Chris Hayes: GOP is ‘radicalizing against democracy, moderating on policy’ The Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, is not happy about Donald Trump’s endorsement of Elise Stefanik, once a moderate Republican New York congresswoman, as a replacement in Congressional leadership for Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who continues to blast Trump for lying about the 2020 election and undermining American democracy. MSNBC host Chris Hayes said that this development is the latest example of the current trend of the GOP, which, he argues, is “radicalizing against democracy” while also “moderating” on policy as the Democratic party as moved to the left on some issues. The Cheney situation also highlights how Trump’s political power is not solely based on his ability to dominate the news media and social media, Hayes argued. Biden’s support for vaccine patent protection waiver puts pressure on Boris Johnson The Biden administration’s announcement that it will support waiving patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines is now putting pressure on the wealthy US allies who are currently blocking the waiver. Global Justice Now, a UK-based advocacy group, said the Biden administration’s move “could be the beginning of the end of the vaccine apartheid,” and that the endorsement now put the spotlight on Boris Johnson. “The Prime Minister has no more excuses. He must now follow Biden’s lead and drop his opposition to the intellectual property waiver immediately. Anything less would be shameful,” Nick Dearden, the director of Global Justice Now, said in a statement. “In the many months since this waiver was first proposed, we could have produced many hundreds of millions more vaccines. Let’s get moving. The UK, EU, and all remaining blockers need to get out of the way.” As my colleague Julian Borger reports, “At present, one in four people in rich countries have received at least one vaccine dose. In low-income nations, the ratio is about one in 500 people.” Giuliani allies continue to ask Trump publicly for help with Giuliani’s legal costs Rudy Giuliani’s supporters, including his son, are publicly calling on Donald Trump’s campaign to help Giuliani with his mounting legal fees, CNN reports. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweeted that Trump told an associate this week that the decision of whether or not to help Giuliani is somehow not his “call”. Phantom of the Opera will sell tickets again as Broadway prepares to reopen this fall As state officials approved a full reopening of Broadway theaters in New York this September, Phantom of the Opera will be there again, not just inside your mind. “Yes, we are coming back,” Phantom’s composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber, told the New York Times, as Broadway’s longest-running production announced that it would put tickets on sale again this Friday. “The production anticipates that audiences will be allowed to return at full capacity, but will be required to wear masks (aptly enough, considering the title character’s signature look),” Playbill reported. The show is slated to return to Broadway on 22 October, when the experience of being once again inside a crowded theater for a live performance is sure to heighten each sensation for audience members. US is seen as a greater threat to democracy than Russia or China, survey finds Nearly half of respondents in a survey of people from 53 countries are concerned that the US is a threat to democracy in their country. That’s a greater proportion than those concerned about any threat to their democracy from China or from Russia, my colleague Patrick Wintour reports. While support for democracy was high among respondents, only 53% said they currently believe their own countries are actually democratic. The biggest threats to democracy, according to respondents, were inequality and the power of big tech companies. The poll was commissioned by the Alliance of Democracies Foundation among 50,000 respondents in 53 countries, and carried out from February to April this year. Report: McCarthy told Trump that Liz Cheney would be out of leadership soon In a recent call, current Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy told Donald Trump that Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who voted for Trump’s impeachment and continues to publicly criticize his lies, would soon be , the Daily Beast reports. Cheney herself has told other Republicans that it’s not worth holding on to her leadership role as conference chair “if lying is going to be a requirement”, one source told the Daily Beast. "History is watching us" Liz Cheney writes in defiant message to the GOP As Congressional Republicans move towards ousting Liz Cheney from her leadership role, the Wyoming Republican published a defiant op-ed in the Washington Post, warning her party that standing with Donald Trump means undermining the rule of law and risking continued violence. “I have worked overseas in nations where changes in leadership come only with violence, where democracy takes hold only until the next violent upheaval,” Cheney writes. “We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.” Deb Haaland’s plans for addressing violence against indigenous women This is Lois Beckett, picking up our live politics coverage from our West Coast office in Los Angeles. Interior secretary Deb Haaland spoke with the Huffington Post about the crisis of murdered or missing indigenous women, and shared a chilling story about the lack of law enforcement action. Global implications: the inside story of the Facebook Oversight Board Trump decision Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger is one of the members of the Oversight Board that upheld Facebook’s decision to ban Donald Trump’s account for inciting violence and undermining democracy after the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol. In an insider’s account of the Oversight Board’s deliberations, Rusbridger defended the board’s independence from Facebook and highlighted members’ broader concerns about the global ramifications of Facebook’s action against Trump. One of their key issues: “For how much longer would giant social media platforms act as an amplification system for any number of despots around the world. Would they, too, be banned?” Among the board’s new policy advisories to Facebook, Rusbridger writes: “if the head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a determinate period sufficient to protect against imminent harm”. Today so far That’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Lois Beckett, will take over the blog for the next few hours. Here’s where the day stands so far: The Biden administration backed a waiver of intellectual property rights for coronavirus vaccines, which progressive activists have said will help spur global production of the vaccines. “The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines,” US trade representative Katherine Tai said in a statement. Facebook’s oversight board upheld the suspension of Donald Trump’s account in response to the former president’s comments about the deadly Capitol insurrection. However, the board also criticized Facebook for indefinitely suspending Trump’s account and instructed the company to conduct a six-month review to determine whether the ban should be lifted. Trump lashed out against Facebook and other social media giants in response to the decision, saying such companies “must pay a political price” for suspending his accounts. “What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country,” Trump said in a statement. “The People of our Country will not stand for it!” Joe Biden said the Republican party engaged in a “mini-revolution”, as House Republicans push for Liz Cheney to be removed as conference chairwoman over her criticism of Trump. “It seems as though the Republican party is trying to identify what it stands for,” Biden said this afternoon. “They’re in the midst of a significant sort of mini-revolution.” A federal judge blocked the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium, ruling that the health agency did not have the authority to halt evictions because of the coronavirus pandemic. The justice department has said it will appeal the decision. Lois will have more coming up, so stay tuned. The first “tweaked” vaccine against the worrying coronavirus variants that emerged in South Africa and Brazil has successfully neutralised them in laboratory trials, the US company Moderna has said. The results of the small trial suggest that boosters against the variants will be feasible and could potentially be rolled out this year to counter the threat from variants that have appeared around the world and are feared in some cases to be more transmissible or partially vaccine-resistant. Leading companies have been racing to produce adapted versions of their Covid vaccines. Pfizer/BioNTech, which has a similar mRNA vaccine to Moderna’s, and Oxford/AstraZeneca are also in the process of developing tweaked vaccines against the South African variant, B1351, and the Brazilian variant, P1, which appear to be the major threat to current immunisation programmes. Moderna became the first to announce results on Wednesday. They appear to be very positive, although only basic information from an initial analysis of results is available so far. Gabriel Scally, a professor of public health at the University of Bristol and a member of the Independent Sage committee, argued that waiving intellectual property protections was the most efficient way to get vaccines to countries like India, which is experiencing a devastating surge in cases right now. Scally wrote in a Guardian column last month: Production is being constrained because pharmaceutical companies have refused to share their vaccine technology, and intellectual property rules prevent countries from creating their own generic versions of the jabs. This means we are restricted to the supply chains of the patent-holder company. Because of this impediment, we are using just a fraction of the world’s potential global vaccine manufacturing capacity. More than 100 nations, led by India and South Africa, are pushing to temporarily suspend patent rules at the World Trade Organization during this pandemic. But the move has been blocked by a small number of countries, including the UK and the US, as well as by the EU. Throughout this pandemic, Independent Sage has sought to guide the government and act as a non-party political voice for sound population health policy. Our remit would not usually extend to matters of international trade. But in this case the risk to public health is clear. By helping block a patent waiver, the UK government is stifling vaccine production, which means many countries will wait years for sufficient doses. That risks letting the virus run rampant, leading to new variants and putting our own vaccination programme in jeopardy. It would be a reckless act of self-mutilation. Senator Bernie Sanders applauded the Biden administration for backing a waiver of intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines. The progressive senator also thanked the “the dedicated work done by activists around the world to put this issue on the global agenda”. “We are all in this together,” Sanders said on Twitter. US Trade Representative Katherine Tai acknowledged the conversations about waiving intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines will not be easy, but she said the move was necessary to support the increased global production of vaccines. “We are for the waiver at the WTO, we are for what the proponents of the waiver are trying to accomplish, which is better access, more manufacturing capability, more shots in arms,” Tai told Bloomberg News. She added, “In terms of how soon the WTO can deliver -- that literally depends on the WTO members, collectively, being able to deliver, and so I am the first one to admit that what we are leaning into is a process that is not going to be easy.” Biden administration backs waiver of intellectual property protections for vaccines The US trade representative has announced the Biden administration supports waiving intellectual property protections on coronavirus vaccines to help ramp up production. “The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” Katherine Tai said in a statement. Tai said the Biden administration will “actively participate” in conversations with the World Trade Organization to help lift those protections. She acknowledged those conversations will “take time” given the complexity of the issue. “The Administration’s aim is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible,” Tai said. A number of progressive lawmakers had called on Biden to lift the protections in order to more easily get coronavirus vaccines to other countries, but some health company executives argued such a move would not help expedite delivery of vaccines. Joe Biden also told reporters he was “willing to compromise” on how to pay for his infrastructure proposals, which would cost trillions of dollars. “But I’m not willing to not pay for what we’re talking about. I’m not willing to deficit spend. They already have us $2 trillion in the hole,” Biden said, referring to the Trump era tax cuts that were not offset with spending cuts. Biden has proposed spending $2 trillion on his American Jobs Plan, and he plans to help pay for that massive project by raising the corporate tax rate to 28%. However, some lawmakers, including Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, have called for a more modest corporate tax rate hike to 25%. Republicans are in the midst of a "mini-revolution," Biden says Joe Biden took several questions from reporters after concluding his prepared remarks on the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. One reporter asked the president to elaborate on his earlier comments about House Republicans’ efforts to oust Liz Cheney from her leadership role over her criticism of Donald Trump. Biden said earlier today, “I don’t understand the Republicans. “It seems as though the Republican party is trying to identify what it stands for,” the president said. “They’re in the midst of a significant sort of mini-revolution.” Biden noted he has been a Democrat for decades, and he has never seen any kind of internal party conflict like the one Republicans are experiencing right now. “I think Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” the president said. Another reporter asked Biden about Mitch McConnell’s comments earlier today, when the Senate minority leader said his top priority was blocking the efforts of the Democratic administration. Biden said McConnell made similar comments during Barack Obama’s presidency, but Democrats were still able to work with Senate Republicans to pass important legislation. Biden touts Restaurant Revitalization Fund: "The American Rescue Plan is working" Joe Biden just delivered remarks at the White House to tout the Restaurant Revitalization Fund included in the American Rescue Plan, which he signed into law in March. The president noted he visited Taqueria Las Gemelas in northeast DC earlier today. The restaurant benefitted from the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the first coronavirus relief package, and the revitalization fund. More than 186,000 businesses have already filed applications for the revitalization fund, the president said. More than half of those businesses are owned by women, veterans and socioeconomically disadvantaged people, he added. Biden said his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package is also helping to lower hunger and child poverty in the country. “The message is clear: help is here,” Biden said. “The bottom line is this: the American Rescue Plan is working. America is getting vaccinated, job creation is soaring, the economy is growing and our country is on the move again.” The White House press secretary was asked about the federal court’s decision on the eviction moratorium during her press briefing this afternoon. Jen Psaki noted the justice department was reviewing the decision, which could have major implications for Americans who have suffered financially over the past year. “We also recognize, of course, the importance of the eviction moratorium for Americans who have fallen behind on rent during the pandemic,” Psaki said. Psaki added that one study indicated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s moratorium had prevented 1.5 million evictions last year. “It clearly has had a huge benefit,” she said. A spokesperson for the justice department confirmed that the Biden administration will be appealing a federal judge’s decision to block the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s moratorium on evictions. The DOJ is also seeking a stay of the decision to prevent the moratorium from being lifted as the appeal process plays out.