Bonjour, Early Birds – We're sad to report that nothing is safe from the supply chain beast, including Girl Scout cookies. Please send leads on Adventurefuls and thin mints here: earlytips@washpost.com. Thanks for waking up with us. | | | At the White House | | Biden downsizes his legislative agenda on anniversary of his presidency | (Washington Post illustration; Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post; iStock) | | Mission control: A month after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) shocked the rest of his party by saying he couldn't vote for President Biden's top legislative priority, Democrats have reached the "acceptance" stage of grief. It came in the form of an unusually freewheeling, nearly two-hour press conference Biden held on the day before his presidency turned a year old. While Biden showed flashes of warmth for Republicans — "I actually like Mitch McConnell," he said — he largely abandoned the message of bipartisanship he ran on in 2020, "when he said that Republicans would have an 'epiphany' and that partisan gridlock would ease if he took office," as our colleagues Annie Linskey, Cleve Wootson and Sean Sullivan note. Instead, he cast himself as a partisan warrior ready to campaign against Republicans in this year's midterms for obstructing his agenda. But he acknowledged that the heart of agenda — the roughly $2 trillion Build Back Better bill — would need to be scaled back even further to have any hope of winning Manchin's vote, even if meant cutting out cherished Democratic priorities. "There's two really big components that I feel really strongly about that I'm not sure I can get in the package," he said. "One is the child care tax credit and the other is help for the cost of community colleges. They are massive things that I've run on, I care a great deal about, and I'm gonna keep coming back on." "I think we can break the package up, get as much as we can now, and come back and fight for the rest later," he added. | Democrats temporarily beefed up the existing child tax credit as part of the Covid relief bill they passed last year, but it expired at the end of the year after the Senate failed to pass BBB. Extending it has been one of Democrats' priorities. Still, Biden repeatedly defended his record in his first year in office and denied that he'd misread his electoral mandate by pushing for policies that are too ambitious. "Look, I didn't overpromise," Biden said. "I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen. The fact of the matter is that we're in a situation where we have made enormous progress." | Presidential power has its limits | But the limits of presidential power — especially with an evenly divided Senate — were on full display Wednesday. In a late-night vote, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). and Manchin sided with Republicans to defeat a change in the Senate rules that would have allowed Democrats to pass two voting rights bills without GOP support, despite Biden's aggressive lobbying for the measure. The defeat was expected, but it could have long term consequences for the filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer "has set the table for a future majority with a slightly bigger margin, whether it's Democratic or Republican, to follow through where he fell short and perhaps go further," Politico's Burgess Everett and Marianne LeVine report. Biden said in a statement after the vote that he was "profoundly disappointed" but would continue "to push for Senate procedural changes that will protect the fundamental right to vote." | There's probably more hope for breaking up BBB, which Manchin has called too expensive in its current form. While the voting rights legislation is dead, Senate Democrats are holding that BBB can be salvaged. | Senate Democrats reacted to Biden's suggested that the bill be trimmed even further mostly with equanimity. "We need to get as much as we can across the finish line," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told reporters following Biden's comments. "It's hard, because we have the skinniest possible majority, and that means it takes every vote. So we need to do what it takes to get every vote." "I support President Biden in his effort to pass a Build Back Better package that can get 50 votes," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted after Biden wrapped up. "The climate and clean energy provisions have been largely worked through and financed. Let's start there." Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), a leading advocate of bolstering the child tax credit, said in a statement on Wednesday evening that he was still fighting to get it included in BBB, citing its success in reducing child poverty last year. But Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who worked on child tax credit legislation with Bennet, indicated he was open to Biden's approach. While he won't negotiate publicly, Brown "has made it clear he's willing to pass this as part of a larger package or as a standalone bill," a Brown spokesperson said. Here's more from our colleagues on the speech: | Here's more on last night's voting rights failure for the White House: | New report examines the presidential transition process from Trump to Biden | New this morning: One year after Biden took office, the Partnership for Public Service and Boston Consulting Group are out with a 59-page report on the Biden transition. It's based on interviews with nearly three dozen transition staffers, Trump White House officials, agency staffers and congressional aides. The Biden transition, which was plagued at points by a lack of cooperation from some in the Trump administration, "brought attention to longstanding areas of fragility and point to issues that require a stronger legal foundation, the need for increased financial support for a range of transition activities, improved agency planning and a focus on reforming the appointment process," according to the report. Among the report's takeaways: "The entire appointments process needs reform. Personnel vetting and disclosure requirements are increasingly complex, and delays in the Senate confirmation process grow with each transition. Although the Biden transition had a large and well-organized personnel team, which allowed for more than 1,000 nonconfirmed political appointees with a high degree of previous governing experience to be sworn in on Day One of the new administration, only about one-third of key national security positions requiring Senate confirmation were filled within seven months of Biden taking office." Here's the full report. | | | From the courts | | Supreme Court rejects Trump's request to withhold Jan. 6 records from House committee | U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a "Save America Rally" near the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. (Eric Lee/Bloomberg) | | Jan. 6 Committee – 1, Trump – 0: "The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected former president Donald Trump's request to block the release of some of his White House records to a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol," our colleague Robert Barnes reports. | - "It was a major victory for the House select committee … [and] another defeat for Trump at the Supreme Court, where he chose a third of the sitting justices."
| The National Archives turned over nearly 800 pages of documents to the Jan. 6 committee within hours of the decision. Here's some of what's included, per the New York Times's Adam Liptak: | - A handwritten note about Jan. 6
- A draft presidential speech for the "Save America" rally that preceded the attack
- A draft executive order about election integrity
- A draft proclamation honoring the U.S. Capitol Police, including officers Brian D. Sicknick and Howard Liebengood
- The White House Daily Diary
| Big picture: "Wednesday's order could send a signal to other witnesses that they have very little ability to challenge January 6-related subpoenas on executive privilege grounds, potentially opening the possibility for more former White House officials to testify," CNN's Ariane de Vogue, Katelyn Polantz and Tierney Sneed report. | Meanwhile, we have new subpoenas: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued two new subpoenas Wednesday for Nicholas J. Fuentes and Patrick Casey, leaders of the white nationalist "America First" or "Groyper" movement. | - Fuentes and Casey "participated in events prior to January 6th promoting unsupported claims about the election, including … the December 12th, 2020 Stop the Steal rallies, in Washington, D.C., where they called for the destruction of the Republican Party for failing to overturn the election," the committee said in a statement.
- The committee also noted that Fuentes and Casey both received tens of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin from a French computer programmer a month before the attack. The FBI is currently investigating the transactions.
| | | The Data | | Biden's declining popularity, visualized: "Biden presented himself as an antidote to his predecessor, offering the promise of what his own campaign ads called 'strong, steady, stable leadership' after four years of bedlam under Trump," our colleagues Ashley Parker, Tyler Pager and Sean Sullivan write. "But the tumult surrounding the administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan offered an early glimpse of the cascade of crises that have badly eroded Biden's image of restoring calm." | | | The Media | | | | Viral | | 👨⚖️Maskgate: In a rare move Wednesday, Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor issued statements denying recent reporting from NPR's Nina Totenberg that Gorsuch refused to comply with Roberts's request to wear a mask, causing Sotomayor — who has diabetes and is at greater risk for serious illness from covid-19 — to work remotely. | | AM/PM | Looking for more analysis in the afternoon? | | Weekday newsletter, PM | | | | | |
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