AP News in Brief at 12:04 a.m. EST

States cite smooth election, despite Trump’s baseless claims

ATLANTA (AP) — The 2020 election unfolded smoothly across the country and without any widespread irregularities, according to state officials and election experts, a stark contrast to the baseless claims of fraud being levelled by President Donald Trump following his defeat.

Election experts said the large increase in advance voting — 107 million people voting early in person and by mail — helped take pressure off Election Day operations. There were also no incidents of violence at the polls or voter intimidation.

“The 2020 general election was one of the smoothest and most well-run elections that we have ever seen, and that is remarkable considering all the challenges,” said Ben Hovland, a Democrat appointed by Trump to serve on the Election Assistance Commission, which works closely with officials on election administration.

Following Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, Trump has sought to discredit the integrity of the election and argued without evidence that the results will be overturned. Republican lawmakers have said the president should be allowed to launch legal challenges, though many of those lawsuits have already been turned away by judges and those that remain do not include evidence of problems that would change the outcome of the race.

In Wisconsin, a battleground state where Biden narrowly edged Biden, top election official Meagan Wolfe said there were no problems with the election reported to her office and no complaints filed alleging any irregularities.

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US hits record COVID-19 hospitalizations amid virus surge

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. hit a record number of coronavirus hospitalizations Tuesday and surpassed 1 million new confirmed cases in just the first 10 days of November amid a nationwide surge of infections that shows no signs of slowing.

The new wave appears bigger and more widespread than the surges that happened in the spring and summer — and threatens to be worse. But experts say there are also reasons to think the nation is better able to deal with the virus this time around.

“We’re definitely in a better place” when it comes to improved medical tools and knowledge, said William Hanage, a Harvard University infectious-disease researcher.

Newly confirmed infections in the U.S. were running at all-time highs of well over 100,000 per day, pushing the total to more than 10 million and eclipsing 1 million since Halloween. There are now 61,964 people hospitalized, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Several states posted records Tuesday, including over 12,600 new cases in Illinois, 10,800 in Texas and 7,000 in Wisconsin.

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Biden vows to ‘get right to work’ despite Trump resistance

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Vowing “to get right to work,” President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday shrugged off President Donald Trump’s fierce refusal to accept the election outcome as “inconsequential,” even as Democrats elsewhere warned that the Republican president’s actions were dangerous.

Raising unsupported claims of voter fraud, Trump has blocked the incoming president from receiving intelligence briefings and withheld federal funding intended to help facilitate the transfer of power. Trump’s resistance, backed by senior Republicans in Washington and across the country, could also prevent background investigations and security clearances for prospective staff and access to federal agencies to discuss transition planning.

As some Democrats and former Republican officials warned of serious consequences, Biden sought to lower the national temperature as he addressed reporters from a makeshift transition headquarters near his home in downtown Wilmington.

He described Trump’s position as little more than an “embarrassing” mark on the outgoing president’s legacy, while predicting that Republicans on Capitol Hill would eventually accept the reality of Biden’s victory. The Republican resistance, Biden said, “does not change the dynamic at all in what we’re able to do.”

Additional intelligence briefings “would be useful,” Biden added, but “we don’t see anything slowing us down.”

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‘Obamacare’ likely to survive, high court arguments indicate

WASHINGTON (AP) — A more conservative Supreme Court appears unwilling to do what Republicans have long desired: kill off the Affordable Care Act, including its key protections for pre-existing health conditions and subsidized insurance premiums that affect tens of millions of Americans.

Meeting remotely a week after the election and in the midst of a pandemic that has closed their majestic courtroom, the justices on Tuesday took on the latest Republican challenge to the Obama-era health care law, with three appointees of President Donald Trump, an avowed foe of the law, among them.

But at least one of those Trump appointees, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, seemed likely to vote to leave the bulk of the law intact, even if he were to find the law’s now-toothless mandate that everyone obtain health insurance to be unconstitutional.

“It does seem fairly clear that the proper remedy would be to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest of the act in place,” Kavanaugh said.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote two earlier opinions preserving the law, stated similar views, and the court’s three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety. That presumably would form a majority by joining a decision to cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it. Congress zeroed out the penalty in 2017, but left the rest of the law untouched.

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False claims of voting fraud, pushed by Trump, thrive online

It started months before Election Day with false claims on Facebook and Twitter that mail-in ballots cast for President Donald Trump had been chucked in dumpsters or rivers.

Now, a week after the final polls closed, falsehoods about dead people voting and ballots being thrown out by poll workers are still thriving on social media, reaching an audience of millions. Trump and his supporters are pointing to those debunked claims on social media as reason to not accept that Democrat Joe Biden won the election.

“These will probably persist for years or even decades unfortunately,” Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor and online misinformation expert, said of the false claims about the U.S. election process. “People are very motivated to both participate in them and believe them.”

There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. In fact, voting officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.

The issues raised by Trump’s campaign and his allies are typical in every election: problems with signatures, secrecy envelopes and postal marks on mail-in ballots, as well as the potential for a small number of ballots miscast or lost. With Biden leading Trump by substantial margins in key battleground states, none of those issues would have any impact on the outcome of the election. Many of the legal challenges brought by Trump’s campaign have been tossed out by judges, some within hours of their filing.

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Dems clinch House control, but majority likely to shrink

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats clinched two more years of controlling the House on Tuesday but with a potentially razor-thin majority, a bittersweet finale to last week’s elections that has left them divided and with scant margin for error for advancing their agenda.

The party has now nailed down at least 218 seats, according to The Associated Press, and could win a few others when more votes are counted. While that assures command of the 435-member chamber, blindsided Democrats were all but certain to see their current 232-seat majority shrink after an unforeseen surge of Republican voters transformed expected gains of perhaps 15 seats into losses potentially approaching that amount.

“We have the gavel, we have the gavel,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who seems all but certain to continue in that role. While she bemoaned Democrats’ losses in districts where GOP votes proved “almost insurmountable,” she told reporters last week, “We’ve lost some battles but we’ve won the war.”

By retaining the House, Democrats will control the chamber for four consecutive years for only the second time since 1995, when Republicans ended 40 years of Democratic dominance.

Yet though Joe Biden won the presidential election, there was a strong chance Republicans would keep Senate control. That would force Democrats to scale back their dreams of sweeping health care, infrastructure and other initiatives, instead needing compromises with the GOP.

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Bidenomics: More stimulus, tougher regulation, and gridlock

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Joe Biden will inherit a vulnerable economic recovery under threat from a resurgent virus, likely with a divided Congress that will hinder his ability to address the challenges.

Yet despite the obstacles, the former vice-president and senator will pursue a drastic shift in America’s economic policy. He has vowed to reverse much of the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulation and indifference to domestic spending and economic development in favour of big investments in education, infrastructure and clean energy. He wants stricter rules to rein in big tech companies and to fight climate change.

And to help pay for it all, the president-elect would turn to large tax increases for corporations and wealthy individuals by reversing much of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts.

Biden is already distinguishing himself from Trump in his approach to the pandemic, which economists generally see as the gravest threat to the recovery. Trump saw the pandemic’s impact on the economy through the lens of government-mandated shutdowns: He argued that to fight the pandemic by imposing curbs on face-to-face businesses like restaurants — the approach favoured by most health experts — was to doom the economy. Yet even when states reopened, many consumers stayed cautious about dining out, going to movies or flying.

“It wasn’t all about shutdowns — it was about people getting scared,” said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist. “I imagine people are getting scared again.”

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Vatican report reveals anonymous letters accusing McCarrick

The Vatican’s report on ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick revealed the previously unknown contents of six anonymous letters accusing him of pedophilia that were sent to U.S. church leaders in the early 1990s and later forwarded to the Holy See.

New York’s then-archbishop, Cardinal John O’Connor, forwarded them to the Vatican in 1999, shortly before he died, along with a six-page confidential memo in which he recommended McCarrick not be promoted to any important U.S. diocese because of a “scandal of great proportions” that would erupt if the allegations became public.

The 449-page report also included testimony from a woman identified only as “Mother 1” who told Vatican investigators she, too, tried to raise the alarm with anonymous letters in the 1980s when McCarrick was bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey, after she saw McCarrick “massaging (her sons’) inner thighs” at her home.

The woman said she sent the letters to members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy “expressing her distress about McCarrick’s conduct with minors,” and she believed they “may have been thrown aside” because they were anonymous.

Jeff Anderson, an attorney for several of McCarrick’s accusers, said at a news conference Tuesday that he also represents two people in the woman’s family and criticized the church for turning a blind eye to the warning.

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Some big, early shifts on immigration expected under Biden

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some dramatic moves on immigration are expected in the early days of the Biden administration. Joe Biden will likely use executive orders to reverse some of President Donald Trump’s most controversial actions, rolling back moves that were a central feature of his administration and important to his base. The Biden administration plans to restore protection for people brought to the U.S. illegally as minors and stop using Pentagon funds to build a border wall. Biden unveiled a detailed, highly ambitious plan on immigration but it will take time to undo many actions taken by Trump. The incoming president will also likely face a divided Congress, making it difficult to enact any kind of sweeping, comprehensive changes to the nation’s immigration system. Here’s a look at what to expect:

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A CHANGE OF TONE

Restricting immigration was a signature issue for Trump, who infamously called Mexicans rapists as he pledged to build border wall in launching his campaign. His administration banned travellers from some predominantly Muslim countries as one of its first acts, took many steps to limit legal immigration and cut the number of refugees allowed in the country by 80%.

Biden has said “immigration is central to who we are as a nation,” noting that most Americans can trace their ancestry to immigrants, but it isn’t a core issue. It’s not even mentioned on his transition website’s top priorities: COVID-19, economic recovery, racial justice and climate change.

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Lawyer: Britney Spears fears father, wants him out of career

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Britney Spears fears her father and will not resume her career so long as he has power over it, her attorney said in court Tuesday.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny declined to suspend James Spears from his central role in the court conservatorship that has controlled his daughter’s life and career for 12 years as Britney Spears’ attorney Samuel D. Ingham III requested at the contentious hearing. But the judge said she would consider future petitions for his suspension or outright removal, which Ingham plans to file.

“My client has informed me that she is afraid of her father,” Ingham told the judge. “She will not perform again if her father is in charge of her career.”

The pop star has been on an indefinite work hiatus since early 2019.

James Spears’ attorney, Vivian Lee Thoreen, defended what she said was his perfect record in his run as her conservator, which has seen her net worth go from in debt to well over $60 million.

The Associated Press