Group items tagged

Biden and Harris, by contrast, talked about the national interest and urged the public to support their plans for the future.

Biden said he will issue a mandate for all Americans to wear masks for a little more than 3 months -- long enough to help halt and reverse the surging infection numbers. "Just 100 days to mask, not forever," he told Tapper. "100 days. And I think we'll see a significant reduction."

That nuanced call to arms is a 180-degree reversal from Trump's steadfast refusal to order the use of masks and his plea to the public back in October

We've had a year of divisive bombast and boasting with Trump claiming the virus would vanish; that he accepted no responsibility for the failed national response; and finally threw up his hands at the over 276,000 deaths from the virus, saying "it is what it is."

Biden estimated that "we can safely open those elementary schools" -- but at an estimated price tag of $100 billion, which he called on Congress to supply.

"I alone can fix it." Biden and Harris, by contrast, are consistently talking about sharing responsibility with other actors -- Congress, Republicans, governors, and allied nations overseas.

"Our Justice Department is going to operate independently," Biden said. "I'm not gonna be telling them to prosecute A, B or C." Another sharp contrast with Trump, who fired his first attorney general and routinely urged his second to go after Trump's political opponents.

Even the relationship between Biden and Harris appears to be based on conversation and consensus rather than firm hierarchy, despite the fact that the two exchanged tough words on the campaign trail during the Democratic primaries

Harris pointed to a recent Zoom meeting at which the incoming administration brought together labor leaders and corporate CEOs. "There's a consensus on what needs to be done" to get Americans back to work, she said.

n this case, voters chose to replace the singular, disruptive ego-driven approach of Trump with an administration that understands that the most potent power of an American president is his ability to convene, coax and cajole our vast nation into moving forward together.

"You're not gonna see me making policy by tweets," Biden told Tapper.

"Kamala, tomorrow 17 senators are joining me at the TX border. The Biden admin is refusing to allow press to see the CBP facilities," Cruz wrote. "Since you’ve promised to 'release children from cages,' surely your admin will allow media to film the empty cages."

"That's their stated justification. Never mind that they are packing thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants in packed facilities. It is reporters and cameramen that pose the COVID threat. And Harris, that's obviously absurd. I can tell you, I've taken border trips," Cruz said during an appearance on "The Faulkner Focus." "I've been to those facilities many times in the Obama administration, in the Trump administration, and they've always let media in. It is only the Biden administration that is engaged in this blackout..."

"But the fact that every news station is not outraged -- if Donald Trump had done this and said, ‘No reporters are allowed on the border,’ the media would have rightly lost their minds. And y’all would have been right to," he added. 

Harris also complained that only a handful of Benedict students were given tickets for Trump’s appearance. Most seats were occupied by administration officials and Trump supporters.

Trump received the award for the First Step Act, which has allowed thousands of non-violent offenders to gain early release from federal prison.

The First Step Act was greeted as a bipartisan success but it is not without its critics among campaigners and even those who supported it.

Factcheckers have said Trump’s regular claim about African American unemployment being at its lowest point ever is, at least under modern methodology, accurate – up to a point.

Harris had been among 10 Democrats expected to attend the forum at Benedict College.

Mayor Steve Benjamin told the Associated Press he was working with college officials to coordinate what was now being called the Collegiate Bipartisan Presidential Forum. The original organisers said they would still have a role.

Cory Booker said on Twitter: “Donald Trump was given a platform unchecked for close to an hour. The Bipartisan Justice Center allowed him to create some illusion of support from this community when, in fact, he excluded it.”

Then came South Carolina. It was the first early contest where a large number of Black voters would register their preferences, and Mr. Biden enjoyed good will with those voters, stemming from his loyal service at the side of President Barack Obama.

When the results came in, he had won — and he had done so decisively, with more than twice as many votes as his closest rival, Mr. Sanders.

On Super Tuesday, Mr. Biden won 10 of 14 states, including some that he never campaigned in. His former rivals continued to coalesce around him over the next week. Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey endorsed Mr. Biden before Michigan’s primary a week later.

Mr. Biden re-emerged on Memorial Day, placing a wreath at a veterans memorial in Wilmington, Del., and wearing a mask, in contrast to how Mr. Trump had been appearing.

The next week, he met with community leaders at a Black church in Wilmington following the death of George Floyd in police custody

His campaign organized occasional in-person events in Delaware and neighboring Pennsylvania that were designed with safety in mind, with large white circles on the ground ensuring social distancing among reporters who attended.

After months of suspense, he selected Ms. Harris, a former rival, to join the Democratic ticket.

Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris accepted their nominations in front of socially distanced reporters at an event center in Wilmington — a far cry from the packed arena that was supposed to have cheered them on. On the convention’s final night, supporters gathered in their cars as if at a drive-in theater, and the new Democratic ticket joined them for a fireworks display.

Once again, his campaign held carefully arranged events with social distancing and mask wearing, a stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s crowded rallies.

Mr. Biden was returning from a campaign trip to Minnesota when the news broke: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans moved quickly to appoint Judge Amy Coney Barrett in her place.

Mr. Biden tried to frame the court fight as a battle over the future of health care in America, warning about Mr. Trump’s desire for the Supreme Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act.

The first debate was the subject of great anticipation, presenting Mr. Trump with a chance to change a race that was unfolding in Mr. Biden’s favor. It also put a spotlight on Mr. Biden after Mr. Trump had spent months portraying him as a senile old man.

The meeting, however, was remembered not for Mr. Biden’s performance but for Mr. Trump’s constant interruptions.

Later that week came another seismic development: Mr. Trump tested positive for the coronavirus. Within two weeks, he had recovered and returned to the campaign trail with large rallies that flouted public health guidance.

Mr. Biden stuck to his approach. He made more visits to battleground states but refrained from holding crowded events.

In the final weeks, Mr. Biden pioneered a pandemic-appropriate substitute for traditional events: drive-in campaign rallies.His speeches quickly took on a new soundtrack, with applause lines punctuated by the beeping of car horns.

On the last weekend before Election Day, Mr. Biden campaigned with former President Barack Obama in Michigan, a state their ticket won twice. With coronavirus cases surging in many places, they condemned Mr. Trump over his handling of the pandemic.

Mr. Biden finished the campaign much the way he had started, presenting himself as a unifying figure who would work to repair the damage inflicted by Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Known as the “For the People Act,” the bill is the professed No. 1 priority of Democrats this year. It would overhaul the nation’s elections system, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering.

Her Northern Triangle work comes in addition to a host of other engagements, including but not limited to: selling the “American Rescue Plan,” advocating Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package, representing women in the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate, assisting small businesses, assessing water policy, promoting racial equity, combating vaccine hesitancy, and fighting for a policing overhaul.

One option for Democrats would be to ram the bill through on a partisan vote by further rolling back one of the foundations of Senate tradition: the filibuster

Now, as President Biden, he is doubling down on that strategy once again and assigning his own vice president, Kamala Harris, the prickly challenge of carrying out his plan to commit $4 billion in a remarkably similar approach as she travels to the region Sunday.

But the numbers tell a different story. After years of the United States flooding Central America with aid, migration from the region soared in 2019 and is on the upswing once more.

Ms. Harris, who has little foreign policy experience and no history in the region, has already been criticized for not visiting the border.

The political risks are evident, including the obvious pitfalls of investing billions in a region where the president of Honduras has been linked to drug traffickers and accused of embezzling American aid money, the leader of El Salvador has been denounced for trampling democratic norms and the government of Guatemala has been criticized for persecuting officials fighting corruption.

“We’ve looked extensively at different programs that have been approached,” said Nancy McEldowney, a longtime diplomat who serves as Ms. Harris’s national security adviser.

Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.

From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“It’s an incredibly not-transparent situation,” said Eric Olson, an expert on foreign aid to Central America at the Seattle International Foundation. “It’s like this is a national secret.”

Even when aid money reached Guatemala in recent years, it often brought little change, according to interviews with dozens who worked with or received assistance from U.S.-financed projects in the country’s western highlands.

For decades, migration to the United States followed a pattern: Aside from some spikes in migration from Central America after civil wars or natural disasters, it was mostly single Mexicans who headed north in search of better jobs and pay.

Aid workers kept coming to deliver lots of seminars on topics in which the farmers were already well versed, they said, such as planting new varieties of coffee beans, and then left.

“She is the daughter of the village’s soil,”

her path to the U.S. vice-presidential nomination has also been guided by the values of her Indian-born mother and her wider Indian family.

Ms. Harris has gushed about her Indian grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, a civil servant who inspired her with his stories about fighting for the rights of Indians

Mr. Gopalan defied the conservative stereotypes of his era, according to neighbors and family friends, lending unswerving support to the women in his family, especially Ms. Harris’s mother

Unlike Mr. Pence, whose record has been intertwined with Mr. Trump’s for the past four years, the debate offers Ms. Harris her most high-profile test to defend her running mate.

“This time it will be about, you know, requiring some level of knowledge—if not mastery—of Joe’s record; the vice president, Mike Pence’s record; Trump’s record; and then, of course, defending my own record.”

The task for Ms. Harris is to make clear that Mr. Biden is the leader of the party while keeping energized the many voters who are inspired by her historic vice-presidential candidacy.

Biden's first major step toward diversity in his administration came when he selected Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian woman, as his vice president.

The transition team's diversity also extends to its advisory board -- where 43% are people of color and 52% are women. Nine of the 13 members of Biden's Covid-19 advisory board are people of color and five of the members are women, according to the data.

The teams consist of roughly 500 people, more than half of whom are women.

"My administration's going to look like America, not just my staff, the administration from the vice president straight down through Cabinet members to major players within the White House, and the court," Biden said

"For months, the Biden-Harris transition has laid the groundwork for a Biden-Harris administration, and at the core of that work is an unrelenting commitment to diversity," said Ted Kaufman, co-chair of the Biden-Harris transition. "As we continue working full-speed ahead to Inauguration, our diverse group of leaders and staff are reflective of America -- upholding President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris' belief that through diverse voices we can develop and implement a policy vision to tackle our nation's toughest challenges."

The diversity figures mirror that of Biden's presidential campaign, which in September said 46% of its full-time staff and 40% of its senior staff were people of color.

Biden has repeatedly promised that ensuring diversity in his administration and his Cabinet will be a top priority.

About 40% of the team "represent communities historically underrepresented in the federal government," a transition official said, which includes people of color, individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities.

"It's going to be a reflection of who we are as a nation."

Even so, Ms. Harris and her advisers have warmed to the task, according to several people familiar with her thinking in the White House. They say it will give her a chance to dive squarely into foreign policy and prove that she can pass the commander-in-chief test, negotiating with world leaders on a global stage to confront one of America’s most intractable issues.

Foreign aid is often a difficult, and at times flawed, tool for achieving American interests abroad, but it’s unclear whether there are any simple alternatives for the Biden administration.

From 2016 to 2020, 80 percent of the American-financed development projects in Central America were entrusted to American contractors, according to data provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The upside is that these companies have big offices capable of meeting the strict oversight requirements involved in handling millions of taxpayer dollars. The downside, critics say, is that a lot of the money disappears into those bureaucracies instead of reaching the people they’re trying to help.

One, called the Rural Value Chains Project, spent part of its $20 million in American aid building outhouses for potato farmers — many of which were quickly abandoned or torn apart for scrap metal.

Then, it seemed that everyone Ms. Monzón knew had left the area, spread across a mountain range where coffee fields bask in a perfect mix of sun and rain. On clear days, you can see Mexico from the dirt road that snakes through town.Ms. Monzón’s husband was already in the United States, and her son, then 14, begged her to take him there. When she wouldn’t, he left on his own and, his mother said, made it safely across the border.

The Obama administration tackled the dicey politics of immigration in part by removing undocumented workers, earning the president the nickname “deporter in chief” from critics. But he also oversaw an infusion of new aid money that would, in theory, make countries like Guatemala more bearable for the poor. Mr. Biden was tapped to help disburse $750 million to the region.Since then, at least three programs that won more than $100 million in U.S. funding in all have come to San Antonio Huista, hoping to make life better.

The farmers of San Antonio Huista say they know quite well what will keep their children from migrating. Right now, the vast majority of people here make their money by selling green, unprocessed coffee beans to a few giant Guatemalan companies. This is a fine way to put food on the table — assuming the weather cooperates — but it doesn’t offer much more than subsistence living.

"We're in the middle of this fourth industrial revolution," he noted. With all the changes in technology, he said, Americans are wondering, "Will there be a middle class? What will people be doing? ... There's genuine, genuine anxiety."

Biden's interview -- his first since the election that also included Harris -- underscored a complete course correction from Trump's attitude towards the virus.

There is a question, however, whether Biden's calls for national unity will resonate among people who didn't vote for him after Trump's relentless attacks on the legitimacy of his victory in the presidential election.

Biden's call to action may carry greater urgency now that the virus is taking hold in rural areas of the heartland with comparatively rudimentary health care systems, which escaped the first wave of infection that concentrated in many cities that tend to vote for Democrats.

Biden will take office amid the most extreme domestic circumstances of any president since Roosevelt, with sickness and death rampant and millions of Americans unemployed, hungry or at risk of losing their homes.

"I asked him to stay on the exact same role he's had for the past several presidents, and I asked him to be a chief medical adviser for me as well, and be part of the Covid team," Biden told Tapper

Trump has frequently mocked the wearing of masks. He is holding holiday parties inside the White House in defiance of his own government's health recommendations.

it is conceivable that one of Biden's first acts after delivering his inaugural address in 47 days will be to put his mask back on.

Biden said in the interview he had asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, who Trump has marginalized and insulted, to continue his current role as the nation's top infectious diseases specialist in Biden's administration and announced an effective promotion for the globally respected expert. Fauci told NBC on Friday that he immediately accepted.

More than 276,000 people have now died from coronavirus in the United States and the nation set a new record for hospitalizations on Thursday with more than 100,667 people being treated for Covid-19.

Biden emphasized that he and Fauci spoke about the fact that "you don't have to close down the economy" if Americans are following through with other safety protocols to prevent the spread of the virus.

"When Dr. Fauci says we have a vaccine that is safe, that's the moment in which I will stand before the public and say that," Biden said. People have lost faith in the ability of the vaccine to work

The President-elect said it is already clear to him from his conversations with governors across the country, as well as 50 Democratic and Republican mayors, that they will need a significant amount of money to get the vaccine where it needs to go.

"It's going to cost literally billions of dollars to get this done. We can keep schools open. We can keep businesses open. But you have to be able to get the vaccine distributed."

The President-elect noted that the Trump administration has been "cooperating with us of late" and looping them in on the plans for how they are going to deliver on the vaccine, but he said, "There's not any help getting out there."

Come Christmas time, there's going to be millions of people see their unemployment run out. So, there's a whole range of things that have to be done."

What's immediately needed is relief for people in their unemployment checks; relief for people who are going to get thrown out of their apartments after Christmas because they can't afford to pay the rent anymore; relief on mortgage payments; relief on all the things that are in the original bill the House passed," Biden said. "People are really hurting. They're scared to death."

"President-elect Biden, and his leadership and listening to scientists, believe that if we all wore our masks for 100 days, we would have a significant reduction in the transmission of the virus," said Rick Bright, a former Trump administration vaccine expert who resigned after warning the administration ignored warnings about the early spread of Covid-19.

Since the first day Biden asked her to join him on the ticket, she said he has been "very clear with me that he wants me to be the first and the last in the room" on major decisions

Biden told Tapper that his Justice Department will operate independently, and that he would not direct them on how or who to investigate: "I'm not going to be saying go prosecute A, B or C -- I'm not going to be telling them," Biden said. "That's not the role, it's not my Justice Department it's the people's Justice Department."

He said he planned to enlist Harris on whatever the most urgent need was at a given moment, much as he did for President Barack Obama as vice president.

"Whatever the most urgent need is that I'm not able to attend to, I have confidence in turning to her," Biden said, noting that was dissimilar from former Vice President Al Gore's approach, which was to handle an entire issue portfolio like the environment. "Look, there's not a single decision I've made yet about personnel or about how to proceed that I haven't discussed it with Kamala first."

And one of the most pivotal moments of her presidential campaign was on a debate stage: She declared “that little girl was me” as she questioned Mr. Biden’s opposition to busing. Even “Saturday Night Live” poked fun at Ms. Harris for her ability to craft a television-ready viral moment.

Missing from the rollout was a plan to cancel student debt, which disproportionately affects Black students, or address the issue of reparations, federal repayments that relatives of Tulsa victims say could restore what was erased. White House officials have said that, as with the broader issue of reparations for Black Americans, the president supports a study of the issue.

Mr. Biden’s visit to Tulsa was a somber one. Before he delivered remarks, Mr. Biden met privately with survivors of the massacre, each between the ages of 101 and 107, whom he mentioned throughout his speech.

The massacre was sparked by the arrest of Dick Rowland, 19, a Black shoe shiner who was accused of assault against Sarah Page, 17, a white elevator operator. As he toured the Greenwood Culture Center, the president was told that within 24 hours of that encounter, the mob that formed in the wake of Mr. Rowland’s arrest destroyed much of Greenwood. The case was later dismissed.

But the political response to the recent killings remains uncertain. Mr. Biden had vowed to secure passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by May 25, the first anniversary of Mr. Floyd’s death. The bill would ban the use of chokeholds, impose restrictions on deadly force and make it easier to prosecute officers for wrongdoing. He missed that deadline, but lawmakers in both parties have expressed optimism that they will be able to reach a compromise on the legislation in the weeks ahead. Despite investigations, no one was ever convicted of crimes related to the Tulsa massacre. Mr. Biden has promised that his Justice Department will be a more active participant in helping to root out bias and bigotry in American police departments. The department has already begun “pattern or practice” investigations in Louisville, Ky., and Minneapolis, which are intended to examine excessive force, biased policing and other misconduct by officers.

President Biden said on Tuesday that he had directed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead Democrats in a sweeping legislative effort to protect voting rights, an issue that is critical to his legacy but one that sees little hope of success in a divided Senate.

Her foreign policy portfolio comes in addition to a host of other engagements, including, but not limited to: selling the American Rescue Plan, championing Mr. Biden’s infrastructure package, representing women in the work force, highlighting the Black maternal mortality rate, assisting small businesses, assessing water policy, promoting racial equity, combating vaccine hesitancy, and fighting for police reform.

Mr. Biden has focused on issues related to voting rights for much of his career, but he faces especially wrenching decisions when it comes to the voting rights legislation he has asked Ms. Harris to help shepherd through Congress.

Known as the For the People Act, the bill is the professed No. 1 priority of Democrats this year. It would overhaul the nation’s election system, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But after passing the House, it hit a wall of Republican opposition in the Senate.

One option for Democrats would be to ram the bill through on a partisan vote by further rolling back one of the foundations of Senate tradition, the filibuster. But at least one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, remains opposed to the idea, potentially scuttling it.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’ ” Mr. Biden said. “Well, because Biden has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends,” a likely swipe at Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another moderate Democrat.

backing the right to unionize of workers at an Amazon plant in Alabama and appeared to warn the online retail giant not to interfere.

Upon his arrival at Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, Biden will be greeted by Polish President Andrzej Duda and receive a briefing on the humanitarian response to the war. He'll meet with service members from the 82nd Airborne Division in Rzeszów before traveling to Warsaw in the evening.On Saturday, the White House says Biden will hold a bilateral meeting with Duda to discuss how the US and allies are responding to the refugee crisis that has ensued as a result of the war. He'll also deliver remarks before returning to Washington.Biden's travel to Poland comes after meetings on Thursday in Brussels, where he attended a slate of emergency summits, announced new actions -- such as sanctions against hundreds of members of Russia's parliament and a commitment to admit 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine -- and conferred with global leaders on how the world will respond if Russia deploys a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.

Poland, which borders Ukraine to the west, has registered more than 2 million Ukrainian refugees crossing into the country. However, the number of refugees staying in Poland is lower, with many continuing on in their journey to other countries.Earlier this month during Vice President Kamala Harris' trip to Poland, Duda personally asked the vice president to speed up and simplify the procedures allowing Ukrainians with family in the US to come to the country. He also warned Harris that his country's resources were being badly strained by the influx of refugees, even as Poland welcomes them with open arms.The White House says that since February 24, the US has provided more than $123 million to assist countries neighboring Ukraine and the European Union to address the refugee influx, including $48 million in Poland.

Biden brought up that he has visited war zones, saying he understood the plight of refugees."I've been in refugee camps. I've been in war zones for the last 15 years. And it's -- it's devastating," he said.Biden also said the refugee influx is "not something that Poland or Romania or Germany should carry on their own."

The Poland trip also comes two weeks after the US rejected Poland's proposals to facilitate the transfer its MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine. The US rejected Poland's proposals over fears that the US and NATO could be perceived as taking an escalatory step, further fomenting conflict between the alliance and Russia -- which adamantly opposes Ukraine's ambitions to join the NATO alliance.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly requested more aircraft for the invasion, making another appeal to NATO leaders on Thursday.

The voting rights bill faces a more urgent timeline. The vast majority of the party has agreed to make the bill the party’s top legislative priority, and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, vowed to put it up for a vote later this month so any changes could be put into effect before the 2022 elections.

In 2020, Ms. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore a piece of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that relied on a formula to identify states with a history of discrimination and require that those jurisdictions clear any changes to their voting processes with the federal government. The protections were eliminated by the Supreme Court in 2013.

Ms. Harris’s impact on the hand-to-hand politics of the Senate is expected to be limited, but she often drew attention to voting rights during her four years as a senator.

Mr. Biden has already pledged to sign the bill, which the House passed with only Democratic votes this spring. Known as the For the People Act, the bill would overhaul the nation’s elections system by creating new national requirements for early and mail-in voting, rein in campaign donations and limit partisan gerrymandering. But with the bill all but stalled in the Senate, Mr. Biden has repeatedly expressed concern over its future in his discussions with Democrats.

At an event in his home state on Wednesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, argued that Democrats were inflating the impact of new state voting laws in an attempt to justify an unwarranted and chaotic slew of top-down changes to the way states run elections.

“What is going on is the Democrats are trying to convince the Senate that states are involved in trying to prevent people from voting in order to pass a total federal takeover in how we conduct elections,” he told reporters. He said “not a single member” of his party supported the bill.

Biden argues that Trump's denial and neglect of a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and is getting worse by the day should deny the President reelection.

Counting in midwestern battlegrounds like Michigan and Wisconsin, where he is expecting to do well, could take longer and lead to the kind of disputed outcome that the President is threatening. Trump has already tried to discredit mail-in ballots, which take longer to count, while Republicans in Texas -- so far without success -- have been trying to invalidate ballots cast at drive-thru sites in the Houston area.

"We feel very confident about our pathways to victory," Biden senior adviser Anita Dunn told Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday.

Trump, while trailing Biden, also has a clear, if narrower, chance to get to 270 electoral votes that relies on him sweeping through a swath of battlegrounds he won four years ago with what his campaign promises will be a huge Election Day turnout.

At a rally in Florida on Sunday night, Trump's crowd started a chant of "Fire Fauci" when the President complained that everyone heard too much about the pandemic.

But an air of foreboding is hanging over one of the most surreal elections in modern US history. Reports of delays in the delivery of mail-in votes in several crucial battleground states deepened anxiety over the possibility of protracted legal duels between the campaigns in the event of a close election.

In Texas, the state Supreme Court denied a petition by a group of Republicans seeking to invalidate nearly 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru facilities in Harris County, a heavily Democratic area that surrounds Houston. Republicans have also filed suit in federal court, which has an emergency hearing Monday morning in Houston.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

"I think it's a terrible thing when people or states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over because it can only lead to one thing, and that's very bad. You know what that thing is. I think it's a very dangerous, terrible thing," Trump told reporters.

But Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on "State of the Union" that she was concerned that Trump could try to declare victory in her state if Election Day voting tallies showed him with a lead before early and mail-in votes were counted.

He took part in a "Souls to the Polls" get-out-the-vote event at a Baptist church in Philadelphia and then held a drive-in rally. He called out disparities in the impact of the virus on minorities and, in the cradle of the American experiment, he painted Trump as a threat to basic American freedoms.

"Let's not ever let anyone take our power from us. Let us not be sidelined, let us not be silent, there is too much at stake and the ancestors expect so much more from us than that," Harris said in North Carolina.

President Donald Trump is casting doubt on the integrity of vote counting and warning he will deploy squads of lawyers when polls close on Tuesday, as his latest attempts to tarnish the democratic process deepen a sense of national nervousness hours before Election Day.

The President's maneuvering, as he fights to the last moment to secure a second term, is taking place ahead of a court hearing in Texas Monday morning on a Republican request to throw out 127,000 drive-thru votes in a key county.

Fears are also growing that the President might try to declare victory before all the votes are counted as he and Democratic nominee Joe Biden launch a final-day swing through the battleground states that will decide one of the most crucial elections in modern US history.

Biden is leading in national polls and by a narrower margin in many key states and has multiple paths to victory.

Trump's route to the required 270 votes is thinner but still viable, meaning either candidate could win.

It is common for some states to take several days to finalize vote counts.

In an extraordinary departure from American political tradition, Trump has been arguing for months that the election is "rigged" against him, has made false claims that mail-in voting is corrupt and has refused to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power.

"I think it's a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election," Trump said in the crucial state of North Carolina, which he is battling to keep in his column despite demographic changes that give Democrats hope.

Some of the most crucial battlegrounds, like Pennsylvania and Michigan, have warned it could be several days before a final result can be declared.

This time, by contrast, Sanders arguably talks about foreign policy more than any other declared candidate does. Of the four senators who launched their candidacies via video—Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Sanders—only his mentioned foreign policy

What distinguishes Sanders is the same quality that distinguished him on domestic policy in 2016: his willingness to cross red lines that have long defined the boundaries of acceptable opinion

He’s produced videos that call Gaza an “open-air prison,” he’s depicted Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the “growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism,” and, most controversially of all, he’s suggested cutting U.S. military aid to Israel.

He’s the only presidential candidate in recent memory who regularly describes the Cold War not as a heroic American victory, but as a cautionary tale

Sanders doesn’t just warn against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, as Warren and Gillibrand have. He warns against it while invoking the United States’ “long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.

he wants America to shun the quest for global supremacy that leads it to overthrow regimes it can’t control and to instead pursue a foreign policy based on “partnership, rather than dominance.”

He called for putting the United Nations—which he called “one of the most important organizations for promoting a vision of a different world”—near the heart of American foreign policy

Sanders challenged the domestic side of the exceptionalist creed: the belief that American capitalism—buttressed by modest regulations and welfare provisions—provides upward mobility.

Now Sanders is poised to challenge exceptionalism in foreign policy: the belief that America, as a uniquely virtuous nation, can substitute its own self-interest and moral intuition for international institutions and international law

A 2017 Pew Research poll found that Americans over the age of 30 were far more likely to say that the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than to say, “There are other countries that are better than the U.S.” But among adults under 30, the latter view predominated by a margin of more than two to one.

For a presidential candidate, challenging American exceptionalism would, until recently, have seemed like a sure path to political oblivion

In 2020, Americans will learn whether there’s a market for his anti-imperial heresies too.