Biden eager to move on, and fast h
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden kept his head down during the impeachment trial of his predecessor that concluded Saturday afternoon with Donald Trump’s acquittal.
And now he can’t move on fast enough.
Biden is traveling to Wisconsin and Michigan this week as he presses ahead on the issue that will make or break his own presidency: defeating the pandemic and reviving the battered economy.
Changing not just the topic of conversation but also the tone could be just as challenging as tackling the coronavirus. It was also a central promise of his campaign.
Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, a close confidant of Biden’s, played a key role in preventing the trial from indefinitely being prolonged when House Democrats wanted to call witnesses Saturday morning.
“The trial had reached its natural conclusion,” Coons explained Sunday in an appearance on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
As he did throughout the proceedings, Biden will spend the upcoming week focused on passing a pandemic relief bill through Congress.
He’ll talk to Americans about the health and economic crises facing the nation at a CNN town hall in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday.
On Thursday, Biden is scheduled to visit a Pfizer’s facility in west Michigan that is pumping out COVID-19 vaccines.
The public and private push for pandemic relief legislation is also expected to include prominent Oval Office meetings before Biden ends the week speaking to foreign leaders at a virtual gathering of the Munich Security Conference Friday.
“I’ve had some good conversations already with President Biden, fantastic conversations about the way he sees things,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday. Although Trump previously referred to Johnson as “Britain’s Trump,” the prime minister signaled in mid-November that he was moving on and is ready to work with Biden on climate change and other issues.
But if Biden is being embraced by some foreign leaders who were friendly to Trump, it’s unclear whether he can get congressional Republicans’ support for his legislative priorities, particularly after the raw emotions stirred up by the trial.
“What we saw in that Senate today was a cowardly group of Republicans,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Saturday. She was particularly disdainful of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s post-acquittal condemnation of Trump.
“It was a very disingenuous speech,” Pelosi said. “And I say that regretfully because I always want to be able to work with the leadership of the other party.”
Pelosi has called for the creation of a commission, similar to the one that investigated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to further investigate the “facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack on January 6.”
Coons backed the idea Sunday.
“I do think that we need to spend months and months unearthing all the evidence that can possibly be gotten to through a 9/11-style commission,” he said on ABC.
Biden, however, has taken the same position on a commission that he did when asked whether Trump should be impeached and convicted. “That is up to Congress,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday.
An otherwise tight-lipped Biden did let a little opinion on the impeachment proceedings slip during an early-morning stroll on the White House lawn Friday to check out his wife’s Valentine’s Day decorations – oversized red, pink and white “candy” hearts stamped with the words kindness, healing, compassion, courage.
“I’m just anxious to see what my Republican friends do – if they stand up,” Biden told reporters who pressed for his thoughts on the concluding trial.