Philadelphia’s Democratic Party boss suggested that a local judicial candidate end her campaign in exchange for his support for a future judgeship appointment, according to a memo drafted by the candidate and obtained by The Intercept.

Party leadership is challenging Court of Common Pleas judicial candidate Caroline Turner’s petition to make it onto the ballot. As that challenge is being litigated, an attorney involved in the party’s challenge arranged a meeting between former Rep. Bob Brady, who is chair of the Democratic City Committee, and Turner this week, according to Turner’s memo.

Turner is running on a progressive platform without party backing in a field that includes eight candidates supported by the party. Brady has previously used his power as the city’s Democratic leader to try to sideline an insurgent movement in Philadelphia. In 2019, for example, the party threatened to expel party committee members who backed third-party candidates, and Brady reportedly said that a council member’s endorsement of an insurgent candidate was “stupid.”

Efforts to dissuade candidates from running have been going on for decades, and in recent years have given candidates credibility with voters who have soured on business as usual. Across the country, candidates have looked for ways to demonstrate their independence from party bosses. Critics of Turner suggested she was blowing a conversation out of proportion for political gain.

In her memo, Turner wrote of her meeting with Brady, “He said if I withdrew there were 6 vacancies coming up and that he would work to get me appointed.”

Turner confirmed to The Intercept that she met with Brady this week but declined to discuss their conversation. “I will not withdraw my candidacy, and I will not stop this fight,” Turner said. “My candidacy is being attacked by those in power who benefit from a broken criminal justice system and are determined to maintain the status quo.”

Louis Agre, a lawyer for the city party said that Turner requested the meeting. “She said she wanted to show respect,” he said. Agre, who also represents Philadelphia’s 21st Ward on the city committee, said that Brady said he never asked her, or anyone else, to drop out of the race, nor did he offer support for a judgeship appointment. “He never asked her to get out of the race, he never threatened her,” Agre said.

Democratic state Rep. and former 9th Ward Leader Chris Rabb said he was aware of other cases where the party had asked candidates to drop out of races. “I have spoken to a few candidates who’ve been approached directly and indirectly from folks associated with the Democratic City Committee who have been pressured to drop out,” Rabb told The Intercept.

Turner had been moving into the May 18 election with an advantage: She randomly drew the No. 1 slot on the ballot this cycle. Candidates in local judicial races typically have low name recognition with voters, so people tend to vote for the first names that appear on the ballot. Attorneys Lopez Thompson and Terri Booker got the second and third slots. The eight candidates endorsed by the Democratic City Committee, including three sitting judges, got spots further down the ticket. (Rabb, the state representative, plans to introduce a bill that would randomize candidates’ positions on the ballot.)

Party leadership is challenging the petitions of some of the candidates they did not endorse, including Turner, arguing that some signatures were not valid. Agre said the party’s challenge had nothing to do with Turner’s position on the ballot. “We review petitions, and we thought that this one was problematic,” Agre said.

Thompson withdrew his campaign this week. Asked if he had discussions with Brady or anyone in his circle about dropping out, Thompson declined to comment. “I withdrew my candidacy for other reasons,” he told The Intercept.

After Thompson withdrew his candidacy for the Court of Common Pleas, Booker took the second spot on the ballot, and Wendi Barish is now listed third.

In the May primary election, voters will weigh in on eight open seats at the Court of Common Pleas. Also on the ballot are seats on the Supreme, Superior, Commonwealth, and Municipal courts; district attorney; city controller; judge of election; and inspector of election. There are currently two vacancies on the Court of Common Pleas, though several sitting judges are running for higher office, which means seats could open up later.

The party’s challenges to Turner’s petitions were dismissed earlier this month on procedural grounds, and the objectors appealed to the state Supreme Court to try to get the case reopened. The court could rule on the matter in the coming weeks.

Standard court procedure requires parties in petition challenges to meet to air issues before trial. According to Turner’s memo, a lawyer representing the party in its challenge, Henry Sias, set up a phone call with Turner and the attorney representing her in the petition challenges on Sunday to discuss an offer from Brady.

Sias “discussed an offer that Bob Brady was going to make to me: if I withdraw, he will support me in an appointment to judge — there are 6 appointments coming up this summer,” Turner wrote. Sias did not respond to requests for comment. Agre said Sias does not speak for the Democratic City Committee.

The next day, Turner met with Brady in person, where he outlined his offer. “He asked me if I was familiar with the appointment procedure — I said somewhat — then he said that the Governor appoints and the Senate confirms but that he would back me in that,” Turner wrote.

According to the memo, Brady told Turner that she “might have problems with a mail in ballot,” implying that the candidates he had endorsed were more well-known and would have an easier time getting votes. Voters can request a mail ballot for the election until May 11. Brady also reportedly warned Turner that she would not get the endorsement from Philadelphia’s 2nd Ward. On Thursday, three days after the meeting, the 2nd Ward endorsed her as part of a slate of candidates that includes District Attorney Larry Krasner.

“He said it was my choice and wanted a response. I said I would like to stay on the ballot. He then told me that he would not talk negatively about me but he would come at me,” Turner wrote.

Turner is running on a platform to bring restorative justice to the court system, which handles trial, family, and orphans’ divisions in Philadelphia County.

Progressive organizers in the city have been working to educate voters about judicial elections and to mobilize communities that local Democrats have not invested in. For Brady to try to undo the outreach that Turner’s campaign has done in those communities is unacceptable but not surprising, said organizer Bill Cobb, former deputy director of the ACLU Campaign for Smart Justice and a senior adviser with Turner’s campaign.

“Do you know that this is the first time that people are ever, ever hearing from somebody who’s running for judge?” Cobb said. “I mean, 50, 60, 70-year-old Black and brown people in these neighborhoods and communities, and no one has ever come to them and said, ‘I’m running for judge in the city of Philadelphia.’”

The former director of Ohio’s Department of Health, Dr. Amy Acton, a Democrat who is exploring a possible run for Senate, has become a complicated figure in Ohio politics for her role in overseeing the state’s abortion clinics under Republican Gov. Mike DeWine.

As health director, Acton defended the state’s decision to cut funding for Planned Parenthood in federal court, defended a “heartbeat bill” that even former Republican Gov. John Kasich had opposed, tried to shut down the last abortion clinic in Cincinnati, and requested that the state attorney general send cease-and-desist orders to abortion clinics operating during a ban on “nonessential” surgery at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While anti-abortion advocates applauded some of these moves, they also fiercely opposed Acton in other cases. She forced the last abortion clinic in the Dayton area to temporarily turn patients away, and later let it reopen, drawing fire from anti-abortion groups who later speculated that she stepped down from leading the Health Department in June because of criticism for being “pro-abortion.”

Before being elected governor, DeWine was the state’s attorney general under Kasich, whose administration worked quietly to curtail abortion access in Ohio with the help of the Department of Health. As attorney general, DeWine went to court to defend those efforts, and as governor, has continued the work of his predecessor. When Acton joined the Health Department, she declined to take a position on abortion, saying she would follow state law.

Yet reproductive rights advocates charge that, as part of her role in an administration that was ideologically opposed to abortion, Acton went beyond what was required by state law.

“There are actions that she took as director of the department of health that I would argue go past what she was required to do by Ohio law, and I feel treated abortion clinics differently,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio.

Acton is one of several Democrats considering running for the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who announced in January that he wouldn’t seek reelection next year. Democrats are hoping Portman’s departure could lead to an easy pickup for the party to help expand their slim majority in the Senate.

Acton’s profile rose during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when she appeared regularly at press conferences alongside DeWine and pushed to enforce strict coronavirus safety measures in the face of criticism from state Republicans. Acton received national attention, including coverage from the New York Times and the New Yorker. There is a “Dr. Amy Acton Fan Club” on Facebook, with more than 123,000 members. Acton left the Department of Health in June to become DeWine’s chief health adviser. She resigned from that role in August, and in September joined the Columbus Foundation, a philanthropic organization where she had previously worked before joining the health department. Acton resigned from that role last month as she mulls a run for Senate. Acton declined to comment for this story because she is not a candidate at this time.

An early poll released Monday, commissioned by 314 Action Fund, a group supporting STEM candidates and seeking to recruit Acton, showed her with a higher net favorability than other potential Republican and Democratic candidates for the seat, including Ohio Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, who has said he plans to run. (Ryan opposed abortion early in his career, but said in 2015 that he was pro-choice.) Last week, the group released a poll showing Acton with a stronger favorability than Ryan in a head-to-head match-up. Others who are exploring bids include State House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes; Franklin County Commissioner Kevin Boyce, who has served as a state representative as well as state treasurer; Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor; and Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley.

Acton is expected to find support among wealthy suburban voters and women in particular. “What makes her leadership so unique is that she actually exemplifies the strength of women’s leadership because she shows how brutal honesty, vulnerability, and empathy make you tough, not weak,” Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue, a grassroots advocacy group that focuses on suburban women voters, told the Toledo Blade. Even local Republican leaders have said Acton could pose a threat to the GOP by appealing to suburban women, a demographic the party has been losing ground with since Donald Trump’s election. But Acton’s role in DeWine’s administration, which pushed to restrict abortion in the state, could become a campaign issue with those same voters. More than half of voters in Ohio opposed the state’s heartbeat bill in 2019. Sixty-six percent of Ohio Democrats who supported Joe Biden in 2020 think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Copeland, of NARAL Pro-Choice, said women will want to know definitively what position Acton has on abortion. “As a candidate, she would have to clarify her position on abortion,” Copeland said. “And she would have to speak to why she took the actions that she took, which interrupted and endangered abortion care for Ohioans.”

Acton was named the first woman to lead Ohio’s health department, overseeing the state’s abortion clinics, in February 2019. Shortly afterward, she defended the state’s decision to cut funding for Planned Parenthood on the grounds that the organization performed abortions.

Ohio passed a law cutting state funding for Planned Parenthood in 2016. A federal appeals court upheld the measure in 2019, after it had been struck down by a smaller panel at the same court, as well as by a federal district judge. In hopes of extending its funding, Planned Parenthood had asked the appellate court to delay the law from being implemented while the group explored options to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The state officially cut funding for Planned Parenthood in March 2019. The organization had received just under $600,000 in state funding the previous year, according to the health department. Acton argued in court filings that the amount of money the organization was at risk of losing amounted to only 5 percent of its revenue.

According to court filings from the time, Acton argued that Planned Parenthood’s request was “a very effective delay tactic” and that the organization would “not be injured at all” from losing state money, the Beacon Journal reported. She also asserted that Planned Parenthood had little chance of getting the Supreme Court to review the case, because it would require convincing the court “to recognize, for the first time ever, a constitutional right to perform an abortion,” the odds of which, she argued, are “vanishingly small.” The court “today is not likely to invent new constitutional rights — such as the right to perform abortions — with no grounding in the Constitution’s text,” Acton and the department’s lawyers reasoned.

She went on to call Planned Parenthood’s claims that it would be injured by a cut in funding “dubious,” arguing that the organization already loses money through its programs and blaming them for having “failed to plan ahead.”

“Planned Parenthood and its employees have had three years to prepare for the possibility that certain funding streams might not be available,” Acton argued, contending that any injury to their employees “results not from the failure to stay the mandate, but from Planned Parenthood’s failure to warn its employees (or their failure to heed its warning) about the consequences of an adverse decision.”

Taxpayers would suffer if the court allowed the law to be delayed any further, Acton concluded. “Ohio has already been forced to support Planned Parenthood and similar entities with three years of funding to which they were not entitled,” she claimed. “Allowing that to go on any longer means further thwarting the will of the People.”

Several months later, Acton was in court again defending the state against a lawsuit filed by several surgical abortion clinics, the American Civil Liberties Union, and its affiliate in Ohio against a heartbeat bill DeWine signed into law in April 2019, the year he entered office. The president-elect of the Right to Life Coalition of Ohio said the group was confident Acton would “write solid rules to implement this life saving law.” Kasich had previously vetoed similar bills twice.

The bill banned abortions from the point of being able to detect a fetus’s heartbeat and introduced criminal charges for doctors who performed them after that point. The measure included exceptions for cases where a mother’s life or health is in danger but not in cases of rape or incest. Anti-abortion groups like Ohio Right to Life welcomed the heartbeat bill, with their president saying it had “the potential to be the vehicle that overturns Roe v. Wade.” DeWine echoed that sentiment when he first pushed the bill, saying he expected it to face lawsuits and that such litigation could help raise the issue to the Supreme Court.

In August 2019, Acton denied a request from one of the Dayton area’s only abortion clinics to renew a waiver that would allow it to remain open because it did not have a written agreement with a local hospital to transfer patients in an emergency, forcing the clinic to limit its services and turn patients away for more than two weeks, the Columbus Dispatch reported. A local hospital had reportedly refused to sign a transfer agreement with the clinic, and its previous waiver had expired. That October, Acton granted an operating license to let the clinic resume normal operation; anti-abortion groups claimed that Acton had manipulated paperwork in order to do so. A few months later, Acton sought to revoke a license for the last abortion clinic in Cincinnati for not meeting the requirements for the same written transfer agreement. The decision was promoted on Ohio Right to Life’s website. 

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last March, the Ohio Health Department issued an order canceling nonessential or elective surgeries and procedures. Acton requested that Ohio’s attorney general order abortion clinics in the state to stop performing nonessential procedures, to which abortion-rights advocates replied that nonessential abortions do not exist.

Josh Mandel, the state’s former treasurer and a former representative in the state house, and Jane Timken, former chair of the state Republican Party, are running in the GOP primary. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel and the family of Robert Mercer have contributed to a PAC backing a possible run from venture capitalist and Republican J.D. Vance.

Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.

She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.

On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The incumbents had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party’s coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.

While Whitmer’s opponents say she was planning to fire them anyway, Whitmer denies that claim. “I’ve been putting in the work,” Whitmer told The Intercept for the latest episode of Deconstructed. “What they just didn’t expect is that we got better and better at organizing and out-organizing them at every turn.”

The battle between the insurgent progressive wing of the party and what’s known in Nevada as the Reid machine — a tightly run operation still guided by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — began five years ago, when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders organized support for his 2016 presidential primary run, while Reid was working behind the scenes to help his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Over the next four years, outside organizations like DSA exploded in size and strength. The Sanders campaign focused on organizing tens of thousands of young Latino voters in the state, with the goal of activating people whom the party hadn’t bothered with before. And it worked: In the 2020 cycle, after investing heavily in Nevada, Sanders won a commanding victory in the Nevada caucuses.

When the Sanders campaign ended, the organizers behind it were ready to take their project to the next level. Progressive groups like the Clark County Left Caucus, of which Whitmer was chair, and local DSA chapters had been organizing for Sanders across Nevada since 2016. They used their momentum, and the state-level delegates they picked up during the caucuses, to continue activating progressive pockets in the state with a focus on local office. Progressives led by the Left Caucus won a majority on the state Democratic board this summer, a sign that their momentum was growing even without a candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket to get behind.

“This was certainly kind of immediately made possible by the caucus outcome,” Keenan Korth, a member of the state party’s central committee who is supporting Whitmer, told The Intercept. “But it really started before then, in that the caucus results were in and of themselves the result of a sustained organizing effort, and the slow accumulation of organizing infrastructure here post-2016, in large part through the campaign in 2018 for Amy Vilela.” Vilela ran for Congress in Nevada in 2018 and later became Sanders’s Nevada campaign co-chair.

During the presidential race, the conflict between the Sanders element and the Reid machine had been kept below a boil partly as a result of the personal relationships at play. Sanders’s 2020 brain trust was significantly made up of former aides to Reid who remain on good terms with the former majority leader, including campaign manager Faiz Shakir; deputy Ari Rabin-Havt, who has since returned to Sanders’s Senate office; and national policy director Josh Orton.

But when the Sanders campaign ended, the establishment was ready to maneuver against them.

The Left Caucus and DSA organizers ran a slate of candidates for state party leadership under the name “The NV Dems Progressive Slate.” All but one candidate on the slate was a dues-paying member of a local DSA chapter. The Democratic Party ran candidates on a slate titled “The Progressive Unity Slate,” playing on a theme they’d been pushing the entire cycle: The groups angling for change from the left were trying to divide the party, they said, while they were trying to save it.

Whitmer faced pressure to drop out of the race, and allies of Reid were working their connections to try to keep the party structure intact. A letter circulated accusing Whitmer of blocking the creation of diversity caucuses, though Whitmer told The Intercept it was a disagreement over process. The fight also drew the attention of Cortez Masto, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported, who approached Whitmer’s opponent, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, about running. Segerblom had chaired the party in the 1990s and wasn’t considering running for the seat.

Segerblom, who supported Sanders in both 2016 and 2020 and chaired his state campaign, confirmed that Cortez Masto approached him about running. He sees the current fallout as an unfortunate culmination of a back-and-forth that’s been happening since 2016. “There’s been a lot of disagreement within the party since 2016,” Segerblom told The Intercept. “This is just a situation where the Bernie team won, and the old guard so to speak were not gonna stick around.” Cortez Masto’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite the pushback, Whitmer ultimately won the election, in which the state party’s governing members voted. In the certified election results, she received 244 to Segerblom’s 214; Jacob Allen won first vice chair by 101 votes; Dr. Zaffar Iqbal, on Whitmer’s progressive slate, was reelected second vice chair by 127 votes; Ahmad Adé won secretary by 39 votes; and Howard Beckerman won treasurer by three votes.

After the results, Mounce sent the email making clear that everyone on the small staff had resigned, including the party operations director, communications director, research director, and finance director.

The mass exodus of party staff, despite the rhetoric around unity, wasn’t a shock, Whitmer told The Intercept. “We weren’t really surprised, in that we were prepared for it,” she said. “But what hit us by surprise and was sort of shocking is that for a slate that claimed that they were all about unity, and kept this false narrative of division going on throughout the entire campaign — in fact they kept intensifying that — that’s what was surprising about it, was the willingness to just walk away, instead of working with us.”

Mounce, the Nevada Democrats director who notified Whitmer of the staff resignations, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Korth told The Intercept Mounce is now providing access to logins and other information to Whitmer and her team. But the ruthlessness on display in her email to Whitmer is part of what has made the Reid machine so effective against Republicans in the state, but it’s unclear how it’ll work against the party’s progressive wing. The Democratic National Committee hired Mounce as their new political director last month.

Whitmer’s predecessor, former Clark County Democratic Chair Donna West, said Whitmer did not try to bridge gaps within the party. She “does not listen to others’ opinions and really take those on board,” West said. “I found that working with her could be really difficult, that she doesn’t really collaborate well, and doesn’t work to build consensus.” West resigned last summer.

A former Nevada Democratic Party staffer, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told The Intercept they quit out of a belief that Whitmer hadn’t built relationships across the party as Clark County chair and was at times unfairly critical of the state Democratic Party. “I knew I couldn’t work with her and watch her destroy the years of hard work so many operatives put into making our state party the best state party in the country.”

In a twist of history, Reid himself actually produced the conditions that led to his own lieutenants getting tossed from office. It was Reid who successfully maneuvered in 2008 to make Nevada the first presidential caucus in the West. His reasoning was simple: He wanted presidential candidates to have to take a position on whether nuclear waste should be stored at Yucca Mountain. More precisely, he wanted that position to be no. In exchange for Barack Obama’s promise to scuttle the Yucca Mountain project, Reid endorsed him, after encouraging him to run. It worked: Obama appointed a former aide of Reid’s to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with instructions to halt the project.

Reid also wanted the caucus to help build the party’s infrastructure, and that worked too. After years of Republican control, Democrats now hold the governor’s mansion, the state Senate, and the state House, as well as both U.S. Senate seats. Without those two senators, there’d be no Democratic majority in the Senate today. But the caucuses also created an opening for Sanders, and his supporters have run through it to swamp the party. Instead of finding a way to work with the newcomers, the Reid machine is setting up an independent shop. Reid declined to comment.

During his final days in office, Donald Trump issued a flurry of last-minute regulations. Included among them was a little-known rule that, if allowed to go into effect, will codify into law a long-held aspiration of the religious right, which buoyed his rise to power.

The rule, finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services on January 12 and set to go into effect February 11, allows taxpayer-funded social service agencies to discriminate based on a person’s LGBTQ status or religious belief. The final rule comes after a yearslong push by conservative Christian groups to reinterpret the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to prioritize their right to refuse services to people based on sexual orientation or religious belief.

Faith-based foster care agencies have been at the center of that fight. The Trump administration granted an unusual waiver to South Carolina in 2019, allowing a Protestant foster care agency to break federal and state law by refusing to work with parents who weren’t Protestant. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton requested a similar waiver from HHS in late 2018. During Trump’s presidency, seven states passed measures allowing discrimination in foster care and adoption systems, either by private agencies or agencies that receive federal or state funding via grants and contracts, joining four states that had previously passed such measures. Another four states introduced such bills last year.

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden sent a letter on January 26 to HHS Acting Secretary Norris Cochran requesting that the agency prevent the rule, which would apply to any agency that receives HHS funding, from going into effect. The new rule would invalidate a 2016 rule from former President Barack Obama protecting against discrimination in HHS grant-making, which the Trump administration announced in November 2019 it would no longer enforce. Wyden and advocacy groups focused on LGBTQ equality want to see a return to the 2016 rule.

The Oregon Democrat also requested that HHS open a new 30-day comment period for stakeholders to provide feedback on the impact of potentially limiting the number of homes for children who need placement during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. (A 30-day comment period is a standard procedure for regulatory rule changes, and the rule finalized by Trump had previously been subject to public comment.)

“For the past four years, the Trump administration pushed policies like this cruel final rule that were not in the best interest of vulnerable children and families,” Wyden told The Intercept. “We have a real opportunity to right these wrongs and restore humanity to HHS by once again ensuring that all qualified and willing foster and adoptive parents can share their hearts and homes with the children who need them. This commitment must be a priority always, but especially in the middle of a life-threatening pandemic when all children and parents are being challenged beyond belief.”

Conservative religious groups like the Southern Baptist Convention and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops applauded the rule, saying it was the end of attempts to prevent agencies from serving the public based on their religious beliefs. The religious right has sought for years to use RFRA, a federal civil rights law, to exempt themselves from following existing federal nondiscrimination law. They found an ally in Trump. The former president had little personal interest in religious liberty, but in exchange for the support of the religious right, and conservative Christians in particular, he helped make their political wishlist a reality. That included naming conservative justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court; expanding the religious right’s right to discriminate; and creating loopholes around federal laws they say violate their right to freedom of religion. In addition to the HHS rule, the Trump administration issued several rules in December to loosen Obama-era restrictions on agencies, like the departments of Education and Veteran Affairs, meant to prevent discrimination by faith-based groups.

On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, the White House requested that heads of executive departments and agencies consider postponing for 60 days any rules issued under Trump that have not yet taken effect, such as the HHS rule. It was on those grounds that Wyden requested the implementation of the rule be put on hold. The rule is also the subject of litigation filed by Family Equality, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on equality for LBGTQ families, which has asked a federal court in Washington, D.C., to throw the rule out and halt its February 11 implementation while the litigation moves forward. Asked about the rule change, HHS did not provide comment.

If the Biden administration blocks the HHS rule, federally funded foster care agencies would have to comply with the 2016 nondiscrimination rules or forfeit funding. Making sure states that currently allow discrimination comply with federal law will take a larger cultural shift, said Julie Kruse, director of federal policy at Family Equality. “The barrier is that discrimination in foster care is commonplace,” Kruse said. Laws allowing discrimination in the child welfare system were part of a wave of anti-LGBTQ proposals that picked up steam following the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing marriage equality. “This was the cutting edge of the anti-LGBTQ movement. And to be honest, it took us a little while to catch up,” Kruse said. “It’s a cultural shift, and it’s going to take hard work. … It’s just a question of ensuring compliance with best practices, and frankly, the law — and, frankly, the Constitution.”

Family Equality has been tracking legislation related to discrimination in foster care and adoption systems. Between 2003 and 2016, North Dakota, Virginia, Michigan, and Mississippi passed bills that allow discrimination in foster care and adoption systems. From 2017 to 2020, South Dakota, Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, Kansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee also passed such measures. Missouri, Colorado, Georgia, and Iowa introduced such bills last year. Massachusetts introduced a similar bill in 2019 that stalled after being referred for further study.

North Dakota became one of the first states to pass a law sanctioning discrimination in the foster care system in 2003 following a widely publicized adoption by a gay couple. The next year, Oklahoma passed a law invalidating same-sex adoptions recognized in other states, meaning if a family crossed state lines, their child could be considered a legal orphan. A federal court struck down the law in 2006. Over a decade later, Oklahoma passed a law prohibiting the state from denying grant or contract funding to private child-placing agencies with discriminatory practices.

Michigan’s 2015 law barred the state from taking any “adverse action” against agencies that deny services conflicting with their religious beliefs, including canceling, denying applications for, or refusing to renew funding. In 2017, two same-sex couples sued the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services for contracting with discriminatory foster care and adoption agencies that would not place children with same-sex couples. They won a settlement in 2019 establishing that the law would not apply to state-funded foster care and adoption services; private agencies that choose to discriminate are still protected against “adverse action” by the state.

Alabama’s law allows privately funded agencies to deny services based on religious belief or sexual orientation but does not extend to publicly funded groups. (Family Equality does not take a position on the practices of privately funded agencies.) Alabama state Rep. Rich Wingo told The Intercept he introduced the bill in 2018 after faith-based agencies in other states started to shut down rather than comply with state regulations barring certain faith-based agencies from denying services to same-sex couples or single parents. “To get out in front of that,” Wingo said, he “proposed a bill that, as long as these are self-funded, privately funded — they receive no federal or state dollars or grants of any kind — that they would not be forced to place children in homes that go against their religious liberties.” The bill prohibits the state from revoking, suspending, and refusing to issue or renew a license to private child-placing agencies that discriminate based on religious belief.

Wingo said he wasn’t familiar with the Trump administration’s rule change, but if it allowed people to exercise their First Amendment religious liberties and retain federal and state funding, he would support it. “I believe your religious liberties trump whether you receive federal or state dollars,” Wingo said.

Last January, Tennessee became the latest state to pass a law allowing taxpayer-funded child-placing agencies to refuse to work with LGBTQ parents or same-sex couples. Tennessee state Rep. Tim Rudd, the bill’s sponsor, framed it as preventing discrimination against faith-based agencies and disputed that those agencies were being given a pass to discriminate. “The bill does not allow agencies to discrimination against anyone and does not prevent homosexual couples from adopting,” Rudd wrote in an email. “The legislation only prevents frivolous lawsuits against religious adoption agencies who place children based on their religious beliefs.”

“The proposed rule and or law being discussed by Democrats in Washington and the Biden administration is unconstitutional and discriminates against people of faith,” Rudd said. “I will fight any attempt to violate the constitutional guaranteed rights of the people of Tennessee.”

It will be important for the Biden administration to enforce federal policy at the state and local level, and to provide resources to do so, said Kruse of Family Equality.

“I think what’s gonna be helpful with this administration would be to work with the Children’s Bureau of Foster Care and Adoption, and ensure that they’re enforcing the rule,” Kruse said. “And I think once they’ve enforced the rule and maybe canceled a grant with a noncompliant agency — that’s how, kind of, nondiscrimination enforcement works, right? You act to bar discrimination by one agency, and the other agencies get the signal that they’d just better clean up their act.”

Biden could help set a national standard for discrimination in the child welfare system by passing laws like the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, Kruse added. That law, last introduced in 2019 by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., would establish a center for LGBTQ youth at HHS and provide funding for the agency to train everyone in the child welfare system in cultural competency, as well as how to be affirming of complex youth identities. HHS could also reverse a data collection rule implemented last spring that undid a requirement that child welfare reporting include information on sexual orientation, Kruse added.

“States cannot improve their care for these populations that they’re failing abysmally until they have the data to drive that,” Kruse said. “It really needs to be a systemic approach. But nondiscrimination is the beginning. Nondiscrimination is the foundation.”

The day after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Maryland state legislators said that they planned to introduce a bill that would create a new domestic terrorism law to address “issues that arose in our nation’s capital yesterday” as well as a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in October.

The measure was first introduced by state Delegate Samuel “Sandy” Rosenberg last year, along with five other Democratic sponsors, but it stalled in the Judiciary Committee. Now, Rosenberg and state Sen. Shelly Hettleman plan to introduce the domestic terror bill in the coming weeks. Maryland opened its new legislative session on Wednesday.

Hettleman tweeted a draft version of the bill last week, which is subject to change and input from advocates, she and Rosenberg said. The bill text Hettleman shared adds a new section on domestic terrorism to the state’s criminal code and creates felony penalties for the crime. Under the law, anyone who threatens, attempts, or commits a crime with the aim of causing serious injury or death and who influences government or policy by intimidation, coercion, or “mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or another violent felony” would be charged with a felony for domestic terrorism. Defendants would be subject to up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.

Following pushback from advocates who worry that such legislation will be weaponized against already over-policed communities, the lawmakers say they are revising the bill to more narrowly focus it on violent crime, and to make sure it’s not used to target activity protected under the First Amendment. 

The proposal comes as a number of states are fast-tracking anti-protest measures that were first floated in response to protests against police brutality this past summer. Many of those measures are being led by Republican lawmakers. But in Maryland, where Democrats control both chambers of the General Assembly but the governor is a Republican, Democrats are leading the push to pass domestic terrorism legislation.

It also comes as numerous elected officials have called to put new laws on the books to crack down on protests and incidents of domestic terror after hundreds of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the Capitol and planted bombs around Washington, D.C. But civil liberties groups and activists have been quick to push back, reminding lawmakers of the irreparable damage they caused following the 9/11 attacks by swiftly expanding the country’s prosecutorial and surveillance powers.

Terrorism is a nebulous legal concept, and related statutes have historically been used to target Black and brown communities and environmental activists — rarely ever to prosecute far right extremists, a 2019 investigation by The Intercept found. Civil liberties advocates say that lawmakers looking to hold right-wing extremists accountable need only to enforce laws already on the books, not create new ones. “Anyone familiar with the scope of surveillance and targeting of Black political dissent or Muslim communities knows that law enforcement has all the tools it needs to aggressively disrupt and hold accountable those who planned and participated in the storming of the Capitol,” Diala Shamas, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Intercept reporter Alex Emmons.

In Maryland, local activists are organizing to push back against the measure, said Dave Heilker, a local organizer who ran in the Democratic primary for Baltimore City Council last year. Last week, Heilker tweeted, “Not only is this bill reactionary and poorly-conceived, it explicitly corporatizes advocacy and threatens grassroots activists with UP TO A DECADE in prison for using ‘intimidation’ or ‘coercion’ to ‘influence the policy of a government.’”

He elaborated in an interview with The Intercept, saying that the language of “intimidation” taps into the racial dynamics of power and fear driving anti-protest bills in other states. “Intimidation is not well-defined legally, because it’s a feeling,” he said. “We don’t want a Patriot Act part two. The Patriot Act is not any better just because it’s written by Democrats.”

On January 7, Hettleman announced on Twitter that she would introduce the measure in the state Senate “to address issues that arose in our nation’s capital yesterday & MI a few months ago.” The next day, in response to criticism from local organizers, Hettleman backtracked, saying that the bill was not in direct response to the attack on the Capitol, noting that it was first introduced the year before. Hettleman was a delegate last year, and did not co-sponsor the domestic terror bill then.

In an interview, Hettleman said that the bill was being introduced to address a rise in hate crimes and would be amended heavily. She also said that she was in conversation with groups that had reached out with concerns. “It was really rooted, as I understand it, in the increase in hate crimes. And specifically the increase in hate crimes in the Jewish community,” she said. “And why was it that there did not seem to be enough focus on white supremacists groups and groups and/or individuals that are engaged in hate crimes.”

Hettleman said she thought that the bill needed to be narrowed to focus on violent crime. “I appreciate that people gave us feedback and showed me, who has been less immersed — I wasn’t involved in the bill last year — but certainly showed me where there are fault lines in the bill that we need to go back to the drawing board, and we need to take another look and try and get at what we’re trying to get at.”

Rosenberg told The Intercept that he introduced the bill last year in response to “the Trump administration’s negligence regarding domestic terrorism and its exclusive focus on foreign terrorism and, most significantly, Muslim terrorism.” As he prepares to reintroduce it, the aim of the bill is to cover incidents like the plot to kidnap Whitmer and the mob attack on the Capitol, Rosenberg explained.

“We want to focus on the problem, which is the kind of acts that took place in Michigan, where there was a threat to the life of the governor. And the felonious acts that took place in the riot and the insurrection in Washington in Capitol Hill last week. That is our focus, acts of that nature,” Rosenberg said. “We want to draft a bill that achieves that purpose and addresses the concerns — the valid concerns — that the bill could be used against what is protected First Amendment activity. And not felonious offenses.”

Last year’s bill included committing a crime with the intent to cause serious physical injury or death to another person and intimidating or coercing a civilian population as part of punishable crimes. The draft text Hettleman shared last week did not include the provision on intimidation or coercion of civilians, but broadened the first part of the statute to include committing, attempting to commit, or threatening to commit a crime motivated in whole or in part by the intent to harm or kill a person.

Malcolm Heflin, an organizer with Progressive Maryland, a statewide nonprofit advocacy group focused on racial, economic, social, and environmental justice, also compared the domestic terror bill to the Patriot Act. Heflin ran in the Democratic primary for the state House of Delegates in 2018. This type of legislation, he said, “creates these huge loopholes that ultimately government and law enforcement just drives through. It’s just unfortunate that that next step also came to Maryland.”

Organizers are planning to continue speaking with legislators and building opposition to the measure. But they worry that with legislators busy negotiating a major education reform package that fell apart at the end of the last session and moving on legislation to address the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, it could pass without the public realizing.

“My fear is that the heat’s gonna die down a little bit on this bill, and people will be agitating against other probably more consequential bills,” Heilker said, “and then this is gonna pass kind of under cover of night without anyone really noticing.”

Rep. Cori Bush’s first resolution in Congress calls to investigate and potentially expel Republican members who upheld Donald Trump’s lies disputing the results of the presidential election, inciting a mob attack on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday that left five people dead.

The freshman member from St. Louis — who was a leader of the 2014 protests for Black lives in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police killing of Michael Brown — announced the resolution on Twitter on Wednesday evening, hours after hundreds of Trump supporters breached security at the Capitol and before the building had been secured.

The resolution, the full text of which was shared exclusively with The Intercept, calls on the House Ethics Committee to investigate and issue a report on whether Republican members violated their oath of office by seeking to overturn the results of the election, and whether they should face sanction — including removal from the House. The measure names Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., as well as Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., as leading the more than 140 members who “have taken unprecedented steps to defy the will of the American people” by voting against Wednesday’s Electoral College certification. Bush plans to introduce the resolution Monday if Congress decides to reconvene instead of continuing their planned recess.

In an interview on Friday, Bush told The Intercept that she had been contemplating the resolution even before her official swearing-in last Sunday. “We need to hold our Republican colleagues accountable for what we feel is an attack on our democracy,” she said.

It’s not unheard of for members of either party to object to certifying the results of a presidential election. Some Democrats have objected to certifying the results of several presidential elections over the last two decades, including in 2017. But the Republican Party’s near-total adherence to the lies and incitements to riot precipitating Wednesday’s events was unprecedented in every way, from the monthslong building of a conspiracy to weeks of reporting that armed Trump supporters would physically try to stop the certification. More than 140 Republican lawmakers said they would object to certifying the results of the presidential election, with several withdrawing their objections after Wednesday’s attacks. Ultimately, eight senators and 139 members of the House supported one or more objections.

Bush’s resolution places Wednesday’s attacks in the context of historic attempts by the GOP to disenfranchise Black and brown voters — particularly in states where they were instrumental in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. It also lays out how the ongoing coronavirus pandemic hit those communities hardest, complicating mail-in voting while Republicans spread misinformation and tried to discount ballots. The measure describes GOP efforts to reject the vote as “a continuation of Jim Crow era measures to suppress Black, Brown, and Indigenous voters.”

“Whereas efforts by Members of Congress, regardless of party, that seek to undermine our democracy, disenfranchise Black, Brown, and Indigenous voters, erode faith in the Federal Government, and attack the popular will of the American public without merit must be condemned, and those Members should be held accountable for their actions,” the resolution reads.

Bush’s fellow progressive Squad members — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, and Mondaire Jones — are among the measure’s 32 current backers. The resolution’s other co-sponsors include Reps. Barbara Lee, Marie Newman, Mark Pocan, Bill Pascrell, and Bobby Rush. Justice Democrats, the group that supported several Squad members in their runs for Congress, backed the measure, as did Brand New Congress, Ady Barkan’s Be A Hero, Mijente, and the Center for Popular Democracy.

Bush’s resolution comes amid calls for Trump’s removal from office, either through the 25th Amendment — an unlikely scenario that would require leadership from Vice President Mike Pence — or impeachment by the House of Representatives. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have called on Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment, and on Friday, Pelosi said if Trump “does not leave office imminently and willingly, the Congress will proceed with our action.”

Shortly after Bush announced the resolution Wednesday, some on the left raised concerns that it could be turned around to expel Democratic members in the future. On Twitter, HuffPost reporter Daniel Marans quoted an anonymous senior figure at a progressive organization as saying, “It’s incredibly dangerous for the left to start advocating for legislators to be expelled based on how they cast their votes on a matter that is duly before them.”

Bush responded to those concerns and spoke about how the resolution came to be in a conversation with The Intercept. The transcript below has been slightly edited for clarity.

What does it mean for you, being who you are and coming from where you come from, to have this happen in your first week in office? 

It’s what I’ve been, I feel, being prepared for all of this time. I just didn’t know it. But from the perspective of the protesters, to be here, and I understand that when I’m at home that I have security challenges because of who I am — but I was told that when I was here on Capitol grounds, I was safe. I was told that I didn’t need extra security. And that’s not what happened the other day. And then also, just looking at it from the side of the protester, I saw things happening that I know that I myself could not have gotten away with and have been brutalized for less. So it was very difficult. Then now I have to work here, and so does my staff. And I want all of us to feel safe.

Where were you when the Capitol was breached on Wednesday? 

I was on my way back to my office, or I had just stepped in my office, one of the two. Probably on the way to the office by the time the footage came out. I was in the Capitol at first; I was in the House gallery actually listening to debate. And I just decided that it was time to get up. You know, I just felt like, “Get up, and go check and see what’s happening outside.” And so I did. Went to the second floor to see what was happening outside, and I was seeing Trump flags coming. At first I couldn’t see the full flag, and then I started to see the full flag, so that meant that people were approaching. So my chief and I, we immediately got on an elevator and left and made it back safely to our office.

What was going through your head when all of this was happening?

I still was just thinking that, you know, it’s protest. That they’re going to just be out here for a long time, in the cold, and they want to make their voices heard, they want to be on camera, they want to not take what they feel is an injustice toward them lying down. So OK, I get it. But when I started to see them coming through the doors — I made it back to my office and I looked up at the television and we started to see people coming through those doors. Then my thoughts were, OK, if they made it through those doors, they can make it through ours.

Can you tell me when and how the idea for your resolution came about? Is it something you were thinking about before entering Congress?

Personally, I started thinking about it before we were sworn in. We were thinking about just making sure that something — that there was some type of consequence. And so we kind of played around with what we thought that that should be for a few days. And then once we were sworn in, we pretty much had the idea, like this is what we need. We need to hold our Republican colleagues accountable for what we feel is an attack on our democracy.

What has the response been from other members of Congress?  

We have had great response, from not only freshmen Congress members but also senior Congress members. We have people who are part of the Progressive Caucus, people who are a part of the Hispanic Caucus. And people signed on fairly quickly. To be a freshman and to be on my third day that day, and to see other Congress members who felt the same way and were willing to publicly say that, that blew me away. And I felt like, OK, we are on the right track. Like this — we are on the right track. And not only me, but so many others that are working on whether it’s articles of impeachment or just other resolutions, it’s needed right now. And we can’t wait. We have to do it right now, in this moment.

You include the context of Covid-19, voter disenfranchisement, and the impact this has on Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. This is not language we are used to seeing in congressional bills. Why was that important for you to include here?

Because I’m not like other Congress people. I am someone who is straight from the movement, the movement to save Black lives. I’m from the Ferguson uprising. And so I’m not the typical Congress member. But I feel like that is why I’m here. Because we have legislation that talks around us. We have legislation that affects people who are outside — they’re just not as connected to people like me. We don’t reach far enough to be able to help people. And so we wanted to make sure that this legislation is reflective of who we are, my experiences. When I think about what our core values are in this office, our work is to do the absolute most for every person in our district, starting with those who have the very least. This is how you do it.

After you announced the resolution, some raised concerns about free speech, including that the resolution could be turned around on Democrats in the future as a way to penalize them for making unpopular votes. What do you say to that criticism? 

I say that right now we need to move, and we need to move quick. I say that the fact that we have support from other Congress members that are more seasoned than I am, that understand the ramifications of this, I feel like that is why we need to move forward. And I do, I understand that we want to make sure that we don’t put ourselves in a position to where this can then be turned on us later. But if we don’t do something right now — because before Donald Trump was even inaugurated in 2016, I wanted him out. You know? So before he even took the seat I was ready for him to go. Had I been in congress then, I would’ve been calling for his impeachment immediately. So I wouldn’t have been one of the ones that had to go back and forth, and sit on the sidelines, and we’re gonna wait, and all the waiting happened, and then it finally happened. And so I believe the same thing here. Donald Trump has only a few days left in his seat. And when we talk about those Republican members of Congress, their work is happening right now. So we have to do that right now. Why can’t we make sure — because we also can’t set the precedent that if you do this, we’re gonna worry about what happens in four years, or eight years. Your work was right now. The work that you did to try to steal an election, that election was now. The people who were hurt a couple of days ago, those who lost their lives, they lost their lives in the now. So you deserve the consequences now. And so that is why we are calling for this investigation into the Republican efforts to overturn this election. People died. And put the lives of all the lawmakers that were here, our staff, they put us in danger. And they put us in danger to save face. And so when I think about protest, as someone who’s been in hundreds of protests over the last few years, we were protesting to save lives. They did this the other day protesting to save face, and those Republicans helped to embolden — those Republican Congress members helped to empower them to be able to do it. So much so that one Congress member even talked about how their constituents were outside. Now true enough, any of us could have had constituents outside. I get that. But to stand on the House floor and to say that, and to say, ‘Those are the people that I represent. They need to have their voices heard.’ Are voices being heard in us storming the U.S. Capitol, breaking windows, taking over offices, putting lives in danger, and being what caused four people to actually lose their — no five now — to lose their lives? That blood is on all of their hands. And that’s why we’re also asking for leadership, we’re calling on leadership and my fellow colleagues to join us in calling for the initiation for this formal process to remove members. We want them removed.

I want to ask you about what you just said about the constituents. Because these members say they have a duty to do something about their constituents’ mistrust in the electoral process. What is your response to that defense? 

[Laughs] There is probably no other group with their feet on the ground in the United States that has more of a mistrust to this process than the Black community. Because of all that we’ve gone through through the years since we were stolen and brought to this country. At least those of us, our ancestors that were. So to then feel like you have been disenfranchised because your favorite TV character, President Donald Trump did not win  — even though he lost the popular vote by more than 7 million votes, even though he has tried over and over again to force this through even in the courts, and he has not been successful, and even though the 14th Amendment stands on our side, they continue to feel like this is what they should be doing. And I push back, because you didn’t stand with the Black community. In ‘65? Where was all of this in ‘65, in ‘64, in ‘63, in ‘62? Where was this? Where was this when, ever since the Voting Rights Act — especially since 2013, the way that the Republicans in all of these various states have been working to gut the Voting Rights Act of ‘65 — where this uprising then? The issue is, when it comes to Black and Brown and Indigenous peoples, when it comes to our vote, it’s OK to invalidate our votes. Because it is always OK to them to silence us. Now when it’s turned around, and they feel like they’re the ones being targeted, or they feel like it’s some type of injustice against them, now the same things that they criticized us for — protests, being off work, covering our faces at a protest, trying to come into a building — all of those things, now it’s OK for them to do. And, to take it a step further, and fight police officers. The same police officers that they said that we should be obeying, and our issue is we don’t know how to listen or obey. The same police officers that I cannot take my — I cannot take my hand, and pick up a finger, and touch a police officer with that one finger. But yet and still, they can fight the police on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.

Rep. Ilhan Omar has drafted articles of impeachment, so have Reps. Lieu, Raskin and Cicilline, but with Congress being adjourned, they’ve been unable to introduce them. There’s been some debate within the caucus over reconvening to take action over Wednesday’s events — and your resolution would be a part of that. What have you and your colleagues discussed on the issue of impeachment? What do you expect to hear from Speaker Pelosi on this today?

I want to move forward with it. I totally support what my colleagues are working on right now. If we have to stay to get this done, I am all for it. What I’ve been hearing is, I have colleagues who are saying like, ‘We need to do this right now.’ They’re like, ‘We need to do this today. We need to get this done. Like let’s get to work.’ And that’s been probably what I’ve heard the most. Is just that people not only want it, but they want it now. I’m expecting to hear from the Speaker that that is where we’re going. I know that because the 25th Amendment may not be able to be possible, so this I believe is our road. We have to do something. We cannot allow Donald Trump to leave office after this egregious act happened, and for that to not go down in the history books that we, as lawmakers, that we didn’t stand against this. Because our people need that — not only us, our people need that. And history needs to show that there was a consequence to his actions. Not only just the blood on his hands.

A last-minute scramble to include surprise hospital billing reform in the new coronavirus relief bill has fallen short, according to multiple sources. Surprise billing is a tactic used by hospitals and other medical providers, many of them owned by private equity giants such as Blackstone, to manipulate bills so that patients and insurance companies wind up paying eye-popping sums for treatment.

Wendell Primus, senior policy adviser to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the most powerful staffer on the Hill, had plans to send a proposal on surprise medical billing to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to four sources with knowledge of the negotiations. By Monday night, however, the effort had been rebuffed.

“There’s still work that needs to be done with the committees,” a senior Democratic aide said.

Slowing and weakening surprise billing reform has been a driving motivation of House Ways and Means Chair Richie Neal, D-Mass., during this past congressional term. The issue fell under the jurisdiction of the Energy and Commerce Committee, whose chair, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, hammered out a tough reform bill on the bipartisan issue with his Republican counterparts. Neal, however, invented jurisdiction for the Ways and Means Committee — the panel has jurisdiction over taxation, and he linked the issue to government revenue in a roundabout way — and put forward his own proposal that was much more favorable to the private equity industry.

McConnell was not interested in including the provision, according to three Senate aides. Neal was also an obstacle to getting reform into the Covid-19 bill, said one member of Congress briefed on the talks. “The one stumbling block has been of course, Richie trying to scuttle it,” the member said.

Neal has drawn criticism for his opposition to ending surprise medical billing and his ties to Blackstone, his top funder this cycle. The progressive group Fighting Corporate Monopolies ran ads attacking Neal, during his primary against Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, over “protecting Blackstone’s profits” by helping last year to kill a Senate compromise deal that would have ended surprise billing, The Intercept previously reported. Neal pulled in major donations from Blackstone executives at the same time he went to work against surprise billing — an unusually close link between campaign contributions and congressional action. Many private equity executives are known to own vacation homes in the Berkshires, which Neal represents.

Surprise billing happens when a patient is in a hospital or medical facility that is within their insurance network but is treated, perhaps only during a single round, by a doctor who is out of network. Patients, of course, have no way of knowing or checking whether the doctor making rounds is in their network or not, so private equity firms have purchased providers and arranged service to maximize the number of times an out-of-network doctor can treat a patient. Those bills are then exponentially higher, landing at the feet of both patients — in the form of copays and deductibles — and insurance companies, who pay the remainder.

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the issue, with people who went to the emergency room for Covid-19 symptoms receiving surprise bills even when insurers have promised to cover out-of-network care related to the novel virus.

Neal tried to muscle his own version of the bill through, even though Energy and Commerce Committee had a proposal that would have relied on median-in network insurance rates to institute federal benchmarks for payment disputes. Under the proposal, bills over $750 would go to independent arbitration.

The Neal proposal would allow providers and insurance companies to settle disputes through an open negotiation process. If that fails, they could move to an independent mediation process, with a suggestion to consider the mean network rate — regardless of the size of the bill. That cumbersome process would do little to reform the system, leaving provider profits in place and potentially leading to higher premiums. Neal told reporters he wanted to punt the issue to next year, Politico reported Tuesday.

“Providers really want arbitration, because they want the ability to be able to get more money,” said one congressional aide close to the process. “Especially through private equity, because they know they can win this process. Because it almost always goes toward the provider.” 

A Ways and Means Committee spokesperson defended Neal’s bill in a statement. “The Chairman wants to find a balanced path forward on this issue that prioritizes patients but also treats fairly community doctors and hospitals that have been completely overwhelmed by the COVID crisis. He has repeatedly asked for the other committees to make the updated legislative text of their proposal public, but they have not agreed to that transparency.”

Unions representing transportation workers who helped elect Joe Biden are outraged about reports that the president-elect is considering former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to lead the Department of Transportation, citing his record of clashing with workers while in city government.

“Rahm Emanuel would be a nightmare. And a betrayal,” said John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO, which represents 150,000 workers in more than 100 local unions. The union endorsed Biden in May and was one of several major transport unions that backed his campaign. “The trade union movement in transportation worked extremely hard to get Joe Biden elected,” he said, particularly in Pennsylvania, where the union represents Philadelphia’s SEPTA transit, rail, and bus workers.

TWU recruited transit and rail volunteers in Pennsylvania who knocked doors, did phone and text banking, held caravans and virtual rallies with co-workers, and distributed fliers at work sites. “We didn’t work our asses off to have Rahm Emanuel as the secretary of transportation,” Samuelsen said. “He’s anti-trade union, he’s anti-worker.”

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, said Emanuel’s consideration was a “complete non-starter,” and pointed to President Sara Nelson’s tweets on the news over the weekend. “We do not need a union buster setting the rules for workers in aviation. That just doesn’t reflect @JoeBiden’s deep commitment to workers & our unions,” Nelson tweeted Sunday. The union endorsed Biden in October.

Other major transportation unions that endorsed Biden include the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; the Association of Professional Flight Attendants; the Amalgamated Transit Union; and SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers.

The Teamsters are not commenting publicly on any potential nominees but are sharing thoughts on picks privately with the transition team, said Bret Caldwell, director of communications for the union. The other unions did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Biden outperformed Hillary Clinton among union households but underperformed past Democratic nominees. He won a majority of support from union households in Michigan and Wisconsin, but Donald Trump expanded his support from union households in Pennsylvania and Ohio, winning majorities of union homes in those states. The president-elect’s transition team includes more than 20 union leaders.

As mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, Emanuel faced off with unions representing teachers and city employees. Emanuel pursued legislation making it harder for teachers to strike, laid off hundreds of teachers and school staff, closed some 50 schools, and threatened to lay off hundreds more city employees to cut costs in favor of privatizing city services. Chicago teachers went on their first strike in a quarter of a decade during Emanuel’s first term, setting off a wave of teacher strikes in a handful of states. City workers fought Emanuel’s efforts to require them to pay more to receive their pension benefits. Despite this record, Emanuel had some labor support during his 2015 mayoral reelection campaign, with unions split between him and his opponent, now Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García.

Emanuel’s name has been floating as a potential pick for Biden’s cabinet for several weeks, and he was lobbying for the transportation secretary post, The Intercept reported last month. News that Emanuel was under consideration sparked backlash from progressives, largely in response to Emanuel’s handling of the 2014 Chicago police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. Emanuel was instrumental in helping cover up the killing and went to court to prevent the release of the dashcam video ahead of his 2015 election. He maintains that he did not see the video until it was released to the public and has defended his handling of the case.

After pushback from the left, Emanuel may also now be under consideration for U.S. trade representative, Crain’s Chicago Business reported last week. But this weekend, Axios reported again that Emanuel was being considered for DOT. Biden’s transition team declined to comment on who may or may not be under consideration.

“I have no doubt in my mind that he would do what any good neoliberal would do, and side with the bosses,” Samuelsen said. “No matter where he lands, whether it’s in transportation or elsewhere, it’s gonna be viewed by the workers that supported Joe Biden as a total betrayal. And it’ll be yet another in a long line of Democratic Party betrayals,” he added. “The truth of the matter is that Rahm Emanuel is the type of Democrat that got Trump elected to begin with.”