JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, Taiwan picks a new president, with the ruling party's win means for the region and for U.S.-China relations, then how the ones rarely use process of impeachment has become a partisan political weapon.

And two new studies find we're drinking and eating more microplastics than we may have thought.

MAN: The real question is, are the kinds of contaminants that are well known in plastics now being delivered at a sufficient dose to actually be a risk to human health?

And that's the question that has not yet been answered.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening, I'm John Yang.

Heavy snow biting cold pouring rain.

For much of today there's been only one state in the continental United States without a severe weather watch or warning, Arizona.

Everywhere else a massive winter storm is spanning the country up ending life for millions of Americans.

It's disrupting presidential politics.

In Iowa they're digging out from blizzard conditions and under the first contest of the 2024 elections.

Republican candidates Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley trim to their campaign schedules and former President Donald Trump's shifted to tele-rallies, and the storm is affecting the NFL playoffs.

Tomorrow's Bills-Steelers game has been moved to Monday as more than a foot of snow is expected and Buffalo.

But fans are still showing up for tonight's Dolphins-Chiefs game despite wins that will make it feel like 30 below in Kansas City.

Taiwanese voters rebuffed China by electing as president a candidate who rejects China's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan.

The victory of Lai Ching-te gives the ruling party an unprecedented third presidential term.

In his victory speech Lai promise to safeguard Taiwan's autonomy.

LAI CHING-TE, President-Elect, Taiwan (through translator): We are telling the international community that between democracy and authoritarianism we stand on the side of democracy.

Taiwan will continue to walk side by side with democracies from around the world.

JOHN YANG: China responded with a statement saying Taiwan is China's Taiwan.

This election will not change the basic landscape.

The Biden administration congratulated Lai but responding to a reporter's question this morning, President Biden said the United States does not support independence for Taiwan.

Lai's to be inaugurated in May.

President Biden also told reporters that he's confident the United States is well prepared after a second round of U.S. strikes against Iranian backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Biden in the United States sent a private message to Tehran.

U.S. officials say they expect the Houthis to retaliate, stoking concerns of a wider Middle East conflict.

In Gaza, predawn Israeli airstrikes killed more than 30 Palestinians, including young children.

The Hamas run Gaza health ministry says nearly 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend, the rise of impeachment as a partisan weapon and you might be eating and drinking more microplastics then you think.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: The Taiwanese presidential election has big implications for both Beijing and Washington.

President Elect Lai Ching-ti, also known as William, rejects Beijing's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan.

Earlier, Ali Rogin spoke with Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, the China reporter for Axios, who's based in Taiwan.

ALI ROGIN: What were the issues that Taiwanese voters were most concerned with?

And what do those issues say about the fact that William Lai has won?

BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN, Axios: Well, Taiwanese voters in this election as with every presidential election were concerned about cross strait relations in Taiwan's presidential elections.

The relationship with China is always a key issue.

And that was certainly the case this year.

Over the past year or so the Chinese government has been increasingly aggressive in its coercive actions towards Taiwan.

And so voters and the parties themselves made that a key issue.

The KMT cast this election as a choice between war and peace, a vote for the KMT as a vote for peace with China.

They said a vote for the DPP as a vote for war.

Whereas the DPP cast this as an election that was a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, with a rising China, you know, a sort of specter of authoritarianism looming over Taiwan.

But those weren't the only issues.

You know, basically on the ballot this year, the economy, unemployment, and high home prices were also very much on voters' minds.

Now, the fact that the DPP one part of that has to do with the fact that this year for the first time, there was a very significant third party on the ballot, that's the Taiwan People's Party and their candidate, Ko Wen-je and Ko Wen-je got more than 20 percent of the vote, which is unprecedented.

Now he was pulling mostly from the KMT.

So if the TPP had not run, then it's possible we would have seen a KMT victory.

What that says is that the KMT itself is not speaking to Taiwanese voters.

They still think that they still say that a close relationship with China is the best way to guarantee Taiwan security.

Most Taiwanese voters or many Taiwanese voters just don't feel that that's true anymore.

ALI ROGIN: How markedly is this going to affect cross strait relations?

BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN: Well, at the end of the day, here are the facts.

China wants to unify with Taiwan, and Taiwan doesn't.

And you know, regardless of how the voters in Taiwan vote, that's not going to change, which means there is going to inherently be some level of tension with China.

But what the voters were looking at is, you know, a continuation of the past eight years of DPP rule.

Now, the DPP is a party that China has cast as a separatist or Independence Party.

Okay.

In fact, when Tsai when was elected the current president in 2016, China cut off all a formal communications with Taiwan.

And since then have steadily poached Taiwan's remaining diplomatic allies.

Now, Taiwan has just about 12 or 13 remaining countries that recognize it formally diplomatically.

If the KMT had won, it's possible that Beijing would have toned it down a little bit.

But what's true is that the KMT, their position isn't unification with China, the DPP's position isn't unification with China.

And so even if the KMT had won, there would still be this kind of fundamental tension.

ALI ROGIN: What do we know so far about how China is reacting to William Lai's victory?

BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN: Well, what they've said this past week is that they will never compromise on their belief that China must unify with Taiwan.

Frankly, they really hate William Lai.

They have branded him as a quote separatist through and through.

Now, what we're expecting is certainly a very strong verbal denunciation from Beijing of the results of today's election.

Analysts tell me that we are not expecting at least not right now.

We're not expecting massive military drills like we saw after Nancy Pelosi visited in 2022.

One reason for that is that the legislature is how it's going to kind of how the pieces will fall isn't quite set.

Now, the DPP did not gain a majority, but neither the KMT the TPP has a significant chunk of the party vote that will give it seats in the legislature.

That means the DPP and the KMT are going to be vying for the TPP support.

And in this kind of mix, it's likely that Beijing does not want to so frightened Taiwan's residents, that they -- that there's an outpouring of support for a DPP, TPP kind of partnership in the legislature.

ALI ROGIN: I also want to ask you about what this means for the U.S.-China relationship, does it have repercussions?

BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN: Certainly, the U.S. is a very important player in this nexus here this, you know, China-Taiwan, U.S. nexus.

The U.S. is Taiwan's most important partner and the its strongest defender, even though the U.S. does not have official relations with Taiwan.

Now, in the past week, there was a Chinese official delegation to the U.S., and there were high level meetings between top Chinese diplomats and Biden administration officials.

And it's likely that what was one of the key topics of conversation on both sides this week was, how are we going to maintain this very delicate stability that we have attained in the U.S.-China relationship over the past few months, regardless of what happens in Taiwan.

Because, you know, here's, here's what's at stake.

This could easily escalate, as you know, the China-Taiwan issue is one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the Indo Pacific region.

And so we are watching this very carefully to see if what's happened today in Taiwan does throw off that balance between the U.S. and China.

ALI ROGIN: Bethany Allen Ebrahimian, thank you so much for joining us and breaking this all down for us.

BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN: Thanks for having me.

JOHN YANG: House Republicans are pressing ahead with their efforts to impeach both President Biden and his homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

If the house approves articles of impeachment against Mr. Biden, it would be the fifth presidential impeachment in the nation's history.

Three of them coming in just the last five years.

Only one cabinet official has ever been impeached and that was in 1876.

There's also talk among some Republican lawmakers of impeaching Attorney General Merrick Garland and defense secretary Lloyd Austin has what was intended to be a check on presidential power become a modern day political weapon.

Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at the George Washington University.

Sarah, all that's going on right now, is this what Alexander Hamilton had in mind when he suggested or argued that impeachment should be in the Constitution?

SARAH BINDER, George Washington University: Impeachment has had a long political history, and even the framers were a little worried about how it would be used.

In fact, it might be the only one thing that Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson agreed on, right.

They worried that a party a large majority could weaponize it against their opponents.

It does seem to be though that in today's recent years, it's been used as a threat, even if sometimes they never get to vote.

And that seems quite a bit different than what we've seen before.

JOHN YANG: I want to talk about the Mayorkas impeachment inquiry.

The chairman of that effort is Mark Green is Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

And he defended this process in an in a hearing earlier this week.

REP. MARK GREEN, Chairman, House Committee on Homeland Security: The constitutional history is overwhelmingly clear on this subject.

The founders designed impeachment not just to remove officials engaged in criminal behavior.

But those guilty of such gross incompetence that their conduct had endangered their fellow Americans betrayed the public trust or represented a neglect of duty.

JOHN YANG: On the other hand, you had a group of legal scholars write an open letter degree in saying that impeachment wasn't intended to cover incompetence, poor judgment or bad policy.

They said it was for truly extraordinary misconduct.

And on the third hand, you had Gerald Ford in the 1970s, when he was trying to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who said, an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives says it is at any given time, what's your take on this?

SARAH BINDER: Well, there's a kernel of truth to Representative Green's argument that the framers said it shouldn't just be a standard of actual criminal misconduct.

But at the same time, the letter writers, the legal experts are correct.

In fact, the framers explicitly rejected this term mal (ph) administration, right, would essentially boil down to policy differences, that that was too low of a threshold, that that shouldn't be the basis of impeachment.

Does that leave us with our President Ford, but a majority is willing to support in some ways that's what it boils down to.

JOHN YANG: You talked about earlier when the debate over this impeachment clause at the time the Constitution was being written.

Hamilton said at the time that when impeachment happened, it would inevitably become political that the country would be divided into camps for and against.

Are we seeing politics not being an effect of impeachment, but being what's driving impeachment now?

SARAH BINDER: Well, there's a certain truth to that way of thinking about it, which is to say we live in an inherently an intensely partisan time.

And there's very little that escapes this sort of seeping partisanship, this partisan team play in Washington, right, your team's forte, so my team is against it.

And in some ways, impeachment and threats of impeachment is just another tool in the majority's.

toolbook.

Of course, you know, we have very tight majorities, very slim majorities, and you can't impeach somebody with a simple majority.

You can't convict them that is.

And so it festers right partisanship as it spreads.

So soon, we get more and more of these threats, to impeach someone over policy differences.

JOHN YANG: Does that devalue the impact or the import of impeachment?

SARAH BINDER: Well, there's always a risk here, that as more and more the threat of impeachment is wielded.

And presidents don't fear conviction, because we rarely ever see two-thirds majorities which are needed to convict the president and remove him from office.

We rarely see those oversized bipartisan majorities.

The risk then is that impeachment which might have been used and perceived as a way to constrain presidents in their exercise of power, that that's not going to work to constrain those presidents anymore in that I think the framers might not be surprised.

But I think they'd be a little quite a bit worried about.

JOHN YANG: What are the risks or the dangers of the pitfalls of that?

SARAH BINDER: Well, first of all, there's the sense and we can look to recent, former President Trump, right, there's the risk here that presidents feel unconstrained.

That is they only feel beholden to their party base.

They might only feel beholden to the set of voters who can get them reelected.

Now, that's not unique to one party or the other.

But the danger here is, if you don't fear any constraint from the Senate, or from the United States conduct, you can violate the public trust, you can abuse your power, knowing that there's very little that stands in your way.

And that can be harmful.

It can be harmful for national security.

It can be harmful for social welfare.

There's all sorts of ways in which the American public and that's sort of the strength of a democratic system relies on holding politicians accountable for how they wield power.

JOHN YANG: Is this a product of this particular moment in American politics?

Or do you think the use of the attitude toward impeachment has really shifted forever?

SARAH BINDER: Well, again, there are deep roots to this partisan and political use of impeachment all the way back right to 1789 and the early, early impeachment efforts in the early 1800s.

So I don't want to overstate the uniqueness of the moment here.

But there is something different I think, going on here.

Certainly, it seems in this Congress, with a Republican majority in the House, which is in the past, leaders seem to be able to kind of constrain their members, constrain the hardliners who really want to go after the other party's president or his cabinet.

These had two speakers of this Congress, neither has really been willing or able to rein in their hardliners.

And in fact, it seems speakers are trying to get out ahead of the parade, that maybe impeachment is the one thing that will unite their party.

And that's seems quite a bit new to me historically.

JOHN YANG: Sarah Binder of George Washington University, thank you very much.

SARAH BINDER: Sure.

Thanks for having me.

JOHN YANG: Plastic, it seems is unavoidable in our daily lives, from takeout containers to water bottles and maybe even that tub of ice cream.

Two new studies out this week find that we're eating and drinking more plastic than we might have realized.

In one of them for the first time, researchers were able to measure nanoparticles of plastic and bottled water.

On average, a liter bottle had 240,000 tiny particles, often smaller than a speck of dust.

They can pass through the intestines and lungs directly into the bloodstream and then to other organs.

Another study looked at what we eat.

It found microplastic in 88 percent of the tested protein samples, seafood, beef, pork, tofu, they all had it.

George Leonard is one of the co-authors of the protein study and his chief scientist at Ocean Conservancy.

George, scientists have known for some time about fish about the because of the water that it's in.

But why did you decide to look at other protein and were you surprised by any of your findings?

GEORGE LEONARD, Chief Scientist, Ocean Conservancy: Well, we were so an Ocean Conservancy.

Of course we care deeply about the ocean and we care deeply about plastic pollution.

So we have been interested in understanding the distribution of plastic in marine life and in particularly in seafood for a long time.

But we realized we also eat a lot of seafood.

And we're all consumers of all kinds of different foods.

So we thought it would be useful to try to put marine data in the context of other proteins that we choose, and we might choose at the grocery store.

So our hypothesis really is that there might be some differences between those that are grown in the ocean, those that have grown on farms, and that are animal products, or maybe some of these new animal substitutes, the meat substitutes that are on the market.

And what we found out was, in fact, there are essentially microplastics in all of these protein choices, and that if you are looking to be a protein eater, you really can't avoid microplastic.

JOHN YANG: I think we can understand in seafood where it comes from comes to the water that they're in.

But where does pork and beef, and especially plant based protein like tofu?

Where does it come from there?

GEORGE LEONARD: Well, so in the ocean plastics, of course, are in the water.

And so they are either ingested, or they can come through the gill systems of fish and shellfish.

And for terrestrial animals and for plants for that matter.

In some respects, it's very similar.

So we know there's a lot of microplastic contamination in the soil.

And so you can find microplastics that are being essentially taken up by plants, through the root systems from the soil.

And then of course, animals are drinking water that is likely contaminated with microplastics.

They're eating a variety of different foodstuffs, which themselves may have plastic in the moment, as well.

And then many of the processed proteins and other foods that we're eating may be picking up microplastic from the processing itself.

JOHN YANG: I know you're not a physician, you're not an epidemiologist, but is there any scientific agreement or understanding of what ingesting a person ingesting this plastic does to them?

GEORGE LEONARD: Well, that's true.

We're all the authors on our study today are marine biologist by training.

But we think that the epidemiological community and the medical profession should be concerned about this as well.

And they are, I would say, we are concerned, but we shouldn't be panicking.

We do know that plastics and the various chemicals that are used to produce them.

And the chemicals that they can absorb in a natural environment can be delivered into animals.

And they have found their way into a variety of organ systems, including in humans, you know, we're finding it in our poop, we're finding it in our bloodstream, we're finding it in other organs in our system.

The real question is, are the kinds of contaminants that are well known in plastics now being delivered at a sufficient dose to actually be a risk to human health?

And that's the question that has not yet been answered.

But I think is important for all of us to address.

JOHN YANG: Okay, so we know it's bottled water, it's in sources of protein.

If someone wants to minimize this, or avoid it altogether, what can they do?

GEORGE LEONARD: Well, you know, you mentioned this bottled water study earlier, which was a fascinating studying in its own right, because they found extremely small plastics, these are called nanoparticles, they're 1,000 times smaller than the kinds of particles that we were sampling in our study, and were found to be, you know, 10 to 100 times more common than we thought for microplastics and bottled water.

And this is really sort of the frontier of new techniques to be able to detect these things that are really at the Nano scale.

If you want to avoid them, you know, the question is, what do we do about that, and I think there are some things that individuals can do.

But more importantly, at the societal level, we need to reduce our use of plastics.

And we need to advance policies to deal with those, that's what we do here at Ocean Conservancy.

But if you're if you're an individual consumer, there's, you know, a couple of things you can do, I think you can use filtered water, you can use glass to store and drink your water from rather than plastic.

You can avoid foodstuffs that are wrapped in plastics.

I have seen bananas in the store wrapped in plastic, which of course, is completely unnecessary.

And there are other ways that you can essentially reduce your use of single use plastics and keep your foodstuffs away from them.

JOHN YANG: How easy are you finding that if you try to get away from single use plastics?

How easy is it?

GEORGE LEONARD: Well, it's a challenge.

And that's why, you know, we need broad systemic changes to how we, as a society produce, manage, use and dispose of plastics, but you know, it's easier than you think.

I remember here in California, where I'm located.

We had a big debate a number of years ago about bringing your own, you know, bags to the grocery store so that we wouldn't use single use plastics in the grocery store.

It turned out you know, we passed the bill to do away with that, and within a week or so I found myself pretty easily using these bags they become very common.

So there are ways that we can change our individual behavior that can overcome some of these sort of entrenched behaviors I think many of us have.

JOHN YANG: George Leonard of Ocean Conservancy.

Thank you very much.

GEORGE LEONARD: Thank you.

JOHN YANG: Before we go and update our congressional negotiations to avoid a partial government shutdown on Friday, PBS News Weekend has learned that congressional leaders have agreed on a stopgap spending bill that would extend funding some funding through March 1st and the rest through March 8th.

That's the day after President Biden State of the Union address.

It's far from a guarantee it still has to be passed by the House and Senate before the deadline this coming Friday.

And that is PBS News Weekend for this Saturday.

I'm John Yang, for all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.