Politics

Biden: I’m not afraid to take presidential oath outdoors on Jan. 20

Washington, Jan 11 (efe-epa).- President-elect Joe Biden said Monday that he is not afraid of taking the presidential oath of office on the steps of the Capitol – in the open air – on Jan. 20, as is US tradition, after the violent assault on Congress last week by supporters of President Donald Trump and Internet threats by radicals.

“I’m not afraid of taking the oath outside,” Biden told the media at a hospital in Newark, Delaware, where he went to get his second dose of the Pfizer anti-Covid vaccine.

Biden said that he thought Trump “should not be in office. Period.” But he did not comment on congressional Democrats’ call to Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president or they will begin a second impeachment process against him on Wednesday.

The president-elect also said that he hopes that those people who engaged in “seditious” behavior in the violent invasion of the Capitol legally pay for what they did.

Biden will assume the presidency on Wednesday of next week in a ceremony that traditionally has been held on the steps of the US Capitol, surrounded by key figures in US politics and society.

Washington will hike security for the event by deploying more than 10,000 members of the National Guard to guarantee public safety, while the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, has asked the public either not to attend the inauguration at all or to gather on the National Mall out of fear of new confrontations.

The assault on the Capitol last Wednesday came as lawmakers were proceeding with certifying Biden’s victory in the Nov. 3 presidential vote. But in a speech before his supporters gathered in front of the White House, Trump urged them to march to Congress and once again repeated his baseless, and oft disproven, allegations that massive election fraud was the only reason that Biden had defeated his reelection bid.

Those election certification proceedings were temporarily disrupted by the violence, chaos and mayhem associated with the invasion of the Capitol.

Biden also said that it is a scandal that some 3,000 to 4,000 people are dying each day from Covid-19 and on Thursday he will present a plan to accelerate the distribution and administration of the vaccines against the highly transmissible and quickly spreading disease, which are not being distributed at the once-hoped-for rate.

The 78-year-old president-elect went to a hospital near his residence in the state of Delaware to receive the two doses of the vaccine in an effort to reassure people who are undecided about whether to be inoculated that it is safe.

The US has suffered more than 375,000 deaths from Covid-19 and 22.5 million confirmed cases of the disease, which continues to spread without pause across a large part of the country.

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