Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thinks it’s dangerous for his party to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s election triumph. But some Republicans are charging ahead anyway.
WASHINGTON
President-elect Joe Biden has chosen Merrick Garland, a federal appeals court judge and former Supreme Court nominee, as the next attorney general a move that highlights Biden’s desire to restore independence to a Justice Department that has been scarred by the intense partisan politics of the Trump era.
Garland, 68, who served as a top Justice Department official in the Clinton administration in the 1990s, faces a tough task, including major decisions on whether to respond to calls to investigate President Trump and members of his administration, and overseeing the tax probe into Biden’s son, Hunter.
News of Biden’s selection came on a day when Trump supporters, egged on by a president who has led a falsehood-filled campaign to overturn the election, violently stormed the U.S. Capitol complex and forced lawmakers to suspend the counting of electoral votes. He will ultimately be responsible for how the Justice Department handles the prosecution of anyone
Democrats have won control of the Senate, thanks to two tight Tuesday runoff races in Georgia.
With the Senate question largely resolved, President-elect Joe Biden can now start to focus on policy, including his ambitious agenda to deal with climate change, which calls for an aggressive shift to clean energy, carbon neutrality by the middle of the century, and massive federal investment to drive these changes. Contrast that with President Donald Trump, who put forth no plan to deal with climate change and actively undermined existing policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Biden is also likely to undo most, if not all, of Trump’s environmental rollbacks with his executive powers. Trump has repealed or weakened 125 environmental regulations, like protections for endangered species and environmental risk assessments for infrastructure. Trump has also opened protected wilderness for fossil fuel development and logging.
LIVE COVERAGE: Congress to confirm Electoral College vote for Biden
Watch session live at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6
Lisa Mascaro And Mary Clare Jalonick
Associated Press
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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s extraordinary effort to overturn the presidential election is going before Congress as lawmakers convene for a joint session to confirm the Electoral College vote won by Joe Biden.
The typically routine proceeding Wednesday will be anything but, a political confrontation unseen since the aftermath of the Civil War as Trump mounts a desperate effort to stay in office. The president s Republican allies in the House and Senate plan to object to the election results, heeding supporters plea to “fight for Trump” as he stages a rally outside the White House. It s tearing the party apart.