Congress. Indeed, his only significant congressional achievement was signing a tax bill that so ostentatiously favored the very wealthy that it helped Democrats retake the House. But Trump, together with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, has succeeded in remaking the federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down, by installing a huge number of extraordinarily ideological right-wingers, selected with the integral involvement of the Federalist Society. This has included filling slots McConnell held open during the Obama administration (not the least of them being the Supreme Court seat that opened up with the death of Antonin Scalia).McConnell reportedly views the court-packing scheme as his chief legacy, and for good reason. While conservatives publicly deride so-called “activist judges,” the Republican Party has relied since the Reagan years on “its” judges to void popular governmental policies, and, most importantly, to oppose democracy itself by selectively impairing voting rights. Of course, the Supreme Court overtly determined the outcome of one presidential election, in Bush v. Gore; but nearly as consequentially, the Roberts court voided the primary enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2015, and in 2019, gave the green light to gerrymandering schemes the GOP has employed to entrench its control of numerous state legislatures, and until last year, the House of Representatives.  Last month, at the behest of the Wisconsin GOP, the Supreme Court forced many voters to choose between being disenfranchised and risking death by voting in person when it voided an order extending the time for the acceptance of absentee ballots, many of which were sent out late. It was all part of a gambit to save the seat of a right-wing judge on Wisconsin’s highest court. Angry Democratic voters showed up at polling places in droves and defeated the GOP incumbent, though some were needlessly infected in the process.The Supreme Court, and other federal courts dominated by GOP nominees, have also been bulwarks against popular governmental policies disfavored by Republicans and their allies, including by voiding gun safety laws and environmental regulations. During the last several years, as Trump has failed to enact his policies through legislation, the Supreme Court has stepped into the breach by affording the president wide latitude to unilaterally effectuate his radical agenda items unilaterally.Most notoriously, the court upheld Trump’s “Muslim ban,” expressly refusing to take into account Trump’s many admissions of his discriminatory purpose, starting with his announcement during the campaign that he would impose a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The court has also repeatedly nullified emergency injunctions issued by lower courts against overreaching presidential actions even before ruling on the merits of challenges to Trump’s policies. For example, the court green-lighted Trump’s defiance of Congress’ refusal to fund his border wall by raiding funds appropriated for other purposes, and permitted Trump to implement rules allowing the government to label immigrants “public charges,” and deny them green cards, simply for accessing aid such as health care and other assistance during periods of extremis.McConnell and his GOP allies plainly have their sights set beyond Trump’s time in office, and expect that the huge cadre of extraordinarily ideological young judges they are installing to lifetime seats on the federal bench will continue to serve their interests, even if the GOP loses its grip on the government in the near future.Given that long view, it is unsurprising that McConnell insisted on bringing a Senate chock-full of vulnerable elderly legislators into session in the midst of a raging pandemic to confirm a 37-year-old former McConnell intern, Justin Walker —who recently wrote that the mayor of Louisville had criminalized Easter by applying a stay-at-home order to a “drive in” church service — to the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.But Donald Trump is not one to care much about the future, let alone a future that might not include him. With the political walls closing in on him, Trump’s likely expectation is that “Trump justices,” and other right-leaning jurists, will do his bidding and protect him, the law be damned, is finally coming into open conflict with his party’s goal of maintaining a lasting judicial wall against Democratic policies. Trump is the only president since Lyndon Johnson whose tax returns have not been disclosed to the public, let alone Congress. He is plainly determined to ensure that it stays that way for as long as possible, and certainly until after the next election.SCOTUS Must Decide if Courts Will Condone Trump’s IllegalityBut the cost to the court of doing Trump’s bidding could be extremely high.In this regard, one of the few high-profile cases in which the Supreme Court ruled against Trump is notable. Last year, the court effectively prevented the administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census because evidence established the government’s claimed purpose—to further the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act—was fraudulent (or in Roberts’ more diplomatic words, “contrived”).  The chief justice was unwilling to openly and notoriously further what amounted to misleading conduct by Trump’s cronies, likely recognizing the risk to the court’s legitimacy could be high.The cost of enlisting the court in Trump’s legally meritless effort to hide his personal financial records from Congress and law enforcement investigators could be much higher.As Trump’s most recent Supreme Court appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, observed, the “greatest moments in American judicial history” have been when courts “stood up to the other branches, were not cowed, and enforced the law”—including when the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to turn over the inculpatory tapes that drove him from office. If the Supreme Court is cowed when it faces the current test, it will be the tribunal’s most ignominious moment in decades, and will not soon be forgotten.This will be particularly true if, as seems increasingly likely, Joe Biden enters the White House next January. It is unlikely that a President Biden would readily accept a Supreme Court setting out to void his policies after the court had bent over backward to protect those of his predecessor. Furthermore, if as seems increasingly possible, Biden takes office with a Democratic majority in the Senate, the Court-packing scheme that Trump and McConnell have counted on as their legacy could be placed in immediate danger.The size of the Supreme Court, and indeed of the entire federal judiciary, is determined by statute, not by the Constitution. Hence, it is within the power of Congress to increase the size of any court, including the Supreme Court, and likewise within the power of the president and the Senate to confirm any nominee. The only thing that would stand in the way of a Democratic Congress and president undoing the GOP’s remaking of the courts, including by adding to the members of the Supreme Court, would be political will. FDR was unable to force Congress to take that step, and Biden has ruled it out himself to date. But in the wake of a Supreme Court decision to protect a desperate President Trump from embarrassment, and potential criminal liability, on the eve of an election, such will might be amply available.Therefore, even if Roberts and every other member of the Supreme Court’s current five-justice conservative majority lack compunctions about sacrificing legal principles to protect Donald Trump, one or more of them may well recognize that doing so could come at a heavy cost to their own power.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

* Retweet storm after justice department drops Flynn case * Obama: US ‘rule of law’ is at risk under Trump * Opinion: Under Trump, American exceptionalism means misery * For God and Country: Christian case for Trump is a thin readDonald Trump continued to fume over the Russia investigation on Sunday, more than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report without recommending charges against the president but only three days after the justice department said it would drop its case against Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser.“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote in a tweet accompanying a conservative talk show host’s claim that Barack Obama “used his last weeks in office to target incoming officials and sabotage the new administration”.The tweet echoed previous messages retweeted by Trump, which earned rebukes for relaying conspiracy theories. On Sunday afternoon the president continued to send out a stream of tweets of memes and rightwing talking heads claiming an anti-Trump conspiracy. One tweet by Trump simply read: “OBAMAGATE!”Trump fired Flynn, a retired general, in early 2017, for lying to Vice-President Mike Pence about conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding sanctions levied by the Obama administration in retaliation for interference in the 2016 election.The US intelligence community has long held that such efforts were meant to tip the election towards Trump and away from Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI – which Trump has acknowledged – and co-operated with Mueller, who was appointed to take over the investigation of Russian interference after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.Mueller did not establish a criminal conspiracy but did lay out extensive links between Trump and Moscow and instances of possible obstruction of justice by the president.Flynn sought to change his plea while awaiting sentencing and the president championed his case, floating a possible pardon. On Thursday, in an act that stunned the US media, attorney general William Barr said the justice department would drop the case entirely.Trump and his supporters have loudly trumpeted the decision and across Saturday and Sunday the president unleashed a storm of retweets of supporters and conservative commentators attacking targets including Obama, Mueller, Comey and House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff.The talkshow host retweeted by the president, Buck Sexton, is a former CIA analyst who now hosts a show which he says “speaks truth to power, and cuts through the liberal nonsense coming from the mainstream media”.In another message retweeted by the president, Sexton called former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe – who Trump fired just short of retirement – “a dishonorable partisan scumbag who has done incalculable damage to the reputation of the FBI and should be sitting in a cell for lying under oath”.In February, the US justice department said it would not charge McCabe over claims he lied to investigators about a media leak.Like Comey, McCabe released a book in which he was highly critical of Trump, who he said acted like a mob boss. McCabe also wrote that Trump had unleashed a “strain of insanity” in American public life.In his own tweets, Trump did not directly address comments by Obama himself which were reported by Yahoo News. The former president told associates the Flynn decision was “the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic – not just institutional norms – but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk”.But Trump’s anger was evident.“When are the Fake Journalists,” he wrote on Sunday, “who received unwarranted Pulitzer Prizes for Russia, Russia, Russia, and the Impeachment Scam, going to turn in their tarnished awards so they can be given to the real journalists who got it right. I’ll give you the names, there are plenty of them!”The president did not immediately name anyone.But in 2018 the Pulitzer committee did, awarding its prize for national reporting jointly to the Washington Post and the New York Times for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”Trump has further reason to resent the Pulitzer committee and question its choices.In 2019, for example, a New York Times team won a Pulitzer for an “exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges”.The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, was rewarded for “uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment”.Trump’s actual impeachment, which he survived at trial in the Senate in February, concerned his attempts to have Ukraine investigate his political rivals. No reporter or news outlet won a 2020 Pulitzer, announced this week, for its coverage of that affair.Trump’s focus on Sunday remained largely on the Russia investigation despite continuing developments in the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 1.3m Americans and killed nearly 80,000.With cases confirmed among White House aides close to the president, top public health experts including Dr Anthony Fauci in quarantine and Trump reported by the New York Times to be “spooked”, the president claimed in a rare non-Russia-related tweet: “We are getting great marks for the handling of the CoronaVirus pandemic.”He also attacked Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president this year, over their response to the “disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu” in 2009.Trump also marked a special day in the calendar, tweeting in trademark capitals: “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!”

WASHINGTON -- Shortly after admitting guilt to a federal judge in December 2017 for lying to the FBI, Michael Flynn issued a statement saying what he did was wrong, and "through my faith in God, I am working to set things right."It turns out that the only higher power that Flynn needed was Attorney General William Barr.Barr's extraordinary decision to drop the criminal case against Flynn shocked legal experts, won President Donald Trump's praise and prompted a career prosecutor to quit the case. It was the latest in Barr's steady effort to undo the results of the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Barr has portrayed his effort as rectifying injustice, and the president more bluntly as an exercise in political payback.In his decisions and public comments over the past year, Barr has built an alternate narrative to the one that Mueller laid out in his voluminous report. Where the special counsel focused on Russia's expansive effort to interfere in the 2016 election, the Trump campaign's openness to it and the president's determination to impede the inquiry, Barr has focused instead on the investigators. He has suggested that they were unleashed by law enforcement and intelligence officials bent on bringing political harm to Trump.Barr has also mischaracterized the findings of the Mueller investigation, questioned why it began in the first place, used legal maneuvers to undo its courtroom successes and opened his own investigation by a hand-picked prosecutor that could bring criminal charges against former U.S. officials who played a part in setting the original inquiry into motion. Mueller and Barr, once close friends, have been like two students standing shoulder to shoulder at a blackboard: What one has diligently written down, the other has tried to steadily erase.In an interview Thursday with CBS News, Barr said he considered the Flynn case to be "part of a number of related acts -- and we're looking at the whole pattern of conduct." (The same day, Trump called it "just one piece of a very dishonest puzzle.")Recent disclosures about the FBI's handling of the Flynn case raise questions about why the bureau's leadership sent agents to interview Flynn without coordinating with top Justice Department officials, the latest in a series of revelations about FBI abuses in politically charged investigations in recent years. Barr, however, even suggested that a theory of the case embraced by Mueller and his team might have made them blind to the facts."One of the things you have to guard against, both as a prosecutor and I think as an investigator, is that if you get too wedded to a particular outcome and you're pursuing a particular agenda, you close your eyes to anything that sort of doesn't fit with your preconception," he said. "And I think that's probably the phenomenon we're looking at here."But when Mueller made his findings public, many criticized him for doing the opposite. His conclusions, especially about whether Trump had committed any obstruction of justice offenses by impeding the inquiry, were dense, burdened by legalese and appeared to reflect a tortured debate among the special counsel's team. They delivered no easy sound bite that the president's opponents could seize upon -- allowing Trump to distort the judgments by calling them a vindication of his behavior.The Mueller report "bends over backwards" to show that the special counsel's team considered all of the legal and political ramifications of investigating a sitting president, said Matthew J. Jacobs, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at Vinson & Elkins."It gives the benefit of the doubt to the subject of the investigation that in any quote-unquote normal criminal case doesn't happen and wouldn't exist," said Jacobs, who once worked for Mueller at the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco.Barr's decision to drop the charges against Flynn was "unlike anything I've seen before," Jacobs said, adding that he saw no evidence whatsoever "that Gen. Flynn was set up or entrapped."In an unsolicited memo he wrote to the White House while still a lawyer in private practice in 2018, Barr unspooled his thoughts about what he called a "fatally misconceived" obstruction of justice theory the special counsel was reportedly pursuing as part of his investigation. Trump named him attorney general months later, but during his confirmation hearing, he pledged not to interfere with the work of Mueller and his team.Barr drew criticism for the way he characterized Mueller's findings last year in a four-page letter that -- for weeks -- served as the public's only picture of Mueller's 22-month investigation. Mueller privately wrote to the attorney general, saying he had mischaracterized the findings -- a letter Barr described as "snitty" -- and over time, Barr has repeatedly tried to emphasize the harm done to the investigative targets of the FBI and the special counsel's office.Barr's handling of the Mueller findings prompted a stinging rebuke in March from a Republican-appointed federal judge, who said the attorney general put forward a "distorted" and "misleading" account of the findings and lacked credibility on the topic.Barr has long insisted that he works independently of the White House, and in February, he said that Trump's public comments about the Justice Department sometimes made it "impossible" for him to do his job. Those comments came after Barr and other top department officials intervened to try to reduce a prison sentence in another case brought during the Mueller investigation: That of Roger Stone, a longtime friend of the president's who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in a bid to thwart a congressional inquiry that threatened Trump.The president has made it clear both to aides and foreign officials that he sees Barr as a crucial ally in the grinding battle against his perceived enemies. Last July, the day after Mueller's congressional testimony seemed to lower the curtain on a more than two-year drama that had imperiled the Trump presidency, Trump was on the phone with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine asking him to assist the attorney general in an investigation "to get to the bottom of" how the Russia investigation began."As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller," the president said. The requests to Zelenskiy helped form the basis of an impeachment case against Trump in the ensuing months.Weeks after that phone call, Barr was on a plane to Rome with John Durham -- the prosecutor leading the Justice Department's investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation -- to seek evidence from Italian officials that might bolster a conspiracy theory long held by Trump: That American intelligence and law enforcement officials plotted with American allies to try to prevent him from winning the presidency in 2016.They did not appear to find any evidence. It remains uncertain, however, what Durham will find over his investigation, expected to finish sometime this year, and what effect it will have on the legacy of the Mueller investigation.The president, of course, has not waited to pass judgment. He has long publicly complained that the Flynn case was a product of a cabal of former officials conspiring against him, and he seems certain to promote its collapse as he ramps up his campaign for reelectionOn Thursday, the day the Justice Department dropped the criminal charges against Flynn -- the first top White House official to have been ensnared in the Russia investigation -- Trump was on the phone with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.Trump boasted that the call came at an opportune time. Things are "coming in line showing what a hoax this whole investigation was -- it was a total disgrace.""I wouldn't be surprised," he said he told Putin, "if you see a lot of things happen over the next number of weeks."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Even a global pandemic and economic crisis isn’t enough to break President Trump’s perception of the Democratic House as a den of haters and losers who care more about hurting him than about helping the American public.Asked on Tuesday why he wasn’t permitting members of his coronavirus task force to testify in front of the House, Trump responded that the chamber is a “set-up” that’s full of “Trump haters.” “They,” said Trump, “frankly, want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death.”It was a remarkable bit of open political retaliation that not only undercut the White House’s official line—that individuals like Dr. Anthony Fauci were too busy fighting the pandemic to spend hours before Congress—but also set up a situation where only the president’s own party would be in charge of hearings into his conduct. Indeed, shortly after Trump spoke, the Republican-run Senate Health panel announced that Fauci would be testifying there next week.“It’s so political. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Rep. Donna Shalala (D-FL), who serves as the House Democratic representative on the not-yet-functional panel to oversee COVID-19 spending. “I can’t remember anyone preventing us from testifying in one house of Congress versus another… To not go to the People’s House is just—it’s stupid, and it’s dangerous.”Congressional oversight has always been an irritant to the occupant of the White House. But rarely has a president so blatantly disregarded it when the context has been so non-partisan and the stakes so high. Even before the emergence of COVID-19, Trump’s defiance of Congress had prompted legal battles that promised to rearrange the long-term balance of federal power. But his insistence on continuing to snub the legislative branch in the midst of a pandemic has sparked an altogether new set of questions and frustrations. “The fact that the president of the United States has directed those responsible for the federal response to avoid appearing before Congress is shocking, irresponsible, and will result in more loss of life,” said Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.). Democrats trying to understand the federal COVID-19 response, he said, are being “limited to what the president says” and what mid-level officials from the administration “tell us on a conference call.”Lawmakers Know They Can’t Keep Track of the $2.2T They Just Spent on Virus ReliefPrivately, Democrats have grumbled that the party should have anticipated this situation. Just a few months ago, the administration staved off subpoena and document requests as part of the impeachment inquiry. With resolution of those matters still in the courts, leadership—the argument goes—should have demanded stronger oversight structures be put in place before trillions of dollars went out the door to prop up an imploded economy. "[House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi has left Democrats largely invisible in negotiating COVID-19 legislative responses and sidelined at a moment that cries out for congressional oversight,” said Jeff Hauser, the founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, a public interest group. “An unleashed House could also make sure Trump's systemic errors are well understood and beyond dispute for the 70 percent of Americans who are not willfully indoctrinated by Fox News. Such public education is necessary to make sure the federal government is never again so unprepared for a mass tragedy.”Those criticisms have been amplified as it’s become clearer that the oversight mechanisms in existence have been either undercut, brushed aside, or largely neglected.There was, for example, no creation of a centralized database to show who received so-called Paycheck Protection Program loans that were meant to aid small businesses but also found their way to boutique hotels and publicly traded restaurant chains. A Democratic aide said that the presumption was that the Small Business Administration would release such information under provisions in existing law. But, the aide conceded, “they aren’t.” The congressional panel tasked with tracking the trillions of dollars being lent out by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department was authorized six weeks ago. But it still lacks a chair and the appointed members can’t hire staff—rendering it basically non-functional.Meanwhile, the president has sidelined or sacked independent inspectors general who have surfaced damning information about the administration’s COVID-19 response or were in a position to—while telling Congress he has the power to decide what lawmakers learn about the pandemic response, not a special IG assigned to the task.And, while administration officials involved in the COVID-19 response appeared before lawmakers in the early stages of the pandemic, they have since gone silent. None has testified since March 12, when there were fewer than 1,000 cases of the virus in the U.S. And House Democrats told The Daily Beast that direct engagement with top officials has been inconsistent. On April 15, for example, the administration cold-emailed a handful of Democratic lawmakers informing them they’d been selected to a congressional task force to advise Trump on reopening the economy. After an initial conference call the next day, no follow-up was scheduled until this week, when House members in the group were told there would be a second call with top Trump economic advisers Larry Kudlow and Kevin Hassett on Thursday. In the interim, administration officials instructed lawmakers to contact them with their three “best ideas” on economic responses—“like homework,” recalled an aide. In the absence of traditional lines of oversight and cooperation, there has been improvising. Bharat Ramamurti, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s appointee to the new congressional panel, said that he was leaning on friends and associates with expertise in his issue areas. And though he continues to encounter absurdly commonplace hurdles (on Tuesday, his computer ran out of batteries because electricity in his neighborhood was down and he couldn’t venture elsewhere) he held out hope that the commission would soon have a chair and get its report done by May 9.“The other unique thing about the oversight commission is all the members are appointed by the Congress,” Ramamurti told The Daily Beast. “Our committee is the only one immune from tampering by the president, which is why it is really important to get the chair in place as soon as possible.”Meanwhile, outside groups are trying to reverse-engineer oversight by starting from the broadest set of data points and working their way back to the administration. Accountable.US, a nonpartisan oversight group, has filed nearly 200 public records requests and skimmed through hundreds of federal filings to see if publicly traded companies have nabbed PPP loans.This still leaves gaping holes. And on those fronts, Democrats are scrambling to patch things up, with a group of lawmakers introducing legislation mandating disclosure of PPP loans and others calling for subpoenaing witnesses. “They’re going to stonewall as much as they can,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI) told The Daily Beast. “We can’t fold. We have to use the tools we have. We may have to issue subpoenas, and try every way we can to get the information we need.”Some Democrats argue that the party’s most effective mechanism for forcing the Trump administration to comply with congressional oversight would be through the purse. But few believe that Pelosi will, or even could, effectively deploy such hardball tactics if the economic situation in the country remains dire. And so, the last hope is that the public pressure will become so overbearing that members of the Trump administration will see it as in their political self-interest to comply. Already, one member—former BARDA program director Dr. Richard Bright—has agreed to testify before a House Democratic committee about a whistleblower complaint he filed detailing systematic missteps and misjudgements the administration made in the early stages of the pandemic. And it would not be unprecedented for the White House to eventually fold on others. In 2013, the Obama White House refused to make available for testimony key figures involved in the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act on grounds that their time fixing the website was too valuable to spend on the Hill. Under threat of subpoena, top technology officer Todd Park eventually agreed to testify in front of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee. Two professors—Mark J. Rozell of George Mason University and Mitchel A. Sollenberger of the University of Michigan at Dearborn—praised the move at the time as a worthy mitigation of tension between the two branches. Reached by The Daily Beast, both said a similar step from Trump would be warranted now. “This is why you have a hierarchical organization,” Sollenberger told The Daily Beast. “They’re there to give voice to organizational needs, respond to Congress when it comes to the organizational issues at hand, the questions Congress has. This is how government works.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

WASHINGTON -- Former President Barack Obama's office called Senate Republicans' investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden's son's activities in Ukraine an effort "to give credence to a Russian disinformation campaign" in a letter Obama's office sent to the National Archives.The letter represents Obama's strongest reaction to date to Republican efforts to investigate unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine and not Russia interfered to help President Donald Trump win the 2016 election.The letter, first reported Tuesday by BuzzFeed News, came in response to a November request from Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa for records of White House meetings "between and among Obama administration officials, Ukrainian government representatives, and Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials."Johnson is chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Grassley leads the Senate Finance Committee. Their request came at the beginning of House Democrats' impeachment inquiry of Trump and was part of their effort to prove the unfounded theory, backed by Russia, Trump and other Trump-allied Republicans, that it was Ukraine and not Russia that interfered in the 2016 election.Obama's March 13 response came on letterhead from the "Office of Barack and Michelle Obama" and was signed by Anita Decker Breckenridge, a former White House deputy chief of staff who is now the records representative to the former president. The letter never mentions Biden by name, but says the Republican senators' request was out of line.Biden's son Hunter held a position on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma while his father was vice president and leading the Obama administration's Ukraine policy.Democrats' effort to impeach and remove Trump from office was based on revelations that he sought to instigate an investigation into the Bidens by threatening to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless its leaders complied with his requests to do so.The Democratic-controlled House voted to impeach Trump in December. The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him in February."The request for early release of presidential records in order to give credence to a Russian disinformation campaign -- one that has already been thoroughly investigated by a bipartisan congressional committee -- is without precedent," Decker Breckenridge wrote. "This use of the special access process serves no legitimate purpose, and does not outweigh or justify infringing confidentiality interests that all presidents have sought to protect."Still, Decker Breckenridge wrote that "in the interest of undermining the misinformation campaign underlying this request," Obama's office would offer the Senate committees access to the records they sought.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on Monday that the American economy needs to reopen quickly and that tens of thousands of more Americans may die from the novel coronavirus, insisting that Americans are “gonna have to” accept that.Speaking to CNN correspondent Dana Bash on her The Daily DC podcast, Christie—who now works as an ABC News contributor—pushed for the reversal of stay-at-home orders in order to open up businesses and ramp up economic activity.Confronted with recent models that now show that as many as 135,000 Americans will die due to decreased social distancing amid the pandemic, Christie essentially threw up his hands and said there really wasn’t a choice.“Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can—but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?” Christie said. “Are there ways that we can thread the middle here to allow that there are going to be deaths, and there are going to be deaths no matter what?”Echoing previous comments he’s made that the country cannot wait to reopen the economy, the former Trump transition team member asserted that “we’re going to destroy the American way of life” if people don’t immediately get back to work.Bash then asked the ex-governor if the public could accept reopening following reports that a White House model is now projecting a daily death toll of 3,000 by June 1. “They’re gonna have to,” Christie bluntly replied. “We’re in the midst of a pandemic that we haven’t seen in over 100 years. And we’re going to have to continue to do things.”Asked how he would tell the American public about the need to reopen if he were the president, Christie responded: “The message is that the American people have gone through significant death before.”“We sent our young men during World War II over to Europe, out to the Pacific, knowing, knowing that many of them would not come home alive,” he said. “And we decided to make that sacrifice because what we were standing up for was the American way of life. In the very same way now, we have to stand up for the American way of life.”About half the states have begun to reopen public spaces and their economies in recent days despite cases growing in many areas and the confirmed U.S. death count from coronavirus approaching 70,000. President Donald Trump, who has called for states to “LIBERATE,” casually conceded during a Sunday Fox News town hall that the final death toll could reach 100,000 after claiming just a few weeks ago that it would be half that number.Chris Christie Clashes With ‘The View’ Hosts on ImpeachmentRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

For a nominee to helm the U.S. government’s intelligence apparatus, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) draws on some unusual sources of information. Ratcliffe’s official, verified campaign Twitter account follows several accounts on the political fringe, including a 9/11 truther account with just one follower besides himself and four promoting the outlandish QAnon conspiracy theory, which posits that the world is run by a cabal of Democratic pedophile-cannibals—and has been ruled a potential source of domestic terrorism by the FBI. The conspiracy theorists followed by Ratcliffe, whose nomination for director of national intelligence goes before the Senate intelligence committee Tuesday morning, cover a bizarre range of beliefs. They posit that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death to help Trump to take down the Deep State. Others claim a Democratic sex dungeon exists in in a Washington pizzeria. But Ratcliffe and the QAnon promoters he follows have one thing in common: utter loyalty to Trump.Even before Ratcliffe’s QAnon interest was known, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a committee member, told The Daily Beast, “Congressman Ratcliffe is a partisan politician who has spent the last two years promoting conspiracy theories in defense of Donald Trump.”It’s not clear whether Ratcliffe followed conspiracy theorists himself, or whether it was done by someone else with access to his Twitter account. The QAnon accounts Ratcliffe follows were first noted by CQ Roll Call editor Ryan Kelly on Twitter. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred questions about Ratcliffe’s Twitter account to his congressional office, which didn’t respond to a request for comment. Veteran intelligence officials expressed alarm that the Senate may soon confirm a Trump loyalist atop the U.S.’s 16 intelligence agencies. “Ratcliffe would be the least qualified person to run the intelligence community, ever, and that includes Ric Grenell,” said former CIA and National Counterterrorism Center analyst Aki Peritz, referring to the acting director of national intelligence. “The hardest job for any intelligence officer is to speak truth to power. Based on Ratcliffe’s past performance, it’s doubtful he can resist the urge to politicize intelligence on behalf of Donald Trump.” The willingness of a likely director of national intelligence to entertain conspiracy theorists highlights what Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee consider Ratcliffe’s lack of fitness for the job. Two committee sources said the minority Democrats intend to press the nominee on his loyalty to Trump—the quality that earned Ratcliffe his nomination—something he displayed with zeal in attacking Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry and portraying the House Democrats’ impeachment of Trump as a frame-up job. At Tuesday’s hearing, the Democrats intend to bring up everything from Russia to the novel coronavirus, where a divide has emerged between the intelligence agencies and the administration over whether the virus was man-made in China. They intend also to question Ratcliffe over the post-impeachment purge of intelligence officials, including several from the office of the director of national intelligence, most recently inspector general Michael Atkinson. “He has little experience in intelligence, and already had to withdraw his nomination once after lying about his resume. The pandemic has shown how putting unqualified loyalists in critical jobs leads to disaster,” said Wyden. “Any Republican who cares for the security of our country should think hard about the consequences of supporting the least qualified, most partisan person ever nominated for DNI.”But that attests to the expectation on the committee for a party-line vote—which will be enough to advance Ratcliffe’s nomination to the full Senate, where his confirmation can proceed on the same basis. Opposition to Ratcliffe was bipartisan the last time Trump nominated him to run Liberty Crossing, the DNI’s headquarters, in 2019. It lasted a week before Ratcliffe withdrew, following reporting on his false claim to have arrested 300 undocumented immigrants in a single day. Trump Intel Pick John Ratcliffe Started Theory of FBI Anti-Trump ‘Secret Society’At the time, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), the intelligence-committee chair, mixed a pledge of support with an acknowledgement of Ratcliffe’s limitations. “Can you find somebody that's got more experience, that's got more experience specifically in the intelligence community? Sure, but I'm not sure that the DNI requires that,” Burr said in July. This time around, Burr gave Ratcliffe both unqualified support and dared committee Democrats to “have [Richard] Grenell stay on as acting” director.That’s a reference to Trump’s current interim director, the ambassador to Germany, another loyalist. Grenell oversaw Atkinson’s firing and the removal of other officials at the office of the director of national intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center. Last month, he rejected House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff’s request for information on the purges, as well as a pledge Schiff requested that “officials, including yourself, will not permit retaliation or reprisals against anyone who has made, or in the future makes, protected disclosures of misconduct to Congress or to Inspectors General.” A member of the House intelligence committee during his brief tenure in Congress, Ratcliffe has distinguished himself in a crowded field by blocking and tackling for Trump. “You managed to violate every principle and the most sacred of traditions about prosecutors not offering extra prosecutorial analysis,” Ratcliffe told Mueller in July. During the impeachment hearings last fall, Ratcliffe insisted that Trump’s insistence on Ukraine publicly accusing Joe Biden’s son of corruption was no more than an effort to fight corruption in that country. He continued, with relevance to his possible next position, “the president, as the unitary executive, is the executive branch,” a reference to a highly disputed constitutional theory popular in certain corners of the right.What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained“The president can and should ask for assistance in ongoing criminal investigations,” Ratcliffe said, even though there was no criminal investigation into Biden or his son at the time. Ratcliffe’s decision to follow conspiracy theory accounts raises other questions. In Ratcliffe’s Twitter feed, accounts with names like “Hobbit Frog” and “Political Madness” pump out tweets that portray Trump not just as a great president, but as a messianic figure poised to use the military and intelligence agencies to purge the country of top Democrats—either through executions or with military show trials and prison terms in Guantanamo Bay.The QAnon accounts Ratcliffe follows often go to extremes. In a graphic posted by one of the accounts, a screaming Trump rescues crying children from a demonic Hillary Clinton—accompanied by text accusing Clinton of conducting child sacrifices. Another posits that Vincent Fusca, a Trump supporter some QAnon believers claim is John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise, conducted a secret arrest of former President George H. W. Bush. QAnon has started to have a dangerous effect in the real world. Two QAnon believers have been charged with murder, while two others have been involved in alleged child abduction plots. A QAnon believer pleaded guilty in February to committing a terrorist incident near the Hoover Dam. Last week, a QAnon supporter live-streamed a trip to New York City to "take out" former Vice President Joe Biden. She was eventually arrested on weapons charges. Discomfort between presidential administrations and the intelligence agencies is supposed to reflect the occasionally divergent prerogatives of both. But the involvement of career intelligence officials in the investigations of Trump that have negatively characterized his presidency has poisoned the relationship, with Ratcliffe being the latest sign of White House hostility to an independent intelligence community. “Ratcliffe’s nomination to be DNI shows the bench to serve Trump at the highest levels has dwindled down to nutters, quislings, and television cranks,” Peritz said. “Anyone with any intelligence knows to decline these positions. Still, the nation continues to pay the price.” Read more at The Daily Beast.Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast hereGet our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Life and death are on the line and the president and his minions appear reluctant to grasp the reality * Coronavirus – latest US updates * Coronavirus – latest global updates * See all our coronavirus coverageWelcome to the US in the age of coronavirus. Faces and fists pounded the windows of Ohio’s capitol like a zombie apocalypse. In Michigan, an armed crowd stormed the state house. Then, history repeated itself.Taking a page from his Charlottesville playbook, Donald Trump called the protesters “good people” and urged Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, to “make a deal” over the shutdown. The president tweeted that Whitmer should “give a little, and put out the fire”. In other words, negotiate over the barrel of a gun. After all, his base was “angry”.One state over, in Illinois, an anti-shutdown protester waived a poster aimed at the state’s Jewish governor, JB Pritzker: “Arbeit macht frei, JB.” The words that hung over the gates of Auschwitz.A Trump administration insider conveyed that it was all a “bit” reminiscent of the “late” Weimar Republic. We know how that ended.Society’s guardrails crashed, the volk demanded its pound of flesh and democracy made the frighteningly unimaginable possible. Hell became part of the here and now.Election day is six months away. The US may experience 25% unemployment and economic collapse. We stand to witness “between 100,000 and 240,00 American lives lost”, according to Dr Deborah Birx. As for the protesters, Birx labelled their conduct “devastatingly worrisome”.“Collective rage” looms large.Life and death are on the line and the president and his minions appear reluctant to grasp the reality. Echoing his boss, Larry Kudlow ties himself into knots over earlier pronouncements that the scourge would be quickly gone. Marc Short, Mike Pence’s chief of staff, prematurely rejects projections of a death toll above 60,000. By Tuesday, the total will probably exceed 70,000.How this plays out at the ballot box remains to be seen. But the early numbers should give Trump serious pause. It is unlikely that racial minorities, suburban mothers and college degree holders will take kindly to bully boys playing Trump surrogates.A poll taken last month showed most Americans wary of returning to normal, with those living in cities and suburbs signaling particular reluctance. Indeed, Republicans disfavored such a move by nearly a two-to-one margin.As for the presidential horserace, Trump is lagging Joe Biden in most national polls and in the swing states. Among college graduates, the former vice-president holds a near 20-point lead. Biden is ahead by double digits among women. Cultural resentments are two-way streets.All this is a continuation of trends that appeared in the 2018 midterms. Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House and Democrats captured the female vote by nearly three-to-two, suburban women by more than 20 points, and a majority of white college graduates. Peloton moms made a difference.More ominously for the president, swing states are drifting away: Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are lining up for Biden. In a break from four years ago, seniors are growing tired of Trump. Were the trend to hold, the ballgame would be over.Texas, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio also appear shaky. Biden could be sitting atop an electoral college landslide.Excluding New York state, the number of coronavirus cases have moved upward and the average number of fatalities appears stuck in neutral. This is not the re-election campaign Trump envisioned in January. Not surprisingly, some of his most ardent supporters in the Senate are engaging in political social distancing.Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Arizona’s Martha McSally tout home-state accomplishments. They are not embracing Trump. The impeachment vote feels a century ago.McSally appears destined for defeat and Tillis is in a dead heat. Only McConnell is given a clear edge and even he is struggling.Coronavirus has unleashed more than death. Social fissures once buried have metastasized into jagged volcanic chasms. The past is always with us, much as we try to jettison it. Weimar was less than a century ago. Democracy is more fragile than we may care to acknowledge.

WASHINGTON -- For decades the vice-presidential selection process has had an air of cloak-and-dagger to it. The party's nominees would say little about their thinking, the would-be running mates would reveal even less, and an elaborate game of subterfuge would unfold that mostly captivated political insiders and usually had little bearing on the election.But a convergence of forces has transformed Joe Biden's search for a running mate on the Democratic ticket. His pledge to pick a woman immediately limited the pool of potential candidates and intensified the competition; that decision, coupled with Biden's garrulous tendency to think aloud about his options, have remade the tryout period into an unusually public audition, and the coronavirus outbreak ensured that it is taking place entirely online and on TV.And Biden himself has increasingly pushed into the political foreground the overwhelming reason that his choice may be the most consequential in decades: the expectation, downplayed but not exactly denied by the Biden campaign, that the 77-year-old would be a one-term president. If that turns out to be the case, his running mate now could well be leading the Democratic ticket in four years."I view myself as a transition candidate," Biden said during an online fundraiser last week, likening his would-be presidential appointments to an athletic team stocking its roster with promising talent: "You got to get more people on the bench that are ready to go in -- 'Put me in coach, I'm ready to play.' Well, there's a lot of people that are ready to play, women and men."The ramifications of Biden's choice will be profound. Even if he loses in November, his decision will all but anoint a woman as the party's next front-runner, and potentially shape its agenda for the next decade, depending on if she is a centrist or someone more progressive."Joe being 77, I think people are going to look to see who is the person who could be the next president," said Harry Reid, the Democratic former Senate majority leader, calling Biden's decision the most significant "in any election cycle I've seen."Former Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri was even blunter about what is at stake: "You're writing your ticket to be the first woman president."There are other factors that have made Biden's decision so momentous. Tara Reade's allegation of sexual assault against Biden has ensured that whichever woman he selects will be his principal surrogate battling those claims, while leaving many Democrats, men and women, convinced the party must put forward a female nominee in 2024.And given President Donald Trump's penchant for race-baiting, the disproportionate impact the virus is having on communities of color and the political loyalty of black women, many leading Democrats believe Biden will select a black or Latina running mate."It boils down to whether he has a Hispanic woman or a black woman," Reid said.Biden has been careful to avoid providing a definitive signal on whether he would seek reelection should he win this year. But his references to serving as a transitional figure in the party, and the yearslong public health and economic recovery that the virus may require, have left many Democrats with the belief that, at age 82 in 2024, he would pass the party's torch to his vice president."I don't want to wish ill on anyone, and I love Joe Biden, but we'd be electing somebody in his late 70s," said former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, referring to the November election. She said of the vice-presidential competition: "This is really auditioning to be the next leader of the Democratic Party."Many Democrats believe a gut politician like the former vice president will pick somebody whose measure he has taken. But that is not to say that Biden, who in recent weeks has reaffirmed his commitment to picking a woman, is immune to political considerations: He will weigh the turnout lift he might get from picking a woman of color alongside the potential regional upside from selecting a Midwesterner.Privately, Biden's aides have started to reach out to Democrats who know the contenders to solicit their views. They have also had some party leaders talk directly with the former vice president about how he ought to be thinking about his decision, according to Democrats familiar with the conversations.Biden himself has talked publicly about potential candidates to an unusual degree. He has chatted with Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and held personal phone calls with Sens. Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who answered bluntly "yes" when asked on MSNBC if she would accept an offer to be Biden's running mate. Advisers to all four women acknowledge privately that they are keenly interested in the vice presidency.At the same time, the former vice president and his top advisers are being heavily lobbied.Stan Greenberg, a longtime Democratic pollster, has laid out a case to Biden's inner circle that he should choose Warren to consolidate support across the Democratic coalition and drive up turnout among younger people and liberals, according to people familiar with Greenberg's overtures.A polling presentation Greenberg shared with the Biden campaign cautioned that as of early April, supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders were "dangerously not" united behind Biden's candidacy. Greenberg suggested that a strongly progressive message on the economy would resonate with those people.Sara Nelson, the head of the Association of Flight Attendants and an increasingly prominent leader in the labor movement, said she and other progressive union leaders had communicated a strong preference for Warren to the Biden campaign."She brings more progressives to the ticket than anyone else," Nelson said.While Warren remains in close touch with progressives, she is also engaged in outreach beyond the left and has been contacting numerous lawmakers to discuss coronavirus legislation in recent weeks. Those contacted include Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, Biden's most influential supporter in the chamber.Warren last week also called a number of Democratic lawmakers designated by the party as "front-line" members -- those facing the toughest races in 2020 -- to offer help with their reelection campaigns. Both she and Klobuchar have issued a number of endorsements for vulnerable lawmakers in recent days.The three senators Biden competed against in the primary have vocal advocates in and around his orbit.But they also have their detractors. Some Democrats worry Warren is too liberal for Biden and point out that choosing her could disrupt the party's prospects to control the Senate given that Massachusetts has a Republican governor who could temporarily appoint her successor. A number of progressives are uneasy about the moderate Klobuchar. And Biden's wife, Jill, has been open about how angry she was over Harris' biting attack on him in the first debate last year.A number of Biden allies are advocating lesser-known Democratic women. One of his top supporters has made the case to him for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Latina who served in Congress and as the state's health secretary, experience that could prove invaluable during a pandemic. Lujan Grisham's sister died of the same cancer that claimed the life of Biden's son, Beau.Another close friend of Biden has urged the campaign to consider the former national security adviser Susan Rice, a black woman who has never run for office but who has deep governing experience.Lujan Grisham and Rice have done nothing publicly to pursue the post. In contrast, Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor of Georgia, has recently embarked on a sustained media tour to pursue the vice presidency, openly encouraging Biden to choose her in a manner that has startled even some of her admirers.Heitkamp said Biden's age and the seriousness of the times all but demanded he make "a governing pick," rather than select somebody for a perceived political lift this year."Given Joe's age, this has to be someone capable of stepping in and being president of the United States," she said, alluding to "the lesson John McCain learned" when he picked the lightly experienced Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008.For the contenders, this is a competition for the vice-presidential nomination very much worth having.Should Biden win and not seek reelection, the Democratic nomination might not be up for grabs for another 12 years -- an eternity for the party's many ambitious up-and-comers. Then there is simple probability: Fourteen of the country's 45 presidents previously served as vice president: (In 1961, Lyndon Johnson, who had his staff research how many vice presidents ended up in the Oval Office, explained to Clare Boothe Luce: "I'm a gambling man, darlin', and this is the only chance I got.")Whoever gets the nod, Biden officials say, it will not be until this summer. Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, a chairman of the campaign, said he hoped Biden would wait to make his selection until after both the candidate and the vetting committee he appointed had the chance to interview potential running mates in person."I would not want him to make a decision like that without meeting and having some real face-to-face conversations," Richmond said. Asked about the very public nature of the competition, he said: "The trying-out on TV, I think, is normal. The actual campaigning for it is a little different, but we're in different times and people make their own decisions."Indeed, beyond the lack of in-person meetings with the prospects, Biden's deliberations have been constrained in other ways. Lawmakers who might ordinarily be pressuring him on behalf of their colleagues -- or, for that matter, against them -- say the selection of a future vice president remains a distant concern compared with the virus crisis.Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida said that Democratic lawmakers from her pivotal state had been floating one of their own as a contender: Rep. Val Demings, a former Orlando police chief who served as an impeachment manager.But more proactive lobbying had mostly been on hold, Castor said. Demings paused plans for a ramped-up national travel schedule when the pandemic set in."Val Demings would make an outstanding vice president," Castor said, adding of her Florida colleagues, "We've had those discussions, but it's all emergency response right now."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company