Biden touts ‘shots in arms and money in pockets’ that coronavirus relief package will provide

Civil liberties groups are ratcheting up pressure on major corporations based in Georgia — including Coca-Cola, Aflac, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and UPS — to oppose a Republican-led effort to make it harder to vote in the Peach State.

It’s a continuation of a dynamic that emerged after the Jan. 6 insurrection, when a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on the erroneous belief that widespread fraud handed the 2020 election to President Biden: Facing intractable opposition from lawmakers determined to restrict voting, voting-rights advocates are taking their case directly to Republican lawmakers’ allies in the business community.

On Friday, the advocates scored a win when the Georgia Chamber of Commerce issued a statement expressing “concern and opposition” to the measures under consideration in the legislature, which would end no-excuse absentee voting, limit early voting hours, restrict drop-boxes for mail ballots, and curtail early voting on Sundays.

U.S. Capitol Police suspended an officer Monday after a copy of an infamous antisemitic tract was found near a Capitol Hill security post Sunday, alarming a congressional aide who viewed the document in plain sight at the checkpoint.

Photographs provided to The Washington Post show a printed copy of the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion sitting on a table inside an entrance of the Longworth House Office Building.

The Post provided the photographs to the Capitol Police on Monday morning and requested comment. The department said Monday evening that Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman had suspended an officer pending an investigation “after anti-Semitic reading material was discovered near his work area on Sunday.”

“We take all allegations of inappropriate behavior seriously,” Pittman said in the statement. “Once this matter was brought to my attention, I immediately ordered the officer to be suspended until the Office of Professional Responsibility can thoroughly investigate.”

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.), whose district includes El Paso, on Monday criticized House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over his visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, accusing him of stoking fear of immigrants and using the Latino community as “a prop.”

Escobar made the comments in a conference call with reporters hours after McCarthy held a news conference in El Paso.

“When I learned that Leader McCarthy would be coming into my district and into my community, I sent him a letter” offering to connect him with people on the ground, Escobar said. “I also cautioned him … and asked him to be mindful about the fact that the words that he and our colleagues use have great power, and they have great consequences, as well.”

When leaders use rhetoric that stokes fear, Escobar argued, communities like El Paso “pay the price.” She cited the 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, in which the suspect said he was targeting “Mexicans.”

“I wish I could accept that Leader McCarthy and my colleagues went into my community to actually find solutions,” Escobar said. “But the fact of the matter is, the purpose of the trip was twofold.” She accused them of trying to “distract” from last week’s passage of the American Rescue Plan and using the “go-to topic” of immigration as a means of dividing Americans.

“My community becomes a prop for them so they can continue to fuel the divisions” in the country, Escobar said.

Escobar also pushed back against the assertion by McCarthy and other Republicans that individuals on the national terrorist watch list — from countries as far away as China — are entering the United States via the southern border.

“You saw it in their eyes,” McCarthy said earlier Monday, referring to the border agents he spoke with during his trip. “They talked about, ‘They’re on the list.’ … The terrorist watch list.”

Escobar told reporters that she had held a meeting recently with border agents and that no mention was made of terrorism suspects crossing the border.

Last week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) yet again caused controversy by saying what he really thought about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Having previously downplayed the severity of it and raised a debunked conspiracy theory that it might not have been perpetrated by supporters of former president Donald Trump, Johnson said he never truly felt threatened. His reason: Because, in his words, “those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” He said he would have felt more threatened if Black Lives Matter or antifa were behind the riot.

On Monday, Johnson kept digging.

In an appearance on a local Wisconsin radio show, Johnson fought back against allegations of racism for invoking BLM and saying he would have been more scared if it had been behind it.

But there are several problems with his defense.

One is that he proclaimed to be surprised by the backlash.

“I completely did not anticipate that anybody could interpret what I said as racist,” Johnson said. “It’s not. This is about rioters.”

Johnson also referred to the “innocuous statement that I made, never anticipated [my opponents] would turn it into what they always turn the debate into: racism.”

That doesn’t really fit with what Johnson said last week, though. In the course of making his controversial points to conservative radio host Joe Pagliarulo, Johnson acknowledged that his comments would “get me in trouble.”

Vice President Harris on Monday made a stop in Las Vegas, where she kicked off a swing in the West to promote the coronavirus relief package signed into law by President Biden last week.

Harris toured a vaccination clinic at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and is also scheduled to visit the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas.

“You all are the heroes of this moment,” Harris told those who were administering vaccines at the university’s vaccination site.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff joined Harris on the trip but has his own itinerary. Emhoff visited a food bank and was set to later hold a listening session on food insecurity with members of the Las Vegas community.

Nevada is the location of a competitive Senate race in 2022: Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who in 2017 became the first Latina ever to serve in the Senate, is up for reelection.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will use a Dallas convention center as a temporary shelter for thousands of migrant teenage boys, an emergency measure the Biden administration is taking to alleviate extreme overcrowding at border facilities in South Texas, according to two Homeland Security officials with knowledge of the plans.

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in downtown Dallas will house boys ages 15 to 17 to free up space in Border Patrol detention cells that are holding record numbers of unaccompanied teenagers and children in deteriorating conditions, the officials said.

The Biden administration mobilized FEMA on Saturday to help cope with a deepening crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border, where the number of families and minors arriving without their parents has soared since the president took office.

Kelly Percival had insurance through her customer service job with a Tampa roofing company when, early last year, she severely fractured her right ankle. After two metal plates and 16 screws to realign her ankle bones and two months off her feet, she called her boss last March to say she could come back to work. Don’t bother, she was told. Amid the newly begun coronavirus pandemic, the company was downsizing.

If Percival, long divorced and now unemployed, lived in most of the United States, she could have turned to Medicaid after her Blue Cross Blue Shield plan disappeared along with her income. Instead, she is among 4 million people the insurance does not reach because they live in one of a dozen states that have not expanded Medicaid even as the rest of the country has been widening the health-care safety net.

But the vast coronavirus relief strategy that President Biden signed into law last week might allow Percival to stop skipping the follow-up orthopedic appointments for her ankle that she cannot afford.

In the weeks after the 2020 election, few members of the media were more ostentatiously willing to entertain Donald Trump’s claims of election improprieties than Fox’s Maria Bartiromo. Despite the lack of evidence then or now for any significant voter fraud, Bartiromo has continued to entertain the idea that something nebulously untoward occurred.

On Sunday, she hosted Gov. Greg Abbott (R-Tex.) for a discussion of the surge in migrants arriving at his state’s southern border. Toward the end of the interview, Bartiromo also asked Abbott to weigh in on federal legislation aimed at protecting voting access.

Abbott claimed that Democrats were “trying to institutionalize voter fraud” with House Bill 1.