Weekly Update 12/7/20

California

Southern California and San Joaquin Valley residents will be under a stay-at-home order after the intensive care unit capacity in the two regions fell below 15%, triggering a mandate issued by Gov. Newsom last week that aims to bring down the soaring number of COVID-19 hospitalizations…

Seven families took California to court Monday, 11/30, accusing the state of failing to ensure "basic educational equality" during a prolonged period of remote learning brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic…

Governor Gavin Newsom announced 11/30 that California will provide temporary tax relief for eligible businesses impacted by COVID-19 restrictions..

President and Administration

Disputing President Trump’s persistent, baseless claims, Attorney General William Barr declared Tuesday, 12/1, the U.S. Justice Department has uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election…

President Trump can redirect $3.6 billion in U.S. military funds to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border because Texas groups that challenged the decision didn’t prove they’ve been sufficiently harmed by Trump’s wall to challenge the funding shift, a federal appeals court said…

Education

Congressional education leaders are hopeful about reaching a deal this month to simplify applying for student aid, a major priority for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate education committee, who is retiring…

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced Friday, 12/4, the extension of the federal student loan administrative forbearance period, the pause in interest accrual, and the suspension of collections activity through 1/31/21…

Education Secretary DeVos announced Wednesday, 12/2, that students can now use the College Scorecard to compare average earnings two years after graduation based on field of study and how much federal student loan debt they can expect to incur, including new information on Parent PLUS loans, based on school…

Congress

Lawmakers are expected to vote midweek on a one-week Continuing Resolution (CR to fund the federal government past Friday, 12/11, when the current CR expires…

Bipartisan negotiators on a $908 billion pandemic relief package are planning to unveil more details of their proposal today, 12/7, aiming to settle on language that can satisfy enough Republicans and Democrats to secure passage of one final tranche of COVID-19 aid before Congress breaks for the year…

The House on Friday, 12/4, passed sweeping legislation that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level, the first time either chamber of Congress has voted to legalize cannabis…

Transition

President-elect Biden named California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as his Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary on Monday, 12/7, and filled out a team that will lead the incoming administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic…

Weekly Update 11/30/20

California

The state’s travel advisory says Californians “should practice self-quarantine for 14 days” after non-essential travel…

Last summer, a COVID-19 outbreak spread to more than half of the detainees and a quarter of facility staff…

An industry-backed group called the California Coalition for Fairness said Tuesday, 11/24, submitted more than one million signatures in an effort to let voters overturn CA SB793 (19R), a recently enacted law prohibiting the sale of flavored tobacco products in California…

In an effort to measure the impact of California’s new board diversity law, the Latino Corporate Directors Association launched a tool to measure the number of Latino directors on California’s public boards…

Coronavirus

About 5.8 million adults say they are somewhat to very likely to face eviction or foreclosure in the next two months, according to a survey completed 11/9 by the U.S. Census Bureau…

AstraZeneca said Monday, 11/23, that it will submit to the FDA preliminary data from large clinical trials in the U.K. and Brazil as part of an application for emergency authorization…

The 2021 Nation’s Report Card (also referred to as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)) is officially on hold for this school year because of the pandemic, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) said Wednesday, 11/25…

President and Administration

The Supreme Court signaled a major shift in its approach to COVID-19 related restrictions late Wednesday, 11/25, voting 5-4 to bar New York state from re-imposing limits on religious gatherings…

President Trump pressed the U.S. Supreme Court to let him exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count, as the justices heard arguments in a case that could affect the allocation of congressional seats and federal dollars…

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is scheduled to testify about the CARES Act before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, 12/1, according to a department statement…

Education

College groups are asking the incoming Biden administration to reverse recent rules they say threaten to dampen the prospects of international enrollment at U.S. colleges…

A new analysis conducted for the U.S. Department of Education puts the amount of money the federal government stands to lose on its student loan portfolio in roughly the same ballpark as the amount private lenders lost on subprime mortgages during the 2008 financial crisis…

Congress

Republican and Democratic lawmakers have reached an agreement on spending levels for the annual spending bill needed to keep the government open after current Continuing Resolution (CR) runs out Dec. 11, according to two congressional aides in both parties…

Transition

The General Services Administration (GSA) on Monday, 11/23, finally acknowledged Biden as the apparent winner of the 2020 presidential election, allowing his team support the transition and gives him access to over $7 million in public funds…

Biden’s selection of Janet Yellen as Treasury Department secretary signals he plans to act aggressively to revive the world’s biggest economy, putting a former Federal Reserve chair who’s not shied away from stimulus at the helm of his economic policy…

Weekly Update 11/23/20

California

New COVID-19 cases leaped in CA last week, rising 53.4 percent as 82,368 cases were reported…

On Saturday, 11/21, Gov. Newsom ordered a state curfew requiring more than 94 percent of Californians to remain in their homes between 10 p.m and 5 a.m. unless performing essential activities…

California health officials issued a new mandate Monday, 11/16, requiring residents to wear face coverings whenever they’re outside their homes, with few exceptions…

California’s 3rd District Court of Appeals on Tuesday, 11/17, stayed an injunction from a lower court that barred Gov. Newsom from issuing executive orders that create new pandemic-related laws, the latest development in a legal challenge to the governor’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic…

Pandemic politics have reached a boiling point in California’s school reopening debate…

Orange County officials have unveiled a plan to provide COVID-19 home test kits to residents in an effort to stop the spread of the virus…

President and Administration

President Trump made explicit Saturday, 11/21, the strategy his legal team has been hinting at for days: He wants Republican-led legislatures to overturn election results in states that Joe Biden won…

Education

Borrowers were excused by Congress from making payments during the pandemic until the end of September…

Associations representing the nation’s colleges and universities are urging the incoming Biden administration in a letter to quickly undo much of what the Trump administration did on higher education policy, starting with changing the new requirement under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that, they worry, will make it harder for victims of sexual assault and harassment to come forward…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) on Tuesday, 11/17, urged President-elect Joe Biden to cancel student debt, calling it the “single biggest stimulus” for the ailing economy, a claim economists dispute…

Last week, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos convened a group of business, education and workforce leaders at the Department of Education for a “Rethink Work-Based Learning” Event…

Congress

Advisers to President-elect Biden are planning for the increasing likelihood that the U.S. economy is headed for a “double-dip” recession early next year…

Bipartisan talks on the FY’21 funding bills have stalled over veteran’s health care funding...

House Democratic leaders are proceeding with plans to bring back earmarks for the 117th Congress, according to Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-MD)…

Last week, House Democrats voted to stick with Nancy Pelosi as their leader and nominee for speaker…

Democrats are making a renewed push to ban schools from using harmful physical restraint and seclusion — practices most often used for students with disabilities…

Weekly Update 11/16/20

California

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday, 11/10, on California v. Texas, another challenge to the Affordable Care Act (ACA)…

President Donald Trump eclipsed 5.7 million votes in California this week, surpassing every Republican candidate in California history…

Gov. Newsom is at the eye of what may be the most diverse lobbying campaign to sweep California—the appointment of Sen. Harris’s replacement…

California, Oregon and Washington on Friday, 11/13, issued a joint travel advisory discouraging nonessential travel and urging visitors and residents returning from other states to quarantine for 14 days…

On Wednesday, 11/18, Rep. Levin will hold a town hall with Dr. Andrea LaCroix, Distinguished Professor and Chief of Epidemiology in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health at UC San Diego, to answer questions about COVID-19 and provide an update on Congress’ efforts to pass more relief legislation…

President and Administration

President Donald Trump acknowledged for the first time on Sunday, 11/15, that Joe Biden won the presidential election, but the President refused to concede and blamed his loss on a string of conspiracy theories…

Education

The total number of international students studying at U.S. universities, whether from within the U.S. or online from abroad, decreased by 16 percent this fall, while enrollments of new international students decreased by 43 percent, according to a new survey of more than 700 colleges conducted by 10 major higher education organizations…

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Thursday, 11/12, backed Harvard University in a lawsuit over its admissions system…

Undergraduates who are studying online this fall rate their learning experience as modestly better than what they encountered last spring -- with greater levels of satisfaction among students who see their instructors taking steps to understand and engage them, according to a new survey of 3,400 undergraduates in the U.S. and Canada…

Congress

Top congressional Democrats renewed calls for a sweeping COVID-19 relief package on Thursday, 11/12, insisting that voters had given President-elect Biden and his party a mandate to fight the pandemic aggressively…

The Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday, 11/10, released drafts of all 12 annual spending bills for 2021, setting up negotiations for a deal ahead of the Dec. 11 deadline to keep the government running…

Coronavirus

Over the past week, there has been an average of 150,265 cases per day, an increase of 81 percent from the average two weeks earlier…

A COVID-19 vaccine developed by Moderna was more than 94 percent effective in the first results from a late-stage U.S. trial with 30,000 people, the company said Monday, 11/16…

Election and Weekly Update 11/9/20

Election Update:

With votes still being counted, turnout in the 2020 presidential election has hit a 50-year high, exceeding the record set by the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama — an extraordinary engagement in what amounted to a referendum on President Donald Trump’s leadership...

As the Trump campaign continued to pursue long-shot legal challenges and top Republicans remained split on whether to congratulate President-elect Biden on his projected victory, Democrats took steps on Sunday, 11/8, toward planning for a Biden administration…

President-elect Joe Biden is planning to quickly sign a series of executive orders after being sworn into office on Jan. 20, immediately forecasting that the country’s politics have shifted and that his presidency will be guided by radically different priorities...

Although the Democrats will hold a narrowed majority in the House, the final makeup of the Senate is not yet clear…

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has served as the Democratic leader since 2002 and letters sent to her colleagues on Friday morning, 11/6, demonstrate her desire for two more years of leadership…

California

Gov. Gavin Newsom exceeded his authority by ordering elections officials to mail all California voters ballots, a judge said Monday, 11/2, in a tentative ruling that could shape the limits of gubernatorial powers but did not affect last week’s election…

A new law (AB 1460) requiring an ethnic studies class in order to graduate from the California State University (CSU) will likely have far-reaching implications for the state’s 115 degree-granting community colleges…

California voters rejected Proposition 16, a major blow to Democrats and social justice advocates who hoped a national reckoning on racial inequality following the police killing of George Floyd would translate into a long-sought repeal of the state’s affirmative action ban…

Launching Kamala Harris into the White House as vice president come January has officially kicked off one of Gov. Newsom's biggest political decisions: appointing California's next U.S. senator…

Coronavirus

A weekend of record-breaking numbers has pushed the US to the brink of 10 million coronavirus infections. And the pace keeps accelerating…

Today, 11/9, drug-maker Pfizer said that an early look at data from its coronavirus vaccine shows it is more than 90 percent effective - a much better than expected efficacy if the trend continues…

President and Administration

LGBT advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate President Trump's September executive order banning the government from working with contractors that conduct “any form of race or sex stereotyping,” including diversity training…

President Trump today, 11/9, fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper via tweet…

Education

President Trump tried to bully schools into opening their buildings, a hard-edge pandemic tactic that succeeded in places and backfired elsewhere…

Congress

Senate Majority Leader McConnell said that Congress needed to approve a new coronavirus relief bill before the end of this year…

House Rules Chairman Jim McGovern (D-MA) wants Congress to take back its Constitutional powers next year…