On Friday morning, a handful of Democrats who withheld support from the Build Back Better Act earlier this month stuck to their pledge to pass it no later than the week of November 15, sending the bill to the Senate for a final round of negotiations with West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. The legislation passed the House 220-213, with one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voting against the bill from the left, citing a tax giveaway to the rich.

I support many of the ideas in the Build Back Better Act: pre-K, lower-priced Rx drugs for seniors, expanded child tax credits, addressing climate change, and more.

But voting for these should not be contingent on voting for tax giveaways to millionaires.

4/

— Congressman Jared Golden (@RepGolden) November 19, 2021

The bill contains funding for universal pre-K programs, subsidized child care for lower- and middle-class families, an extended child tax credit, the largest federal investment in housing to date, and hundreds of billions of dollars for initiatives to fight climate change. The package also contains a number of narrower proposals meant to shore up long-standing parts of the social safety net, like coverage for hearing needs in Medicare and a program to cover the Medicaid gap, partly paid for by allowing Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower prices.

On Wednesday, Manchin told reporters that he was comfortable with Senate leadership’s timeline of a vote by the end of the year, walking back his comments a day prior urging a longer pause to gauge the intensity and durability of inflation.

Though Manchin has not publicly signed on, his green light was another sign that President Joe Biden’s climate and social spending bill has significant momentum even in the face of his cratering approval numbers.

Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., said that he’ll be keeping an eye on how Manchin approaches the outstanding issues and additions that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made to the bill last minute. “I’m not anticipating there’s a lot of room to add new things,” he said. “I think it’s just the opposite. I don’t want to lose things.”

Certain titles included in the House bill, such as a federal paid family leave system, immigration reforms, and a controversial provision to bring back the deduction of state and local income taxes, are expected to be stripped from the package due to opposition from members of the Senate and, in the case of immigration reforms, adverse advisories from that chamber’s parliamentarian.

The Build Back Better Act is a combination of two Biden campaign promises: his American Families Plan and a significant portion of his climate platform. The measures were originally intended to be combined with his American Jobs Plan, but a bipartisan group of senators split the infrastructure piece of the legislation off and struck a deal, hoping that it would drain momentum from the rest of the package. But House and Senate leaders, along with Biden and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, insisted that the bipartisan bill be held back until agreement was reached on the rest of the agenda. Biden’s support for that strategy was haphazard, and he was for it and against it multiple times.

In September, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., succeeded in getting a pledge from Pelosi to split the two measures apart, but when the agreed-upon deadline in late September came, progressives held firm, and Pelosi was forced to pull the bill from the floor. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., reacted angrily, lashing out at her former House colleagues, saying that she couldn’t be forced into supporting the bill. “I have never, and would never, agree to any bargain that would hold one piece of legislation hostile to another,” she said.

Canceling the U.S. House vote on the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act denies Americans millions of new good-paying jobs and hurts everyday families.

Full statement ?? pic.twitter.com/BM7hrUL3KK

— Kyrsten Sinema (@SenatorSinema) October 2, 2021

Negotiations around the Build Back Better bill continued, and Pelosi tried again a month later, on October 29. Again, the progressive caucus held firm, and Pelosi again pulled the bill. Within days of progressives holding the line a second time, Sinema had been brought around, leaving Manchin as the lone Senate holdout.

On November 5, Pelosi again pushed to move the bipartisan bill through the House, this time with the help of Biden, who called into a progressive caucus meeting to plead with the CPC to go along. The caucus broke under the presidential pressure, though the six members of the Squad — Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Cori Bush of Missouri, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — voted no. Republicans had previously said that they would withhold their votes until Democrats reached a majority on their own and only then would cast the few yes votes from their side. That meant the Squad’s no votes could have taken the bill down, but Pelosi put it on the floor, confident that the Republicans would come along. In the end, several Republicans cast yes votes early in the process, putting it over the top, with 13 of them ultimately backing the bill. They have since come under furious assault from their colleagues.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., trying to offset criticism of Republican leadership from major donors and the party’s far right wing, took advantage of a special rule that enables caucus leaders to speak for an unlimited amount of time to hold the floor for over eight hours on Thursday night. His remarks surpassed Pelosi’s previous record for longest House floor speech and pushed the final Build Back Better vote to Friday morning.

The vote serves as a political lifeline for CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal, who persuaded most caucus members to go along with a deal to allow passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill in exchange for a statement from five conservative Democratic holdouts promising to vote for the Build Back Better Act after the release of scoring information from the Congressional Budget Office, on the condition that the vote occur no later than the end of this week. Jayapal’s agreement was at odds with the caucus’s previous position demanding that the two bills remain linked, and she drew fire from progressives who worried that the caucus would lose its leverage if the bipartisan bill passed before the House considered the Build Back Better Act.

Jayapal argued that the CPC’s maneuvers helped guarantee the inclusion of progressive provisions in the bill. “I feel like we held the line, not just once but twice. We jump-started all the negotiations that weren’t happening between the two senators and the White House and progressives,” she told The Intercept, referring to Manchin and Sinema. “We kept all of our progressive priorities in, albeit at lesser numbers and not as strong as it would have been at $3.5 trillion, but we really defined that fight.”

By threatening to withhold support from the infrastructure bill, progressives also got commitments from the conservative Democratic holdouts to support their policy priorities in the bill, including immigration reforms and prescription drug negotiation. Pocan, the chair emeritus of the CPC, said that the caucus had also gotten “preclearance” on roughly 95 percent of the Build Back Better Act. (Preclearance means that the legislation was precleared with a majority of the Senate.) “We’ve already ran it by all the parties,” he said.

As the programs within the Build Back Better package were scaled back, so were the revenue-raising proposals meant to fund them. The current package is offset primarily through increases in funding for the IRS for enforcement, a 15 percent minimum tax on large corporations, a global tax on multinational corporations, and other measures that increase the tax liability of wealthy Americans and large businesses. Provisions to increase the corporate tax rate and increase the individual tax rate on high earners were stripped from the package due to opposition from Sinema. Other proposals, such as a tax on asset growth that resembled a wealth tax, were temporarily considered but ultimately discarded in the face of opposition from conservative Democrats. Hedge funds and private equity firms have dodged an effort so far to close the loophole that allows them to pay lower taxes than regular workers.

Asked if she’s worried about the Senate pulling out key priorities from the House bill, House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said, “I’m going to take it one at a time. I don’t know what the Senate’s going to do … but I know what I’m fighting for, the child tax credit. I’m fighting for paid family medical leave.”

The post Centrist Democrats Honor Promise as House Approves Build Back Better Act appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Last Monday, a Democratic firm hosted focus groups with women in Virginia who voted in 2017 for Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, in 2020 for Democratic President Joe Biden, and then this month for Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin. It was centered on suburban women: a group that pivoted significantly to the right in the governor’s election.

Consultant Danny Barefoot said that Anvil Strategies called roughly 30,000 people in Virginia. Most didn’t answer, but several hundred of them fit the criteria he was looking for: people who voted Democrat, Democrat, Republican in the last three elections. Those people were called back and offered a $100 gift card if they’d do a lunch-hour Zoom and talk about why they voted the way they did. Ninety-six women, a fifth of whom were not white, were broken into three different sessions. Barefoot sat in on one of them and got permission from the funders to share quotes and results.

Focus groups are put together differently than surveys, which weigh the responses to reflect the population at large. While 96 respondents isn’t enough for a robust polling sample, it’s a chance to dig deeper into the views of a slice of the electorate. Virginia is about two-thirds white, and this sample was 79 percent white — so slightly whiter than the state at large but not by a ton. Eleven percent of them were Black women, 6 percent Latina, and 4 percent Asian American. They came from around the state. Barefoot said he didn’t ask about college education, because what he was interested in was people who lived in the suburbs regardless of race or educational background.

What Barefoot found is that while the women agreed with Democrats on policy, they just didn’t connect with them. When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.

The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”

When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. When asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.

The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.

“They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”

“You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.” That fall, Davis cut an ad for Youngkin, citing his commitment to keep schools open as decisive.

And while the group made a Democrat angry at Democrats the face of its opposition, behind her was a coterie of Republican operatives. The bulk of the group’s financing came from N2 America, a conservative nonprofit, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Pete Snyder. Its co-founder was a Republican who lost a 2019 race for school board, and the rest of its officers were Republican operatives too. A slick nonprofit named Parents Defending Education was launched in 2020 to help guide the local groups. Little effort was made to conceal who was behind it: A longtime Koch network operative, Nicole Neily, was placed at the helm of the “grassroots” organization. Aside from Davis, nearly every mom and dad brought onto Fox News to complain about critical race theory held a day job as a senior Republican operative.

It was the purest expression of the way Republicans have driven the fight over schools and then capitalized on it. The fear of public schools indoctrinating our children has been a GOP theme for its base voters for decades, but in the wake of Trump’s rise, the party watched in horror as suburban voters recoiled from Republicans into the arms of Democrats. Casting about for an issue that could win some of them back — recall that this is a game of margins, not absolutes — the party landed on schools. Around the country, the conservative media apparatus, unrivaled by Democrats, gave air cover to the schooling issue — handing local activists language to use, a story to tell, and the resources and platform to tell it.

The tactic was even more potent in northern Virginia, where many professional Republican operatives and lobbyists live. In Loudoun County this November, McAuliffe outpaced Youngkin 55 percent to 44. But Biden had beaten Trump there by 62 percent to 37. Youngkin’s showing was only 11,000 votes fewer than Trump won a year earlier, while McAuliffe notched 50,000 fewer votes than Biden had. While Biden carried Fairfax by 42 points, McAuliffe only took it by 31.

That the GOP didn’t make even bigger inroads, given their heavy investment in the issue, may be the one silver lining for Democrats — who, witnessing a dishonest astroturf campaign take shape and get twisted beyond all recognition on Fox News, decided, perhaps understandably but to their later regret, to ignore the question. After McAuliffe’s debate gaffe, in which he delivered up the perfect sound bite to Youngkin — “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” — he took weeks to respond, initially not recognizing the danger. “Everybody clapped when I said it,” McAuliffe insisted later.

Even where Republicans spent heavily against outmatched Democrats, they made only marginal gains in school board races. But if the issue continues to go uncontested, their luck may run out. National Democrats have no coordinated response yet, leaving school board members — unstaffed, underfunded, borderline volunteers — hung out to dry, with nothing to rely on but mainstream media assertions that there’s actually nothing to see here.

A voter walks past election signs as she walks to the Fairfax County Government Center polling location on Election Day in Fairfax, Va., on Nov. 2, 2021.

Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

In the Virginia election, two arguments that have been running parallel in Democratic circles for the past several years finally collided. One is the question of how Democrats should position themselves in the ongoing culture war, with jockeying over fraught and contested concepts like wokeness and cancel culture. Critical race theory is one example of this; Democrats can’t seem to agree on whether it’s a good thing that should be taught and defended or a Republican fabrication that’s not being taught in elementary schools at all. The other is the round-and-round debate over race and class: Are voters who flee Democrats motivated more by economic anxiety or by racial resentment and eroding white privilege?

While these debates have unfolded, Democrats have seen a steady erosion in support among working-class voters of all races, while gaining support among the most highly educated voters. That movement would point toward class divisions driving voter behavior, but the rearing up of critical race theory as a central plank of the Republican Party appeared to throw the question open again. Maybe it’s racism, after all?

Properly understanding how different voting blocs understand the terms of the debate, however, unlocks the contradiction: The culture war is not a proxy for race, it’s a proxy for class. The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.

Now, for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice, the culture war and issues like critical race theory easily work as dog whistles calling them to the polls. But for many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party. Take, for instance, one of the women in Barefoot’s focus groups. When asked if Democrats share their cultural values, she said, “They fight for the right things and I usually vote for them but they believe some crazy things. Sometimes I feel like if I don’t know the right words for things they think I am a bigot.”

For many voters, and not just white ones, critical race theory is in a basket with other cultural microaggressions directed at working people by the elites they see as running the Democratic Party.

Barefoot’s results rhymed with the conclusions of a memo put out by strategist Andrew Levison, who has long made the argument that Democratic efforts at connecting with working-class voters are fundamentally flawed. The memo, published after the Virginia election but not directly responding to it, looks at how Democrats can win support among a growing number of anti-Trump Republicans. Rather than convince the entire white working class — which is typically approximated in polls by looking for white voters without a college degree — Levison argues that Democrats should “identify a distinct, persuadable sector of the white working class” and then figure out how to get members of that specific group to vote Democratic.

Levison, citing data from multiple election cycles, notes that Democrats roughly win about a third of white working-class votes. The party loses about a third right out of the gate: hardcore right-wing people who would never consider voting for Democrats and think even a Democrat like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — known for much of his career as “Wall Street Chuck” — is a flaming socialist and a traitor. Levison calls that third “extremists,” and argues they are not gettable under any circumstances; he distinguishes them from the final third, which is made up of what he calls “cultural traditionalists.”

Strategist Andrew Levison’s characterizations of “extremist” and “cultural traditionalist” voters.

Screenshot: The Intercept

His category of cultural traditionalists, he acknowledges, is not meant to capture every voter who is gettable by Democrats; likewise, many cultural traditionalists have competing and conflicting views on various issues. But just as corporations work to create consumer profiles before going to market with an ad campaign, Democrats need to define who that persuadable person among the white working class is. To do so, Levison relies on years of survey data, much of it collected by Working America, a community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, that does tens of thousands of in-person interviews with working-class people around the country each year looking to identify those who are persuadable.

As Levison defines them, cultural traditionalists are people who don’t follow the news closely but have an easy-going personality and an open mind — contrasted with cranky, short-tempered people who are more likely to fall into the “extremist” category. They believe in patriotism and the “American way of life” but also believe that diversity, pluralism, and tolerance are essential characteristics of that American way of life. When it comes to race, these traditionalists have something of a Michael Scott view, rooted in the cliche that they “don’t see race” or “don’t see color.” They also have religious and moral values they’d happily describe as “old fashioned” but say they have no problem with people who have different views. When these voters shifted their views on marriage equality, accepting it as something that ought to be legal even if they were skeptical of it, the dam had broken.

Cultural traditionalists, according to Levison, also think of government as often wasteful and inefficient and of politicians as corrupt and bought off — but they don’t think government is inherently evil and can be convinced that it can do good things. Meanwhile, they think Democrats are a party that “primarily represents social groups like educated liberals and racial or ethnic minorities while having little interest, understanding, or concern for ordinary white working people like themselves.”

Levison’s distinction between these cultural traditionalists and what he calls the extremists, except for that last part, can plausibly apply to many, many Black and Latino working-class people as well. And even that last part — that Democrats don’t have much interest or concern for ordinary white working people, specifically — is not really a value judgment, it’s a widespread interpretation of Democratic messaging that is not uniquely held by white voters.

They’re the sort of voter that would be gettable for Democrats without compromising on a racial justice agenda if it is sold as the United States continuously striving to close the gap between reality and its values. But, Levison adds, there are a number of cultural issues on which cultural traditionalists and extremists align, and Republicans have become adept at exploiting them. He defines them as: pride in their culture, background, and community; respect for tradition; love of freedom; belief in personal responsibility, character, and hard work; and respect for law, strict law enforcement, and the right of individual self-defense.

There are a number of cultural issues on which cultural traditionalists and extremists align, and Republicans have become adept at exploiting them.

In other words, they express the same sensibility as the women in Barefoot’s group who wanted to teach their children a positive history of the United States. One suburban Black woman in his group put it this way: “Our kids should be taught about slavery and all of that awfulness but America is also a good country and that’s what I want my kids to learn.”

Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States. Instead, to the extent it has seeped into the public consciousness, it has done so around the notion of rejecting 1776 as the date of our birth and supplanting it with 1619 as our “true founding,” in a phrase that became so controversial it was deleted.

Times editor Jake Silverstein wrote in the introductory essay:

1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?

That section too has since been edited, blunting some of its edge, and creating another situation where supporters of the project at once say that there was nothing off-base about it, while changing it in response to the criticism. As schools around the country began teaching the project, Republicans made a national issue out of it, one that can’t be disentangled from the fight over critical race theory.

Liberals often suggest that parents who are skeptical of the New York Times’s 1619 Project reject the idea of teaching the truth about American history. More often, as with the woman in the focus group, it’s a question of framing rather than truth. Believing or conceding that we as a people are defined by the worst of the past might actually be true, but the concession is seen as cutting off any hope of a better future. As an adult, if that’s the view you’ve come to — and I flirt with it often myself — it’s a more than understandable conclusion. But we want our children to remain hopeful about the possibility of a better world, since it’s the world they’ll inherit and build after we’re all gone. The argument that slavery was essential to the development of capitalism in the United States is well-established scholarship by this point. But absent a call to overthrow capitalism, that notion, particularly when compressed into something an elementary school student could absorb, loses any meaning beyond nihilism. And so of course parents of all races reject the framing and look askance at a party of elites who seem to be blithely suggesting — though not really meaning it — the overthrow of a capitalist system that benefits them before all others. And if they’re not suggesting that, then what?

Levison, meanwhile, argues that Democrats need to lean into the kind of patriotic rhetoric that makes many progressives recoil. Democrats have the potential to split “extremists” off from “traditionalists” by couching Democratic values as truly American, and extremists as “un-American.” As an example of such possible rhetoric, he offers, is, “I love the American flag as much as any American but I would never use a flagpole flying our flag as a club to assault other Americans that I call my ‘enemies.’ That is not the American way.” Or: “The values I grew up with are good values and I want them to endure. But the values of the people who want to turn Americans against each other and divide our country are not my values.”

An attendee signs the campaign bus of Glenn Youngkin, Republican gubernatorial candidate for Virginia, during a campaign stop at the Alexandria Farmers Market in Alexandria, Va., on Oct. 30, 2021.

Photo: Eric Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

At the end of Barefoot’s focus group, the women were asked if they’d have considered changing their vote if Democrats had passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The bill, which was passed by the House the following week, is something that Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, has claimed would have helped win the election for McAuliffe.

Ninety-one percent of the suburban women said no, 9 percent said yes, and one woman laughed and said, “What does that have to do with anything?”

She’s right to laugh. But that 9 percent actually points to something hopeful. In a close race, a 9-point swing like that can matter. If Democrats had passed the reconciliation bill as well and could talk about universal pre-K, the child tax credit, clean energy investments, and subsidies for child care, they might have won even more back. And if Democrats were out of touch culturally, though, that swing could be even higher

A major new survey from Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working-Class Politics points to another way that cultural chasm can be bridged: with candidates who focus on these economic issues but don’t talk like juniors at Oberlin.

The survey design was unusual: Instead of asking about issue preferences or messaging alone, it concocted prototypes of candidates and asked which of them was more appealing. When it came to a candidate’s background, the survey found — somewhat awkwardly for a socialist magazine — that voters of all races and classes had the most positive reaction to small-business owners. The most disliked candidates were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Working-class candidates — teachers, construction workers, and veterans — also fared well, though not as well as mom and pop.

Broadly, Jacobin did not find evidence to support the Great Left Hope that if the masses would turn out in full at the ballot box, they’d eagerly support democratic socialists candidates and policies. “Many working-class voters in advanced economies have actually moved to the left on questions of economic policy (favoring more redistribution, more government spending on public goods, and more taxation of the very wealthy), while remaining culturally or socially moderate,” they write. They contrast this from where mainstream Democrats have gone: left on culture while “tempering their economic progressivism.”

But the survey also pointed to how they could be won over, and the results mapped with Levison’s and Barefoot’s findings. Language Jacobin described as “woke” created a cultural barrier between voters and candidates that diminished support for both “woke progressive” and “woke moderate” candidates, while universal, populist language did best for Democrats. Notably, “woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics,” they write. “For example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.” Startlingly, the survey found a 30-plus point gap between support for a teacher running on a populist, universalist message versus a CEO running with a moderate economic platform, couched in woke rhetoric reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

A South Carolina National Guardsman meets a school bus as it arrives with Black students at the Lamar School on March 23, 1970, in Lamar, S.C.

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

In today’s debate over critical race theory, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of the busing wars in the 1970s and ’80s. Like with busing, Democratic elites are creating conflict within the working class while protecting their own class and cultural interests. By the early 1970s, white school districts had spent nearly two decades resisting Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in schools, and national attention had turned to redlining and the dug-in segregation of housing.

The 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act had banned residential discrimination and empowered the federal government to forcibly integrate neighborhoods. In 1973, Donald Trump and his father were sued by the Department of Justice for racial segregation in their housing and settled two years later. That same year, a Gallup survey asked Black residents to choose from a list of preferred solutions to school desegregation, and the top choice was the most intuitive: neighborhood integration and an end to redlining. Only 9 percent of Black residents named busing as their preferred approach to school desegregation which, again, is intuitive: Attending the neighborhood school is always preferable, all things being equal, than being bused somewhere else. The same was true for white voters: Just 4 percent supported busing.

But neighborhood integration would require white residents to give something up. Even today, according to law professor Dorothy Brown, the author of “The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — and How We Can Fix It,” when neighborhoods integrate, with the Black population reaching at least 10 percent, property values either decline or grow more slowly. Facing that systematic decline in wealth, many white residents fought neighborhood housing integration. Busing, meanwhile, could be avoided by the well-off by sending their kids to private school. And so Democrats went with busing over housing. Republicans began to use busing in campaigns as a dog whistle to bigoted parents resistant to desegregating education, banking on the fact that there was additional political gain to be had among a majority of voters who opposed it for a variety of reasons. In 1981, Gallup found 60 percent of Black voters supported busing as a means to integration, though opposition was strong as well.

“‘Antibusing’” is a code word for racism and rejection,” wrote Jesse Jackson in 1982. “True, some blacks oppose busing, but not for racial reasons. Blacks sometimes are against busing because all decisions about desegregation are being made for them, not with and by them.”

Battles over language are by definition divorced from the material reality that structures inequality.

White parents who couldn’t afford private school fled to the suburbs, creating new school districts along racial lines; since busing only happened within a school district, that meant it was largely going on inside big cities, with the suburbs immune. White working-class voters who remained in the cities noted rightly that the professional class in the suburbs, which proudly supported busing in the city, was merely signaling its own virtue, while engaging in the same bigoted resistance to — or avoidance of — integration.

Today’s white Democratic elites are also confronted with school systems that have substantially resegregated, persistent racial income and wealth gaps, and test scores that reflect those patent inequalities. Their answer has been to thoughtfully interrogate the concepts of white privilege and systemic racism by examining interpersonal relationships and developing a new vocabulary that gives its speaker license to feel as righteous about things today as white folks did in the Boston suburbs in 1975. But, as Jamelle Bouie writes, battles over language are by definition divorced from the material reality that structures inequality.

We must remember that the problem of racism — of the denial of personhood and of the differential exposure to exploitation and death — will not be resolved by saying the right words or thinking the right thoughts.

That’s because racism does not survive, in the main, because of personal belief and prejudice. It survives because it is inscribed and reinscribed by the relationships and dynamics that structure our society, from segregation and exclusion to inequality and the degradation of labor.

Bouie answers with Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition to “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.”

Telling the truth about King and his politics has always been too much for American liberals. The vulgar version of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives popular in boardrooms and school workshops is meant to fill the void created by a refusal to assault the roots of racism; they provide a way to talk about racism that strips it of its material reality and slots it instead into the world of individual self-improvement. Without the systemic context, it merely trains people in how to enact roles, identify people failing to play their proper role, and properly “call them out.”

One woman in the focus group, asked how she understood critical race theory, said, “It teaches our kids America is defined by the worst parts of its past.” Instead of hiring corporate consultants to pretend to tear down white supremacy in the classroom, Democrats could dedicate themselves to the pursuit of living up to the values on which it was founded. Frederick Douglass’s famous speech delivered in 1852 — “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” — pounds at the conscience of the nation by describing the gap between its founding principles and its everyday reality.

“I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost,” Douglass said.

Teaching the truth about American history, including all of its awfulness, doesn’t require teaching kids that they or their country are defined by the worst of its past. Quite the opposite: America’s greatest heroes have always defined their project within the outlines of the promise and spirit of the nation’s founding, daring and challenging it to live up to its promises.

“Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country,” Douglass concluded on that Fourth of July. “There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope — while drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.”

That’s something “cultural traditionalists” can all get behind. It would still, of course, trigger the far right. But the resulting fight would isolate the extremists, exposing their hostility to Douglass’s message as the raw racism it is. Democrats win the argument when it’s about Charlottesville, but lose if it’s Loudoun County. But Loudoun County isn’t Charlottesville, just as Glenn Youngkin isn’t Donald Trump. Let the right lose its mind attacking Frederick Douglass. Make him and his allies like Robert Smalls — those who fought oppression against the worst odds — the true heroes of American history. And not one more word, for the love of God, from Robin DiAngelo.

The post It’s Not Just White People: Democrats Are Losing Normal Voters of All Races appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Sen. Patrick Leahy is holding a press conference on Monday morning in the Vermont statehouse, heightening speculation about his looming potential retirement. Leahy, the longest serving Democrat in the Senate, is up for reelection next fall. Leahy stepping back would open up a new likely Democratic seat, raising the question of whether Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will endorse the state’s lone congressional representative, Peter Welch, or allow an open primary to play out.

Welch, a Democrat, is known to be planning a run to replace Leahy if and when he retires. If Sanders endorses Welch, he functionally forecloses any challenge from the left. State Rep. Tanya Vyhovsky is also contemplating a run for Senate if Leahy steps down but told The Intercept she won’t do so if Sanders gets behind Welch. “I don’t want to lose any capacity I have [in the state legislature] in a race that’s unwinnable,” she said. “That is a big piece of this — if Bernie is going to endorse Peter there’s not much point doing it.”

Vyhovsky broadly shares Sanders’s politics and was endorsed by him the previous two cycles. Meanwhile, Welch and Sanders are much closer personally than they are politically. If Sanders does freeze the field by endorsing Welch, it would come out of personal loyalty rather than as a way to advance his political revolution. His penchant for such loyalty was on display during the presidential campaign, when he repeatedly resisted efforts by advisers to get him to go on the attack against Joe Biden. “Joe is a friend,” he would often say.

Leahy remains popular in Vermont as well. Asked by The Intercept if he planned to endorse a candidate or allow a race to play out, Leahy said recently that he wasn’t ready to make a public statement either way. Sanders, historically, has taken large amounts of time to make endorsements; Vermont political observers and those around Sanders are unsure if he’ll endorse Welch. (A Sanders spokesperson declined to comment.)

Welch was caught up in a scandal recently when the Washington Post and “60 Minutes” revealed he was one of three Democrats who’d pushed for a law that tied the Drug Enforcement Administration’s hands when it came to going after pill mills fueling the opioid epidemic which was — and still is — raging in Vermont.

It later emerged Welch was trading stocks in companies involved with the legislation, including buying hundreds of thousands worth of RiteAid stock as the company lobbied for the law.

While the state is a safe vote for Democrats in presidential elections, Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott is widely popular, and cruised to reelection in 2020, smashing the Democrat by 41 points. He’s up for reelection in 2022 — the state’s governor serves two-year terms — and has previously said he’s not interested in running for Senate, though national Republicans will no doubt pressure him otherwise.

Republicans were dealt a blow last week when neighboring Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu declined a run for the Senate, citing the chamber’s hopelessly partisan nature. Republicans have multiple other pickup opportunities, including in Georgia and Arizona, and are confident in their ability to seize the upper chamber.

When Leahy was first elected to the Senate in 1974 in the blue wave following Watergate, he was the first Democrat ever to win in the state. His run was made more difficult by a third party candidate who gained real traction. A young Bernie Sanders was perennially the nominee of the Liberty Union Party and had already run multiple times for Senate and the governor’s office, never breaking double digits. Sanders ended up winning just over 4 percent and Leahy won his race by about 4,000 votes.

Sanders would soon retire from politics and devote himself to media. Of course, Sanders didn’t stay retired, becoming the mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981 and then winning election to Congress as an independent in 1990. He and Leahy have had something of an alliance since, as Sanders has danced delicately in and out of the Democratic Party. In 2006, when the other Vermont Senate seat opened up, Sanders ran for it, won the Democratic primary, then rejected the party line and ran as an independent in the general election. The state party voted to unanimously endorse him anyway and didn’t field a Democrat. He’s remained an independent but caucuses with Democrats, and continues to run in Democratic primaries.

In 2006, Welch, then a state senator, ran for the House seat, took the Democratic primary uncontested, and went on to win the general election fairly easily. Welch and Sanders have been strong allies since, even though Sanders is well to Welch’s left. In 2016, Welch endorsed Sanders for president — sparking jokes in Vermont that Welch was hoping to help open up his future Senate seat — while Leahy backed Hillary Clinton.

Vyhovsky was raised working class in Essex Junction, Vermont, in a single-parent home, and serves as a social worker alongside her statehouse service, which only began in 2020 when she successfully ousted a Republican representative. Vyhovsky said that Welch is well liked personally in the small state and widely considered to be a “good guy.”

“That’s fine, go have a beer with him, but he doesn’t have to be your representative,” she said. “Peter is fine, I guess, but people are desperate for change, they’re desperate for broader representation and new voices and different voices.”

The post Bernie Sanders Could Snuff Out a Potential Primary Contest to Replace Patrick Leahy appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

When Lauren Windsor, a Democratic operative working with the Lincoln Project, sent five young people dressed in khakis, white shirts, and sunglasses to hold tiki torches in front of Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus as it docked in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Friday, she never considered that people might think they were actual white supremacists.

The tiki torch stunt was meant to echo the far-right show of force in the city in 2017 and visually tie Youngkin’s campaign for the Virginia governorship with former President Donald Trump — a manifestation of Democrats’ ultimately doomed strategy not to attack Youngkin on his own terms but to tar him by his association with Trump. Instead, when local media painted the stunt as a real demonstration by white supremacists, and it was amplified by the campaign of Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a former governor of the state, it spiraled out of control, with the Lincoln Project only claiming credit for it much later in the day.

Though Democrats would later be accused of manufacturing a white supremacist hoax, the poorly conceived stunt always intended to be transparent that its intent was to link Youngkin to Trump and the infamous Charlottesville protests and that its author was indeed the Never Trump Republican operation the Lincoln Project, according to interviews with participants and contemporaneous communications reviewed by The Intercept.

At the heart of the stunt gone wrong was a belief among Democratic and Lincoln Project operatives that the key to defeating Youngkin wasn’t a populist attack on the corrupt source of his wealth, the Carlyle Group, as Democrats did effectively with then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Bain Capital in 2012, but instead to yoke him to Trump. “We’re here to remind Virginians what an endorsement from Donald Trump really means,” the actors were instructed to say if asked.

It was never intended to appear real, according to Lincoln Project planning emails shared with The Intercept. And the strategy, in general, failed, with Youngkin squarely beating McAuliffe in a state that President Joe Biden and Gov. Ralph Northam won handily in recent years.

But on Friday, the internet and local media took it seriously, particularly after the image was boosted on Twitter by the social media staffer for the McAuliffe campaign — first thinking that the demonstrators were actually white supremacists (one of them is a woman and one is Black), followed by conservative media attempting to identify the participants, and along the way publicly naming young Democratic operatives who had nothing to do with it.

The evening before the event, Windsor and officials at the Lincoln Project exchanged final messages outlining their plan. Windsor shared the emails with The Intercept to demonstrate that she had not intended to create a hoax, allowing us to review her inbox itself to demonstrate that the emails were not doctored. As a condition for providing the emails, she asked that the Lincoln Project officials’ names be kept anonymous, as she didn’t have permission to share them.

The operatives were instructed to reveal to any reporter who asked that they were there on behalf of the Lincoln Project. The problem for the actors: Nobody in the media approached them. They were likely scared off by the drizzle, said Pete Callahan, another Democratic operative.

A Lincoln Project attorney wrote to Windsor and others with the following legal advice: “If they’re asked who sent them, there’s no legal requirement that they identify TLP. But it’s also fine if they do. More of a press/optics question for you. If you wanted to be more generic, they could say something like, ‘A group that thinks that Glenn Youngkin would bring Donald Trump’s politics to Virginia’ or something like that. They could also just not say anything.”

In a reply, Windsor made clear that the plan was to be transparent about who they were working for:

1. IAN IS ONLY SPOKESPERSON

Only questions to be answered are:

Who are you with?  We’re here with the Lincoln Project.

And Why are you here?  We’re here to remind Virginians what an endorsement from Donald Trump really means

No comment for any other questions.

The instructions also included the mundane (“Brigade should not be on phones — we need the visual to be clean”) to the security-related. “De-escalate if people start threatening you. Do not engage,” the note instructed.”

Email from Lauren Windsor.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Later that night, the lead on-the-ground organizer, Ian Golden, confirmed that he’d received the instructions.

“Understood. Lauren – I’ll text you once we sp, when we arrive, and when we’re clear,” he said. (Gathering at a starting point is abbreviated “sp” in Army lingo.)

The five tiki torch-wielding stunt artists gathered in the rain and, to any reasonable person, clearly appeared to be carrying out a performance. Their khakis in several cases looked more denim than khaki; they were wearing sunglasses in a drizzling rain. Did we mention that only three of the five were white men? Beyond that, the notion that even white supremacists at this point would show up with tiki torches and khakis beggars belief.

The story first started circulating online when a local NBC News reporter posted a photo of the affair:

These men approached @GlennYoungkin’s bus as it pulled up saying what sounded like, “We’re all in for Glenn.” Here they are standing in front of the bus as his campaign event at Guadalajara started.@NBC29 pic.twitter.com/l681ejyBjc

— Elizabeth Holmes (@holmes_reports) October 29, 2021

Her tweet was then boosted by the social media staffer for the McAuliffe campaign, who took the stunt seriously. Democratic operative Adam Parkhomenko then boosted the Olaf post, sending it virally through Virginia Twitter. That’s when the attempted stunt became an accidental hoax.

Screenshot: The Intercept

On Twitter, a number of journalists — including me — noted several of these absurdities, speculating that a Democratic-aligned political operation was likely behind it.

The Daily Caller, meanwhile, began hunting down the identities of the five torchbearers, ultimately reporting that it had successfully identified two of them. Alec Sears, the Daily Caller reporter, said on Twitter that he was “confident” in his identification of one operative, while the other bore “a strong resemblance” to a second person he falsely ID’d. The Intercept reviewed the driver’s licenses of both, and both of Sears’s identifications were incorrect. (Sears did not respond to a request for comment.) When the falsely accused Democratic operatives made their social media accounts private, the move was cited as further evidence of their guilt. Only one of the five people involved on the ground was a Democratic operative — Golden — while the rest were hired hands, and The Intercept agreed to keep their names private.

In the afternoon, the Lincoln Project finally took credit, putting out a statement. There was also speculation by some — again, including me — that the Lincoln Project was perhaps only claiming responsibility for the operation after it had gone badly so that it would be blamed on Republicans rather than Democrats. That thinking was too clever by half, as the correspondence shows that the Lincoln Project and its lawyers were involved well ahead of time in conceiving and executing the stunt.

Golden, the on-the-ground organizer of the action, told The Intercept it never occurred to him that people wouldn’t understand they were pulling a stunt. Just the week before, he said, he and Windsor had been blocked by Youngkin staff from an event. “They know who I am, they know it was me,” said Golden.

Windsor said she called Parkhomenko to tell him that it was a Lincoln Project stunt and huddled with the Lincoln Project about claiming credit. Hours passed, however, before any public statement was made.

“It didn’t make sense to me that it wouldn’t be a stunt. I just assumed nobody would think it’s real.”

Callahan was assigned to be outside the event filming. He confirmed that the other four hired hands were not those identified by the Daily Caller and said that the delay in claiming credit came down to Lincoln Project operatives deliberating over their statement. “I was surprised people bit on it, thinking it wasn’t a stunt. It didn’t make sense to me that it wouldn’t be a stunt. I just assumed nobody would think it’s real,” said Callahan.

“A lot of that, at least as far as I know, was because Lincoln, who was kind of calling the play here, wanted to make a statement and take their time doing it. In hindsight, we should have knocked it down right away.”

The credulity with which the stunt was met went beyond the act itself. When the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical outlet, joked that one of the actors was in fact Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam — a reference to his blackface scandal — actor Debra Messing, a frequent poster of resistance liberal messaging, didn’t seem to see the joke.

Screenshot: The Intercept

Messing’s gullibility, amusing as it may be, is emblematic of a larger problem facing Democrats. The party elite has organized its electoral operation around frightening voters like Messing with constant invocations of Trump and white supremacists — effective at keeping base voters engaged and angry but good for little else. In Virginia, not enough of the state’s voters bought into it.

The social media staffer on the McAuliffe campaign who initially boosted the image has since made his Twitter account private and has replaced his bio with two simple words: “I’m sorry.”

The post Internal Lincoln Project Emails Show How a Charlottesville Tiki Torch Stunt Went Wrong appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Heading into the final stretch of the 2006 midterms, House Democrats were in need of an agenda. They had ridden the frustration at President George W. Bush as far as they could, and his mishandling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the occupation of Iraq had allowed them to skate by without offering a compelling countermessage. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had been pressing then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to formulate some sort of vision the party could rally behind, though Emanuel wanted to make sure it wasn’t anything that sounded anti-war, socially liberal, or hostile to business interests.

Many of the candidates he recruited around the country refused to condemn anything but Bush’s handling of the war and were far to the right of the typical House Democrat. Pelosi had put him off, later telling Molly Ball, Pelosi’s biographer, that she hadn’t wanted to put a message out too soon in the campaign and see it drowned out.

In late July, the party finally released its vision, calling it “A New Direction for America” and putting forward six policy ideas under the cringeworthy slogan “Six For ’06.”

Among those six incremental reforms was a promise that Democrats would allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug policies with pharmaceutical companies and use the savings to expand Medicare benefits. In November 2006, they won the House back for the first time since 1994.

Now, 15 years later, Democrats are staring at an opportunity to actually make good on that promise. Despite reports that the provision has been stripped from the final package — it was not included in the House bill released Thursday afternoon — Democrats in Congress say the fight isn’t over. “The negotiations are still going on,” said Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto, D-Nev., Thursday evening. “It’s the number one issue I hear about in Nevada. And rightly so, we have to reduce drug costs. Negotiation is a key part of it.”

On Thursday afternoon, House progressives again beat back an effort by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House to split the bipartisan infrastructure bill from the broader Build Back Better Act moving through Congress under the majority-only rules of reconciliation. The progressive caucus and their allies in the Senate say they’ll use the leverage they’ve preserved to fight to get some form of drug-pricing legislation back into the bill over the weekend. Pelosi, too, is pushing to reinsert something. At a press conference Thursday, she said that there were elements she still hoped to see survive, and as the architect of the political strategy of centering drug prices in Democratic elections, her credibility is on the line. The battle represents the collision of two elements of Democratic politics that are fundamentally in conflict: what they tell voters in order to get elected, and where they get the money to broadcast that message to voters.

Since 2006, they have told voters that, given the opportunity, they’ll take on the power of Big Pharma and force the industry to lower drug prices, so that Americans are no longer paying vastly more than people in any other country on Earth. At the same time, they have been substantially bankrolled by the very industry they have promised to take on. Fulfilling their promise to voters requires butting up against the financial interests of a powerful wing of the party. But breaking their promise threatens their ability to ever again promise action on an issue that is a driving concern for voters.

Just one week after receiving the speaker’s gavel in January 2007, following the Democratic sweep the previous year, Pelosi made good on her end of the promise, leading House Democrats in passing the drug negotiation bill — which promptly died thanks to an inability to surmount a filibuster in the Senate.

Had it passed the Senate, there’s no reason to think Bush would have signed it into law, but the bill’s fortune’s changed when Barack Obama was sworn in as president in January 2009 with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate by July of that year. But his White House quickly moved to cut a deal with Big Pharma instead, promising not to push for drug price negotiations in exchange for the industry agreeing not to oppose reform and to cut $80 billion in costs over 10 years. Pelosi vowed that she wasn’t bound by the deal, but no drug price negotiations were signed into law.

In 2018, as Medicare for All surge in popularity, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, spying a shot to finally regain the House, warned candidates not to run on single-payer or any big sweeping reform, urging them instead to focus on lowering drug pricing, citing internal data that it polled better.

The memo to candidates said that the top-testing recommendation was to allow the government to negotiate lower drug prices. Democrats that cycle and in 2020 made lowering drug prices their central campaign issue on television ads. One of the Democrats who flipped a Senate seat in 2018, promising lower drug prices, was Kyrsten Sinema.

The 2020 elections put Democrats in the strongest position in a decade to finally enact their policy agenda. While holding slight majorities in the House and Senate, they could pass long-promised drug pricing reform using the budget reconciliation process that allows them to avoid a filibuster from Republicans.

Upon entering the White House, President Joe Biden made empowering Medicare to negotiate down prices a central part of his American Families Plan. Democrats crafting a reconciliation deal to implement that plan eyed the cost-saving measure as a way to pay for expanded Medicare coverage, achieving two wins in one.

But the plan was opposed by pharma-backed Democrats, especially Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, whose state hosts more pharmaceutical companies than any other state in the country. In a sign of the internal party dispute to come, Menendez offered his own drug cost reform proposal earlier this year that would cap seniors’ out-of-pocket expenses while preserving the industry’s massive profits and denying Medicare beneficiaries the more affordable prices that customers in other countries pay.

In the House, the drug pricing measure was defeated in the Energy and Commerce Committee, thanks to the defections of three Democrats: Reps. Scott Peters of Ohio, Kurt Schrader of Connecticut, and Kathleen Rice of New York. Peters and Schrader are known to be bankrolled by and loyal to Big Pharma, and Rice is Peters’s closest ally in the House. It was her first year on the powerful committee: She had battled Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for the seat, and the party’s steering committee had given it to Rice in a landslide.

In the Senate, Sinema has refused publicly to support the provision and is said to oppose it in private. She again declined to comment when approached Wednesday by The Intercept in the Capitol. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, told reporters this week he had not even heard from Sinema about her position but cannot understand her rumored opposition. “All it is is making Medicare consistent with the [Veterans Affairs Department] and Medicaid, which have had this … negotiated discount for many years,” he said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., admonished lawmakers unwilling to support reform, telling reporters earlier this month: “It’s beyond comprehension that there’s any member of the United States Congress who is not prepared to vote to make sure that we lower prescription drug costs.”

The pharmaceutical industry is “spending hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make sure that they continue to make outrageous profits to charge us, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs,” he said. “So this is not just an issue of the pharmaceutical industry. This is an issue of American democracy. And whether or not the United States Congress has the ability to stand up to incredibly powerful special interests like the pharmaceutical industry.”

Sanders’s observation is perhaps an understatement. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the omnipresent trade group and lobbying arm for drugmakers, spends over $500 million a year shaping policy and mobilizing the pharmaceutical industry to speak with one voice when it comes to any attempt to regulate drug prices.

The restriction on Medicare negotiating drug prices dates back to the creation of Medicare Part D in 2003, a Republican plan that Bush White House adviser Karl Rove believed would make seniors a permanent bloc of Republican voters. The legislation, opposed by Democrats, added prescription drugs as a benefit of Medicare, a major advance that has been important to improving the health of seniors — both personal and financial. The law was also a major gift to pharmaceutical companies and included a provision that would bar the Health and Human Services Department from negotiating lower prices.

Despite the ostensible ban on lobbyists’ money, drug industry money continued to flow into the Democratic Party.

The drug industry’s role was sharply highlighted on the campaign trail by Obama when he first ran for president. “First, we’ll take on the drug and insurance companies and hold them accountable for the prices they charge and the harm they cause,” said the Illinois senator on the trail while campaigning in Virginia. “And then we’ll tell the pharmaceutical companies, ‘Thanks but no thanks for overpriced drugs.’ Drugs that cost twice as much here as they do in Europe and Canada and Mexico. We’ll let Medicare negotiate for lower prices.”

Obama pointedly banned drug industry lobbyists from donating to his campaign and villainized them on the stump. But even at this seemingly high-water mark for reform, at every step of the way, the drug industry money continued to flow into the Democratic Party, with the explicit goal of buying influence and curbing any prospect for price-cutting policy becoming law.

Despite the ostensible ban on lobbyists’ money, non-registered drug industry representatives poured cash into the Obama campaign through individual contributions. Pfizer officials paid $1 million for skybox seats to watch Obama accept the Democratic nomination in Denver, at a party convention made possible by donations from AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Amgen, and Merck. The chief executives of the largest drugmakers mingled with DNC officials at invitation-only events. The Center for American Project Action Fund, the think tank that was considered Obama’s administration-in-waiting, accepted $265,000 from PhRMA during the campaign.

The following year, during the desperate legislative battle to pass what became the Affordable Care Act, PhRMA lobbyists won the deal that kept Medicare drug price negotiation or any other similar price cap on lifesaving drugs out of the law. In exchange, Democrats were promised $150 million in ads designed to boost public support for health reform. The agreement minted the chief PhRMA lobbyist, former Rep. Billy Tauzin, a special $11 million payday for his role in shepherding it through Congress and the White House.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 radically reshaped the political landscape for pharmaceutical companies. Drug firms were already routinely ranked among the largest industry donors to candidates and PACs. Pharmaceutical companies and their representatives donated regularly to lawmaker foundations, including the foundation run by former Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah and by current Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C.; as well as the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, and other nonprofits and think tanks associated with policymakers.

But the court decision opened a new financial sieve for drug firms to dominate elections. The largest drug lobby group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA went from routine $1,000 checks to individual lawmakers to dumping seven figure sums of largely undisclosed corporate cash into the coffers of dark money groups and Super PACs. American Action Network, a GOP campaign arm that can raise and spend unlimited amounts thanks to the court decision, took in $14.6 million from PhRMA.

In short order, pharmaceutical firms made sure that any close congressional election would rely heavily on funds tied, at least implicitly, to a demand that drug price regulations stay off the table.

The Democrats lost the House in 2010, while Republicans swept statehouses across the country, and used their newfound power to gerrymander a durable majority. Even as Democrats won the popular vote for the House over the next decade, they remained locked out of power. The Obama administration, hobbled by its previous losses, did little to fight the pharmaceutical industry on any major cost-related issues.

But the salience of the problem began to make waves again in 2015 and 2016, as controversies around astronomical drug price increases absorbed headlines. Turing Pharmaceuticals, led by a young investor named Martin Shkreli, purchased the patent rights to a crucial parasitic infection pill called Daraprim, and hiked the price by 5,000 percent overnight. Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a darling of Wall Street, spent virtually nothing on research and development, and simply purchased patents and hiked prices on a range of drugs.

States attempted to push back but were crushed by the tidal wave of pharmaceutical money. In 2016, a California ballot measure attempted to tie the price of Medicaid drugs to the rates paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs – a workaround to lower prescription via collective bargaining. The drug industry plowed into the state, financing the most expensive ballot campaign in history at that point (only to be surpassed by Uber’s Proposition 22 in 2020 over driver classification) to pressure voters into opposing the law. Groups typically aligned with Democrats, such as the NAACP, San Francisco’s historic LGBT Democratic clubs, and longtime Latino civil rights organizations, accepted consulting fees and grants from drug companies that year, and endorsed the drug industry-backed campaign to defeat the ballot measure. Drug industry-backed ads featured an array of Democratic organizations they had funded as they persuaded voters to oppose the measure – which went down in defeat.

During the 2020 election, PhRMA gave another $26.4 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC associated with House Republican leadership. PhRMA also financed groups for Democrats, including the major Super PACs tied to party leadership and Center Forward, a dark-money group that supports moderate Democrats.

Democrats had promised to enact reform for so long, Sanders said, and had so much public support that failing to deliver would raise the question of what the purpose of electing them was. “And this is an issue of not just lowering prescription drugs. It’s whether or not democracy can work. And if democracy cannot work, if we cannot take on the pharmaceutical industry, why do you go out to ask people to vote?” Sanders asked. “Why do you ask them to participate in the political process, if we don’t have the power to take on a powerful special interest?”

The post Democrats Find Their Big Pharma Bag Is Making It Inconvenient to Take On Big Pharma appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

A new alternative minimum corporate tax is set to hit only companies with more than $1 billion in profits at the insistence of the Biden administration, the bill’s Senate co-author said on Wednesday.

Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, said on Tuesday evening that his original version of the legislation, proposed in August, would target any company earning at least $100 million. Asked on Wednesday by The Intercept where opposition to that threshold came from, King said that “it came from the administration and I’m not sure why.”

“Our original proposal raised twice as much money and it was a lower tax rate,” said King.

The new version, aimed to be included in the Build Back Better Act, applies a 15 percent minimum tax rate to companies that earned $1 billion or more. Many extremely profitable companies are currently able to claim to the IRS that they made nothing. The Biden administration’s budget from earlier this year proposed setting the threshold at $2 billion.

“I think it was Treasury,” King added. “I don’t know if it was ease of administration or what the motivation was, but I’m satisfied with where we are now. Although the billion-dollar threshold may be too high and maybe something in between would make more sense and raise more money.”

Another reporter asked why the threshold wasn’t put somewhere in the middle, like $500 million. “I agree, nice work, call the White House,” King suggested. The idea was included in President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which proposed a 15 percent minimum rate, but was designed to target only “large companies.”

The original threshold would have applied to roughly 1,300 companies, while the new version hits just around 200. The $1 billion benchmark spares some of the country’s largest corporations from the new tax, like defense contractor Huntington Ingalls Industries, management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, and airline JetBlue.

Democrats are in need of additional revenue for their package, as Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has opposed raising corporate rates or personal rates on the wealthy, as well as allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., finds a tax on billionaires “punitive.”

The alternative minimum corporate tax has the support of all 50 Democrats in the caucus. “Congratulations, good bill,” Sinema told King on the Senate floor Wednesday, King relayed after the encounter.

The tax is modeled on the alternative minimum personal income tax, which was created in 1969 to grapple with the superrich having figured out how to game the system and pay no taxes on their income. The AMT required they pay at least a minimum amount on their income. (So the rich responded by rearranging their compensation to pretend they have no income, therefore an AMT doesn’t apply. The new attempt to tax billionaires anyway is currently being torpedoed by Manchin.)

Many companies currently get away with paying little to no corporate taxes by writing off depreciating assets, stock options for employees, and other expenditures so that they have little to no taxable income — or even a loss — to report to the IRS, despite boasting massive gains to their shareholders.

As just one notorious example, Amazon disclosed at least $10 billion in profits to its shareholders but paid no federal taxes in 2018 and even collected millions in refunds from the federal government, thanks to a series of deductions and credits.

The Democrats’ new corporate tax will still permit some deductions and credits — like for research and development, clean energy investments, and other spending — to continue, meaning the highly profitable companies could still reduce their taxable income to little to nothing and dodge paying their fair share to the federal government.

King told reporters Tuesday evening that the new corporate tax would raise $300 or $400 billion over 10 years from about 200 companies around the country. (With the $100 million threshold, the legislation would have raised roughly $717 billion, according to an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a source involved said.)

“For decades, [the giant corporations] have lobbied this Congress to open another loophole, a little twist, a little turn and … then they’ve gotten the accountants to come in and expand those loopholes as new regulations,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a member of the Senate Finance Committee, told reporters. “And the result is that they are now in the business of avoiding paying their taxes, and they make a lot of money out there every single year, so the idea here is to say ‘Enough.’”

If the new corporate tax manages to raise significant revenue as Democrats expect, it could go a long way in funding Biden’s Build Back Better spending priorities. Still, Democrats have had to significantly scale back their plans in recent weeks as a result of demands from right-leaning lawmakers like Manchin and Sinema.

With the Senate split 50-50, Democrats can’t afford to lose a single vote on their bill, which is using the budget reconciliation process to pass with a simple majority. Now, plans to expand Medicare coverage, ensure paid family leave, and other initiatives are under pressure.

The Senate Democrats’ new tax proposals will also have to be approved by their counterparts in the House.

The post Biden Administration Urged Senate to Raise Profit Threshold for Minimum Corporate Tax to $1 Billion appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Kyrsten Sinema might be on the young side for a senator — less than half the age of some of her colleagues — but she represents the Democratic Party’s past. Think of her and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., as the dead hands reaching out of the grave, grabbing at the party as it tries to move on from them. They might have managed to claw back spending on the Build Back Better Act, but the reality that their time has passed is clear. And the way you can measure this most directly is in terms of dollars.

For Sinema in particular, her approach to the negotiations — to push against social spending and tax hikes on the rich and corporations — has cost her badly in the polls at home and hasn’t had much of an upside when it comes to campaign cash. Her model of politics is outdated, though it has been the dominant form for most of her life.

In the 1980s, in response to the Reagan Revolution and the ongoing realignment that broke what Democrats thought was a permanent stranglehold on Congress, the party developed what was called at the time a “PAC strategy” but today is just called fundraising. Republican candidates in 1980 had heavily outspent Democrats, who believed that their name recognition and long record — they implemented the New Deal, won World War II, enacted the Great Society, and so on — meant that the GOP was wasting money on television. When that turned out not to be the case, Democrats realized that they needed comparable money of their own, and the fundraising idea was that since Democrats still had durable control of the House of Representatives — they could cling to it for 14 years after Reagan’s 1980 election — businesses that had interests before Congress needed to start ponying up for access.

Raising corporate money is not actually that efficient.

Access quickly turned to alliance, and the party drifted heavily in a pro-business direction. These “New Democrats” argued that the party had to beat back the power of special interests — and by special interests, they meant civil rights advocates, environmentalists, and labor unions. The presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1988 pushed back against this hegemonic approach, but without a way to aggregate grassroots enthusiasm into the money needed for a national infrastructure, the threat was neutralized. Starting with Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential race, it finally started to look possible that a candidate funded by a large number of small, individual donations could compete with one funded by the rich and corporations. Technology was making it possible for people to quickly translate their enthusiasm not just into a honk and wave on a highway overpass, but also into actual money.

Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama showed the promise of small dollars in 2008, but he also raised an insane amount of money from Wall Street — and, once in office, he abandoned the network of small donors he had built and went with the big money. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., nearly toppled the Clinton machine with his famous $27 contributions. In 2018, the small-donor revolution spread to normie Democrats, with anti-Trump, #Resistance liberals throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at congressional Democrats, enabling them to retake the House. In 2020, small donors did it again, and the resource-rich Democrats took both the House and Senate.

One of the people who noticed this shift was Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., once known as Wall Street Chuck. But thanks to all of these small donors, he now serves as Senate majority leader. A lot of people have chalked up Schumer’s pivot toward progressives as fear of a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and no doubt that’s part of what’s going on. Another factor is that Schumer is used to delivering for donors so that they keep the spigot flowing. And Schumer’s donors are now rank-and-file Democratic activists throwing in $27 at a time. In 2020, 41 percent of the money raised by Democratic Senate candidates came from donations of less than $200. What they want is to see Democrats fighting for what they ran on, so Schumer is happy to give them that fight.

Schumer also knows that raising corporate money is not actually that efficient, because each one of these lobbyists or rich people requires coddling, demands intimate access, wants internships for their kids, wants a dinner and a speech and photo, and on and on. Small donors just want you to win and then deliver what you promised. They don’t expect to ever meet you unless they’re volunteering at a headquarters where you happen to stop by.

Over the summer, Sinema showed just how much work it is. For the past few months, we were treated to endless stories about Sinema skipping important events in Washington to be at this or that fundraiser and even leaving the country to go to Paris to raise money. For all that trouble, Sinema broke her fundraising record, reporting $1.1 million in fundraising in third quarter.

Kyrsten Sinema fundraised $1.1 million in Q3 with a big assist from the pharmaceutical and financial industries amid reconciliation negotiations.

That's the most campaign money she's raised in any quarter since she became a senator. https://t.co/14a8IfdI3M

— POLITICO (@politico) October 15, 2021

And it’s true that’s her record since she became a senator.

But when she was a candidate running for Senate — back in the third quarter of 2018, when Democratic voters thought she was a progressive and wanted to help her flip a Republican seat — she raised almost $7 million.

That’s not a fluke. You might think that 2018 was a special year and that Democratic small donors are no longer fired up since President Donald Trump is out of office and kicked off Twitter. That argument falls apart when you start looking at individual candidates. Fellow Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly is totally fine with the full $3.5 trillion proposal for the reconciliation bill, voted for a minimum wage increase, supports passing parts of the labor reform legislation called the PRO Act, and generally supports all kinds of reforms that Sinema is battling. Kelly, who’s up for reelection next year, raised $8.2 million this past quarter, while the Republican candidate expected to win that primary raised just over half a million.

OK, you’re thinking, maybe Kelly just has a ton more rich friends than Sinema. Well, the way to test that hypothesis is to look at the Federal Election Commission records for how many of the contributions were itemized, how many were unitemized, and how many were from PACs. Unitemized means that it was less than $200, and PACs are generally corporate PACS, but they could also be labor unions, and Kelly probably did well from them after sponsoring the PRO Act.

In the last three months, Kelly raised $3.4 million from small donors, according to his FEC report. In other words, he raised three times more than Sinema just from small donors even while Sinema was making a corporate-loving spectacle of herself and traveling the world to raise money. He made nothing from PACs. And his $3.8 million in itemized contributions shows that a Democrat in a swing state can back the Biden agenda and still raise money from big donors.

Sinema raised $914,000 from itemized contributions — those are big donations — and just $31,653.71 from small donors. She also raised $192,000 from PACs.

The fundraising profile that looks the most similar to Sinema’s is Manchin’s. Like Sinema, he’s up for reelection in 2024. He did better than Sinema in the third quarter, raising almost $1.6 million. But just $10,448 of that was made up of donations of less than $200. Of that, $1.3 million came from large donations, and $250,000 came from PACs.

Manchin, though, is distinguished from Sinema in that he can plausibly claim to be in a different political environment back home, a state that Trump carried in 2020 by nearly 40 points while losing in Arizona.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin is perhaps the best comparison, since she serves from Wisconsin, which Trump won in 2016, Biden won in 2020, and will be hotly contested in 2024. The last quarter, she raised $640,000, about half of which is from small donors. So if that’s Sinema’s game — selling out the entire Democratic agenda to do slightly better than Baldwin in the fundraising race — I guess congratulations are in order.

Over in Georgia, Sen. Raphael Warnock put Sinema’s haul to shame, raising $4.7 million from small donors in the third quarter on his way to raising $9 million overall. Maggie Hassan, the New Hampshire senator up for reelection this cycle, also raised more than Sinema: $2.5 million last quarter, more than $800,000 of which was from small donors.

And how did Sinema compare to a House member without a serious challenger?

Q3 fundraising totals:

AOC: $1,679,781
Kyrsten Sinema: $1,138,017 https://t.co/cbe1X2GMPv

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) October 17, 2021

Ocasio-Cortez raised just over $1.6 million to Sinema’s $1.1 million. In fact, she raised more from just small donors than Sinema raised total.

The simple fact is that Sinema’s style of fundraising just isn’t the best way to raise large sums of money anymore. And most politicians ultimately follow the money, which means that they’re now going to follow the people, especially if they’re in swing states that millions of people care about. So if you believe that politicians are corrupt and only do what their donors tell them to do, this is actually good news about the future of the Democratic Party. For now, however, the party’s past still has a death grip on the present.

The post Sen. Kyrsten Sinema Is the Dying Scream of the Corporate Democratic Party appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Mercenaries involved in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in July traveled to Bolivia ahead of the country’s election late last year, according to Bolivian authorities. In a press conference on Monday, Bolivian government officials alleged that the mercenaries were in Bolivia with orders to assassinate Luis Arce, then the leading leftist candidate for president. Arce served as finance minister under former President Evo Morales and was the presidential nominee of his party, Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS.

Bolivian authorities connected the plot to an effort, previously reported by The Intercept, by ex-Defense Minister Luis Fernando López to import U.S. mercenaries into Bolivia ahead of the election to block the left from returning to power after Morales had been ousted in a coup a year earlier.

Leading the advance team in Haiti that ultimately assassinated the president, according to Colombian authorities, was Colombian mercenary German Alejandro Rivera García, now held in Haitian custody.

According to the Minister of Government Carlos Del Castillo del Carpio, Rivera, who goes by “Colonel Mike,” entered Bolivia on October 16, 2020, under passport No. AV 969623, two days before the Bolivian election. He came into Bolivia from Colombia via the Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz and stayed at the Hotel Presidente in La Paz, near the presidential palace.

The Intercept could not immediately independently verify the Bolivian government claims.

The Haitian president assassins were organized by the Doral, Florida-based security contractor Counter Terrorism Unit Federal Academy LLC, which is run by Antonio Enmanuel Intriago Valera and Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, who acted as a recruiter. Both Pretel and Intriago entered Bolivia between October 16 and 19, Bolivian officials said. Like Rivera, they entered via Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz, the home base of the country’s right-wing opposition.

Two other men — Ronal Alexander Ramírez Salamanca, a former member of the Colombian Police, and Enrico Galindo Arias — entered through the Colombia-Viru Viru route, later staying with Rivera at the Hotel Presidente. As Del Castillo highlighted, the hotel is just blocks away from Plaza Murillo, where Arce’s presidential inauguration later took place.

At the press conference on Monday, Del Castillo said that the government had obtained and searched the emails of Joe Pereira, who The Intercept had identified as an organizer of a mercenary plot with López, the ex-defense minister, and that documents found in his possession confirmed the reporting. Del Castillo added that the newly uncovered documents laid out the specific goal of assassinating Arce.

The Intercept previously obtained audio of Pereira conspiring with López by phone. On the calls, López implicated ex-Interior Minister Arturo Murillo as supportive of the plan. Murillo has since been arrested in the United States and faces corruption-related charges.

According to Del Castillo, Pereira’s emails indicated that he sought to hire more than 300 mercenaries, including a former Blackwater contractor and a shooter who had trained with the U.S. military. (In the call shared with The Intercept, Pereira had promised López he could recruit “up to 10,000 men.”)

The Bolivian plot did not come to fruition. Arce dominated the field, making a runoff unnecessary by winning 55 percent of the vote and crushing the right-wing candidate by 40 points. The extent of the victory appears to have drained the energy of the renewed coup plotting.

The post Assassins of Haitian President Named in Alleged Plot to Kill Leftist Bolivian Leader Luis Arce appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In January 2019, Jim Yong Kim threw the global financial development sector into a state of disarray: The former academic and health official announced he would be stepping down the following month from his role as president of the World Bank, opting instead for a cushier gig at a Wall Street private equity firm. For an institution that was already struggling with heightened competition from China and private capital, Kim’s departure — which came as a total surprise — was seen as a setback, as it handed an opportunity to choose a new leader to President Donald Trump, creating worries that the America First champion would pick somebody ill suited for the global role.

As the White House moved to select its new leader, one name very dear to the Trump’s heart kept floating around: his daughter Ivanka Trump. That never came to fruition, though, with Ivanka later telling reporters that though her father had raised the subject, she declined to pursue the position as she was “happy with the work” she was doing as his senior adviser.

Ivanka Trump did, however, aid Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney in the selection process. When the Treasury Department announced Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs David Malpass as the World Bank’s new president, Ivanka released a statement predicting Malpass would be “an extraordinary leader of the World Bank.” (Malpass was in fact a controversial pick, due in large part to his past criticisms of the World Bank.)

But two sources, not authorized to speak publicly, tell The Intercept the talk of Ivanka at the helm went far beyond the realm of Beltway chatter: Trump very much wanted Ivanka as World Bank president, and it was Mnuchin who actually blocked her ascent to the leadership role.

“It came incredibly close to happening,” said one well-placed source.

Representatives for Mnuchin and Ivanka Trump did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the World Bank or the Trump Organization.

Since the World Bank’s creation in 1944, the U.S. has always led the prerogative to name the bank’s president in an informal agreement with European leaders, who are given the job of naming the head of the International Monetary Fund (an arrangement that rather bluntly underscores the Western imperial nature of the international financial institutions).

Prior to her role at White House adviser, Ivanka spent 12 years at the Trump Organization as executive vice president of development and acquisitions. She also launched her own line of fashion products which, according to 2019 financial disclosures, reportedly brought in between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in rent or royalties.

Once in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Ivanka helped launch the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, colloquially known as the “Ivanka Fund”: a World Bank-supported project to raise money for female entrepreneurs in developing nations. It was her work on the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative that White House spokesperson Jessica Ditto cited in explaining Ivanka’s qualification for selecting the next World Bank leader. “She’s worked closely with the World Bank’s leadership for the past two years,” Ditto said.

But that initiative still left her pretty light on experience. “That’s a very thin base to try to establish credibility in this multilateral institution,” said Scott Morris, director of the U.S. development policy program at the Center for Global Development in D.C. “It’s hard to imagine that she would have been viewed as a credible leader. It would be the worst kind of exercise of U.S. power. I have to think as a candidate she would have encountered some resistance. But maybe [the bank’s members] would not have wanted to provoke the U.S. president.”

From the moment her father won the presidential election, Ivanka has been wrapped up in controversy: She falsely testified that she was uninvolved in the 2017 inauguration (a lawsuit alleged that the Inaugural Committee overpaid for event space at the Trump International Hotel in D.C.); she and her husband, fellow presidential adviser Jared Kushner, earned hundreds of millions in outside income while working in the White House; and her Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative was ultimately a flop.

Mnuchin often placed himself between the president and what the Treasury secretary saw as colossally counterproductive moves. His time as a Hollywood producer — making him a representative of the set whose approval Trump craved — gave him influence that others in the administration lacked. He pushed Trump to name Jerome Powell as head of the Federal Reserve and routinely talked him out of random government shutdowns. His successful effort to talk Trump into backing and signing the CARES Act was among his other significant achievements. He also had a habit of dodging responsibility for Trump’s worst excesses. On January 6, he made sure that he was in Sudan.

But given that there’s a growing discontent among the World Bank’s member nations over the U.S.’s unilateral ability to nominate the institution’s leadership, the Ivanka saga could serve as a warning against the status quo. “A growing number of countries don’t like this whole arrangement,” said Morris. “For them to hear how close it was to being the U.S. president’s daughter probably adds fuel to the fire that the Americans are so cavalier about this.”

The post Steven Mnuchin Stepped In to Prevent Ivanka Trump World Bank Appointment appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Late Friday, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., released a statement expressing dismay that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had once again delayed a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill and accusing a “far left faction” of endangering President Joe Biden’s agenda. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus had threatened to withhold their votes for the infrastructure bill if it wasn’t preceded by a larger reconciliation bill, a plan that had been in place since the summer.

“We were elected to achieve reasonable, commonsense solutions for the American people — not to obstruct from the far wings,” Gottheimer wrote.

Gottheimer goes after Pelosi. pic.twitter.com/zal7m4RNxq

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) October 2, 2021

Never mind the fact that Gottheimer himself led a small group of House members to obstruct the larger reconciliation spending bill, which contains many key priorities of the Biden administration’s agenda. And that Biden traveled to the Capitol and, in a private meeting with Democrats, endorsed the progressive strategy to pass both bills at the same time — and encouraged both wings to find a number they agreed on and move forward.

At the end of August, Gottheimer and a gang of eight other House members used their leverage to force Pelosi to schedule a vote on the infrastructure bill that had already passed the Senate with a bipartisan majority. The group of conservative Democrats hoped to cleave it off from the broader reconciliation package, which includes steep tax hikes on the rich and robust social spending.

But come Friday, Gottheimer was the lone name on the statement after, according to Politico’s Heather Caygle, no one else from his “unbreakable nine” would sign on. Later that evening, a Republican representative said one angry Democrat called Pelosi a “fucking liar” for not putting the bill on the floor, and there was little question about the identity of that angry Democrat.

The goal of Gottheimer’s group had been to pass the infrastructure bill and then train their fire on the bigger bill. Free the hostage, then blow up the insurgents. Their demand went against the grain of the Democrats’ two-track strategy, but Pelosi conceded by giving them a date for the infrastructure floor vote: September 27.

Gottheimer and some of his allies then huddled with the dark-money group No Labels, which finances their campaigns and was instrumental in organizing the opposition. “You should feel so proud, I can’t explain to you, this is the culmination of all your work. This would not have happened but for what you built,” Gottheimer told them, according to a recording of the conversation obtained by The Intercept. “It just wouldn’t have happened — hard stop. You should just feel so proud. This is your win as much as it is my win.”

Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., former chair of the right-wing Blue Dog Coalition, celebrated that the victory would let them focus next on fighting the reconciliation package, which he told the group he opposed. “Let’s deal with the reconciliation later. Let’s pass that infrastructure package right now, and don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to spend trillions more of our kids’ and grandkids’ money that we don’t really have at this point,” Schrader said.

But House progressives quickly responded, vowing to block the bill — to hold the line — if it came to the floor without the broader spending bill. Gottheimer remained confident over the next several weeks, saying privately that he was sure the progressives would fold. On September 27, it was clear that there weren’t enough votes to pass the bill, and Pelosi pulled it from the floor, rescheduling it for a September 30 showdown.

On CNN Thursday, Gottheimer gave the bill a “1,000 percent” chance of being passed that day. He never got close, and the bill was pulled again, leaving Gottheimer to meekly argue that the House had not been technically adjourned. Friday would still be the same “legislative day,” he tweeted, and negotiations were ongoing and he was grabbing Red Bull and Gatorade and — hey, where’s everybody going?

It ain’t over yet! This is just one long legislative day — we literally aren’t adjourning. Negotiations are still ongoing, and we’re continuing to work. As I said earlier: grabbing some Gatorade and Red Bull.

— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) October 1, 2021

So Gottheimer, notoriously abusive to his revolving door of staff, had nobody around to advise that his Red Bull-fueled statement might backfire.

The journey of the Congressional Progressive Caucus from punchline to counterpuncher involved decades in the wilderness, followed by a rapid consolidation of power that took Congress by surprise this week.
The roots stretch back to the 2009 and 2010 fight over the Affordable Care Act, when an outmatched CPC was forced to swallow a bill that fell short of red lines they had drawn. More than 50 members of the caucus had signed a letter vowing not to support any health care reform bill that didn’t include a “robust public option,” but all of them did just that in the end.

Two things were clear: The House and Senate needed Democrats who were more progressive, and those progressives needed to be better organized. A few new organizations popped up in an effort to bring that into being. One called itself the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, or PCCC — its abbreviation a troll of the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which it was designed to counterbalance. Separately, then-bloggers Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald organized a political action committee to back progressive challengers in primaries.

Two things were clear: The House and Senate needed Democrats who were more progressive, and those progressives needed to be better organized.

After the midterm wipeout of 2010, many electoral fights took place with little media coverage. Two of the first progressive battles of the new era came in 2012, when a coalition of groups, including the PCCC, intervened in open primaries for House seats in San Diego and New Mexico.

In San Diego, progressives backed Lori Saldaña over right-wing businessperson Scott Peters. In New Mexico, they were for Eric Griego against the conservative Michelle Lujan Grisham. They lost both narrowly, and the losses have reverberated. Earlier this month, Peters cast one of three votes against a committee measure to allow Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs. Lujan Grisham is now governor of New Mexico, where she battles progressives from her statewide perch.

But, thanks in significant part to the organizing around Griego’s campaign, which evolved into a statewide effort, Deb Haaland ran for Lujan Grisham’s vacant seat and won as a progressive. When Haaland was elevated to secretary of the interior earlier this year, the primary campaign for her seat wasn’t left versus center or left versus right but rather who was the most progressive. Even in a race dominated by party insiders, it went to Melanie Stansbury, a progressive state legislator.

This week, the newly sworn-in Stansbury publicly vowed that she would hold the line with the progressive caucus and block the bipartisan bill unless both moved together. Adding rank-and-file members like Stansbury to the caucus’s public list was in some ways more valuable than compiling a list of the usual suspects, showing Pelosi that the opposition wasn’t just deep, but it was also broad.

Throughout the 2010s, the Democrats’ ability to raise small dollars gradually expanded, driven forward by Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign in 2012 and then Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016. Though Sanders fell short, he showed that there was a major base of support for his democratic socialist agenda, in terms of both people and money. That same year, Pramila Jayapal, an anti-war organizer from Washington state whose inspiration to enter electoral politics was Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., was elected to the House.

She and Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin set about transforming the progressive caucus from what former co-Chair Raúl Grijalva had described as a “Noam Chomsky book reading club” into a cohesive unit capable of wielding influence. The caucus set an internal agenda but didn’t have any requirements for joining. In 2018, when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset New York Rep. Joe Crowley, her suggestion of a “sub-caucus” that could be more nimble as a bloc was seen internally as both a hopeful sign and something of a challenge. If the caucus didn’t get itself organized, it would be supplanted by something else.

It wasn’t a certainty until this week that the progressive bloc could hold strong.

During the next Congress, progressives withheld their votes in committee in a fight to strengthen H.R. 3, the bill that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Donald Trump was president, so little that the House did was going to become law, but it was a preseason win of sorts that showed the tactic could work. Ahead of this Congress, the CPC tightened its ideological requirements for membership and shifted to a single chair to become more nimble. In early 2021, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer used CPC intransigence to persuade Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., not to push too hard for deep cuts to unemployment benefits, telling him that progressives would take the American Rescue Plan down in the House if he did. At the same time, Jayapal shied away from a showdown over the $15 minimum wage after only 42 Democrats voted to override the parliamentarian.

Over the summer, the number of progressives willing to hold the line on the infrastructure bill continued growing, particularly as the holdout senators refused to even lay out what they were for and against. But it wasn’t a certainty until this week that the progressive bloc could hold strong.

Ocasio-Cortez said she doesn’t blame Gottheimer for miscalculating. “Honestly, I see why he was so certain, CPC never stood up like this until this week,” she told The Intercept. “Until this week, the most we could scrounge together for a showdown was like 14 members.”

The post How Rep. Josh Gottheimer Got Outmatched by the Congressional Progressive Caucus appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner has filed “statement of candidacy” election papers to challenge Shontel Brown for the Cleveland-area congressional district’s Democratic primary in 2022, federal campaign records show, though she has not made a final decision on whether to officially run.

Turner, a top surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, competed in a special election for the open seat after Rep. Marcia Fudge was nominated to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Though Turner started the race ahead by some 30 percentage points, she was eventually edged out by Brown, a local council representative and chair of the Cuyahoga County Democratic Party, a position she declined to relinquish even after announcing her candidacy. On August 3, turnout was minimal, with Brown winning 35,504 votes to Turner’s 31,202. Brown is now the overwhelming favorite over Republican Laverne Gore in the special election, slated for November 2.

Turner’s filing allows her to keep her campaign apparatus running while making a final decision on a 2022 bid, said spokesperson Angelo Greco, adding that the filing does not guarantee she will make a bid.

Last week, Turner appeared on The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed and hinted strongly at a rematch. “I got all options on the table,” Turner said.

Asked if she thought a normal election would be easier to win for her than a special, Turner said that she did. “Because, first of all, when you got 435 seats, as we are going to have in 2022, plus the Senate seats that are up, you can’t concentrate all that firepower on only one seat,” she said, a reference to the millions in outside money that rained down on her. “And when you’re making a strategic calculus, as somebody that’s looking at all the Democratic seats, they’re gonna be some Democrats running and they are not running in a safe Democratic seat who are going to need that firepower to come save them. So absolutely. The turnout would have been different; we would have more college students who rock with people like me and the progressive movement. That was missing. You would have more people who are going to come out and participate.”

Turner only began hitting Brown hard for allegations of corruption toward the end of the race, and said that in hindsight, that may have been a mistake. “The movement needs to be a little more disciplined, and we gotta be more agile. And we cannot let the lofty issues that change humanity that we’re fighting for cloud our judgment on just how negative, how hard, the corporatist Dems will come at progressives,” she said.

Turner noted that Brown will only have been in office for a short time before the next race begins, and the district lines will be redrawn as a result of redistricting. If the district becomes more working-class, Turner has a better shot, but if it incorporates more of the wealthier suburbs that leaned toward Brown, Turner will have a harder time. “The lines will be different, and also if the person takes office, they can’t take office before November. It’d [then] be the holidays. You know? And then it’s January, right? And February,” she observed.

The Democratic primary is scheduled for May 2022.

The post Nina Turner Files 2022 Campaign Papers but Demurs on Decision to Run appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Today is September 27, which was supposed to be the day that Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., managed to force a floor vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate earlier. His goal was to split the bipartisan bill away from the broader reconciliation bill so that he and his allies could pass the small one and water down or kill the latter. The dark-money group No Labels that is backing his effort has made that goal explicit.

Gottheimer won the concession of a vote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but, crucially, he didn’t win a promise of a successful vote. So the Congressional Progressive Caucus organized its members into a bloc and vowed to vote against infrastructure unless the bigger bill came along with it. Twenty-two House Democrats went on the record saying they’d withhold their votes; Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and 10 Democrats backed them up. The media took a long time to catch on but finally realized that — wait a minute! — these people are serious. Late last night, Pelosi sent out a letter announcing that the vote would be pulled. Debate on the bill starts today, but the vote has been rescheduled for Thursday.

In years past, progressives would not have been able to make a threat credible enough to get the vote pulled from the floor. So what’s different this time? For one, primaries matter, and in 2020 progressives ousted a handful of corporate Democrats and won open primaries against right-wing, business-friendly Democrats.

But that still doesn’t quite explain it, because progressives are still in general stuck with a structural disadvantage: They actually want to pass things, whereas centrists are happy never passing anything. Progressives have little leverage, since the choice is often between getting a little bit of something and getting nothing. That’s exactly what happened with the Affordable Care Act. Progressives vowed that they wouldn’t support a health care bill without a robust public option, and in the end they were told, here’s the final bill — it’ll give insurance to 20 or 25 million more people and expand Medicaid, but it has no public option. Are you a yes or a no? Faced with that choice, a progressive member of Congress is going to vote yes 99 out of 100 times.

What’s different this time is that the corporate Democrats actually want something. They worked really hard on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and it includes a ton of corrupt giveaways their financial backers really want.

Don’t take my word for it — here’s Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, talking to NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur, quoted on Twitter: “The crap written by those 12 rump senators, who are all pro-fossil-fuel actually, does virtually nothing to reduce fossil fuel pollution from transportation. So I’m trying to fix that in reconciliation. They basically took out all of our climate provisions. They took my electric bus program, and they cut it and then they said oh, and a third of the money has to be spent on fossil fuel buses. I mean, they’re such jerks… The industry could’ve written their bill.”

House Transportation Chair @RepPeterDeFazio on Senate infrastructure bill: “The crap written by those 12 rump senators, who are all pro-fossil-fuel actually, does virtually nothing to reduce fossil fuel pollution from transportation. So I'm trying to fix that in reconciliation.”

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 22, 2021

DeFazio on BIF: “They basically took out all of our climate provisions. They took my electric bus program, and they cut it and then they said oh, and a third of the money has to be spent on fossil fuel buses. I mean, they're such jerks… The industry could’ve written their bill.”

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 22, 2021

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called out the industry influence on Instagram when asked if she’d be willing to tank the bipartisan bill if it didn’t come with the other one.

Rep. AOC is a NO on infrastructure without reconciliation.

"Nothing would give me more pleasure than to tank a billionaire, dark money, fossil fuel, Exxon lobbyist-drafted 'energy' infrastructure bill if they come after our child care and climate priorities."

Video via source: pic.twitter.com/ZR2nGP58BM

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) September 9, 2021

That is what makes this moment different. For progressives, the choice isn’t between getting something that’s just OK and getting something that’s good. The bipartisan bill is in many ways a step backward, an actively bad piece of legislation that would make the world a worse place if not paired with the climate and social policy piece. Just spending more money on roads and bridges and fossil fuel infrastructure while the world burns isn’t half a loaf. It’s not even stale bread. It’s straight up moldy. Throw it in the compost.

For once, centrists and progressives both have an interest in getting something passed, and that’s why it’s so important to keep the two pieces linked to each other. Even Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who has threatened to block reconciliation, has done nothing back home except brag about her ability to get the bipartisan infrastructure bill finished and talk about how addressing climate change is our highest priority. Sinema is now claiming that she won’t support any increases in either the corporate tax rate or the personal tax rate for the wealthy in reconciliation. If she holds firm in her defense of the Trump tax cuts, all of this maneuvering may end up being for nothing. Yet at the same time, it’ll be hard for her to explain why she blew up her priorities just to protect Trump’s tax cuts.

The post Pelosi Delays Infrastructure Vote After Progressive Pressure appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The dark-money group No Labels remains optimistic that it has been able to delink the bipartisan infrastructure bill away from the larger reconciliation package that includes the bulk of the Biden agenda, with the possibility of outright killing the bigger bill still in play, according to a note sent by the group’s executive director to its donors.

“It is now clear that the reconciliation package will be delinked in time from the infrastructure bill and will be less than $3.5 trillion (if it passes at all), in theory making support from House Republicans for the infrastructure bill more likely,” the email from Margaret White reads.

The message goes on to applaud Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema for her relentless fight on their behalf.

The reconciliation package includes major investments in combating climate change, support for child care and elder care, and expansion of Medicaid and Medicare, among a host of other policy advances. But major donors to No Labels stand to see significant tax hikes to offset those costs if the reconciliation package becomes law. The House Ways and Means Committee approved $2.9 trillion in new taxes on the rich over the next decade.

Progressives have insisted that both packages go together so that centrists don’t simply notch a victory on the bipartisan bill and then turn around and kill the more expansive piece of legislation. Centrists have claimed that progressive fears of such a betrayal are unfounded, and that while they also support the Biden agenda, they simply want to approve the bipartisan infrastructure bill as quickly as possible. Those assurances lose credibility each time the financial backers of the centrist Democrats celebrate the possibility they may be able to kill reconciliation, even if they do so in semi-private.

In White’s email, she acknowledged that her group was short of the votes needed to pass the bipartisan legislation on Monday, because progressives have vowed to oppose it until the reconciliation package is on Biden’s desk. “The biggest warning sign is on the left, where the Progressive Caucus leadership continues to object to the delinkage and claims they have the votes to kill the infrastructure bill, leading them to suggest Speaker Pelosi should cancel the vote or risk embarrassment,” White wrote. “In the post-Brexit, post-Trump, free-agent, populist era in which we live now, don’t assume that Speaker Pelosi and President Biden can definitely deliver the votes on the left.”

“This only reinforces that No Labels is not only No Values but now also No Clue,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis.

President Joe Biden hosted multiple groups of Democrats at the White House on Wednesday, meeting with an ideological range of his party colleagues. “The best way to help the American people is by passing the President’s Build Back Better Agenda, which includes the Build Back Better Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure agreement,” said Pocan, who was present for the meeting. “The President agreed and reiterated his position that we need to pass both to move America forward. The debates we’re having are not about progressives versus moderates, but it’s a fight between the special interests who don’t want to pay their fair share and making sure we build back better for the American people.” White did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted that she told the president during the meeting that a majority of her members — enough to sink the bill — would vote no if both pieces of his agenda were not finished.

The full text of the email from White is below.

Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2021 12:03 p.m.
Subject: State of Play Update

I wanted to share this note to provide both a state of play update on the critical infrastructure negotiations but also as a call to action for our community to reach out to Senator Sinema’s office and thank her for her heroic efforts in working to get this bill over the finish line. Please see below:

Days to promised infrastructure vote: 5

Vote count: well short of 218 public commitments

Latest news:

Mostly good!

* The infrastructure vote has been reaffirmed by the Democratic leadership for Monday (or perhaps Tuesday or later next week if the debate goes long).

* Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer seem determined to whip the vote to get the bill passed and have begun the process, making a strong argument for the substance and politics of the measure.

* The President is scheduled to meet in person at the White House today with House members to get them on board. Josh Gottheimer is expected to be among those there.

* It is now clear that the reconciliation package will be delinked in time from the infrastructure bill and will be less than $3.5 trillion (if it passes at all), in theory making support from House Republicans for the infrastructure bill more likely. 

The biggest warning sign is on the left, where the Progressive Caucus leadership continues to object to the delinkage and claims they have the votes to kill the infrastructure bill, leading them to suggest Speaker Pelosi should cancel the vote or risk embarrassment.

In the post-Brexit, post-Trump, free-agent, populist era in which we live now, don’t assume that Speaker Pelosi and President Biden can definitely deliver the votes on the left. 

To get to 218 votes, the Speaker and the President are going to have to keep a very high percentage of House progressives on board, while House Republicans will likely have to deliver more “yes” votes than currently exist. 

All of this remains tied up in what the media continues to pay more attention to, which is the partisan standoff over the debt ceiling and a potential government shutdown. How that will impact getting the majority vote for infrastructure remains a mystery 

Message/actions of the day:

* Support Senator Sinema by calling her office to show your encouragement: 202-224-4521.

The post Dark-Money Group to Donors: Reconciliation Bill Can Still Be Killed appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough actively organized against Democratic efforts to reform the filibuster throughout 2013, working closely with a bipartisan group of senators hoping to stave off the rules change, MacDonough told a law school audience during a 2018 commencement address at Vermont Law School.

By 2013, Senate Democrats faced a long backlog of judicial and executive nominees, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell thwarting the party’s efforts to confirm the Obama administration’s nominees at every turn. Outside of a few holdouts, Democrats in the Senate were pushing to eliminate the filibuster on judicial and executive appointments below the Supreme Court level. MacDonough played a highly political role in the intense dispute, she recounted.

MacDonough said in her commencement speech that while her nominal job was to assist the elected senators in the body, she felt her true allegiance was to the institution of the Senate, which is cloaked in a heavily contested mythology. “I represent the interests of my unseen client, the institution of the Senate itself. While serving its hundred members on a day-to-day basis, I still represent the Senate,” she said.

“It was the protection of the Senate’s rules and precedents that brought me into conflict with the Senate majority back in 2013 when talk of overturning the Senate’s cloture rule for nominations by what is called ‘the nuclear option’ was revived,” she continued, referring to the parliamentary procedure that lets the Senate override a standing rule by simple majority. “It was my duty to advocate for preservation of that rule and in doing so, I worked with all the gangs.”

The term “gang” is used in the Senate to describe an ad hoc working group of senators, generally from both parties, who’ve formed a group on a temporary basis with a particular goal in mind. A Gang of Six formed to hash out health care reform in 2009, for instance, and a Gang of 10 worked on the recent bipartisan infrastructure plan in the Senate. In 2005, a Gang of 14 got together to fend off changes to filibuster rules when it was Democrats who were holding up George W. Bush nominees.

Offering technical advice to a gang would be well within the scope of her job but, as MacDonough made clear in her address, she allied with the centrists looking to block reform. “We worked on compromise orders; I was warning of nuclear winter, the erosion of the Senate’s trademark comity, and the danger of setting such a precedent,” she said. “I cautioned against the loss of the 60-vote threshold as a bulwark against pressure from the executive branch. I hoped that there would be some understanding that the rules that some in the Senate wanted to amend for a limited advantage were there to protect them from disadvantage in all other circumstances. And for a time, it seemed as though the center would hold.”

MacDonough described the ultimate reform to the filibuster — which allowed the Obama administration to staff its agencies and appoint judges — as a “stinging defeat.” “By November, the argument was lost; the chair on my advice ruled against a point of order on lowering the threshold for cloture, but an appeal was taken, and I was overturned. It was a stinging defeat that I tried not to take personally. That wasn’t easy,” she said.

Her understanding of the event as a “stinging defeat” suggests an expansive view of her role in the Senate.

Of course, she was not overturned because she made no ruling. As parliamentarian, she only advises the chair of the Senate, who is either the vice president or a senator. She reports to the secretary of the Senate, who reports to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Her understanding of the event — a majority of senators voting to implement new rules in the chamber where they are elected to serve — as a “stinging defeat” suggests an expansive view of her role in the Senate.

The fight to reform the filibuster has brought the Senate’s real history into relief, with a number of Democratic senators having read the recent book “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” a history of the filibuster written by Adam Jentleson, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The book, along with individual education sessions conducted by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., has helped senators understand that the filibuster was not part of the original Senate design, was introduced by accident, expanded in a fluke, and then ruthlessly exploited almost exclusively in defense of segregation and white supremacy.

MacDonough noted that in 2017, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., ended the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, she felt a sense of empty vindication. “It will never feel good or rewarding enough to say ‘I told you so’ when people finally understand the point of which you were trying to convince them,” she said.

The notion that McConnell would not have ended the filibuster if Democrats had resisted doing so is at odds with every norm McConnell had been willing to break to keep the seat open, including refusing to entertain a nominee from President Barack Obama.

That year, MacDonough took heat from the right for barring some elements of the Affordable Care Act from being repealed through reconciliation, and from the left for allowing drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve to go through. But, she said, she had no regrets, and she wasn’t going anywhere. “As a senator said to me recently, if last year didn’t make you retire, you’re never going to go,” she said. That’s just fine with a majority of senators in both parties, Senate insiders said, explaining that MacDonough enjoys an immense amount of popularity on both sides of the aisle and that firing her now would likely blow up any chance of moving anything through reconciliation. Having an unelected bulwark to blame for an inability to govern is a bipartisan thing.

Having an unelected bulwark to blame for an inability to govern is a bipartisan thing.

In any event, she did stick around, and in February scotched the Democratic effort to include a minimum wage increase in reconciliation, despite the Congressional Budget Office finding that the policy had a significant deficit impact. MacDonough’s confidence in her position was expressed in the opinion she delivered. After hearing extended arguments from both parties, and sorting through dueling memos, she issued a one-line verdict simply declaring the minimum wage ineligible for reconciliation. The hubris of declining to offer any advice, and instead simply rendering a verdict, infuriated some Democrats involved in the process.

Her opinion, issued Sunday, on including a pathway to legal residency and citizenship in the Democrats’ reconciliation bill suggests that MacDonough took the criticism to heart; this time around, she actually explained her reasoning as to why, she judged, immigration reform shouldn’t be part of reconciliation. But the way she did is indicative of how far removed the position is from that of a staffer offering parliamentary advice. She begins it like a Supreme Court opinion: “The question before us is …”

For a provision to clear what’s known as a “Byrd bath,” there is a six-prong test. Five of those prongs — no need to go into them here — are fairly objective. The sixth, the most subjective, is the “merely incidental” test. A policy can’t be included if its budget impact is “merely incidental.” A staffer offering guidance would let principals know how a policy fared on each prong, and in cases where there’s a gray area, present competing arguments and precedents. Instead, MacDonough waxed poetic about the trials of migrants and then created a brand new precedent that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would bar any significant legislation from moving through reconciliation.

“The reasons that people risk their lives to come to this country — to escape religious and political persecution, famine, war, unspeakable violence and lack of opportunity in their home countries — cannot be measured in federal dollars,” she wrote. That’s a lovely sentiment, but it has nothing to do with interpreting Senate rules. MacDonough should run for office, and in the meantime, the Senate needs staff that can offer unbiased advice.

The post Senate Parliamentarian Played Highly Political Role Against Filibuster Reform in 2013 appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

An unprecedented slate of 50 insurgent candidates is teaming with a viable gubernatorial ticket in an effort to throw out the Democratic political establishment in Rhode Island.

The 50 candidates will all be part of the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, a novel formation that seeks to give insurgents the benefits of scale and coordination that the party establishment has long relied on. Candidates paid dues into the co-op, and the co-op helped candidates manage their races and execute the mechanics of a campaign that are often daunting to first-time challengers. They join Matt Brown, a former Rhode Island secretary of state, who’ll be running for governor; and Cynthia Mendes, the recently elected state senator now running for lieutenant governor.

“We have looked at and talked to a bunch of progressive partners around the country — West Virginia did West Virginia Can’t Wait,” said Brown, referencing the 2020 grassroots movement to bring a pro-labor electoral infrastructure to Charleston. “The co-op model is, we think, kind of a breakthrough in progressive political organizing because the candidates pay dues and that means that the co-op can provide direct services to them, everything A to Z: campaign manager, recruitment, candidate training, writing campaign plans. So it’s really like running a statewide, coordinated campaign for 50 candidates.”

The Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate organization, has already endorsed the slate and is out with an ad promoting the bloc of candidates.

After Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Wall Street-friendly venture capitalist, resigned to become President Joe Biden’s commerce secretary in March, Lt. Gov Dan McKee, a moderate Democrat, was sworn in as governor. McKee and a handful of other Democrats are also vying for governor in 2022.

Brown challenged Raimondo in 2018 but did so without a statewide network, losing in the primary 57-34 percent, or roughly 28,000 votes.

But this time, Brown has a stronger progressive network to tap. The Rhode Island Political Cooperative won 10 of its 24 races in the 2020 election cycle: two for city council, five for state Senate, and three in the House.

Those victories shook up the state legislature. The General Assembly, which had balked at a minimum wage increase for years, quickly passed a bill lifting the minimum to $15 an hour, while making additional nods in a progressive direction.

But for the insurgents, it quickly became clear that a more wholesale sweep was needed. Mendes, who had knocked off the finance chair, said that she was taken aback at the apathy and callousness on display from her Democratic colleagues. “As a state Senator, I witnessed really up close and personal the apathy and negligence of our government and just how they just refuse to work on behalf of the people even in the moments of our greatest need,” she said. It was one thing to intellectually understand the corruption of the state government, but it was another thing altogether to see it up close.

It was difficult, Mendes said, “to deal with the ache of being in that space and realizing how much they didn’t care.” Mendes, a single mom and a nurse, said that the gap between her everyday life at home and her life in the statehouse was monumental. “To live in a community where there’s a sense of urgency that there are deep needs around us, and that we need to address them, and then go into a chamber where people are interested in going to fundraisers, and getting a headline, and getting in front of a camera — it’s actually surreal,” she said.

“We just can’t wait for corrupt politicians to start caring,” Mendes said.

The post A Slate of More Than 50 Progressive Candidates Looks to Take Over Rhode Island appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

When Joe Biden entered office in January, Democrats knew they had two years to enact a mountain of critical legislation before midterm elections threatened their slim majorities in the House and Senate. That two-year window is now down to roughly one. But much of that time will be spent campaigning, meaning that the next month or two will shape the direction of not just the Biden administration, but arguably also the course of U.S. and global politics for decades to come.

With the administration’s $3.5 trillion vehicle careening toward a September 27 deadline, conservative Democrats have been at work trying to derail the White House’s ambitious agenda. First, they cobbled together a small, corporate-friendly bipartisan infrastructure package that they hoped would take the steam out of the larger effort. When that didn’t work, the conservative bloc pushed to shrink its size down from $6 trillion to $3.5 trillion, then pushed to decouple the two efforts. They are now threatening to destroy it altogether.

Last week, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., reentered the fray, telling Biden that if the infrastructure bill wasn’t passed on schedule, she would vote no on the crucial reconciliation package, as Politico Playbook reported this morning. Over the weekend, Axios reported that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was advocating yet again for a “strategic pause” to the spending, this time until 2022.

Their maneuvers risk — or are intended to cause — a complete sabotage of the Democrats’ once-in-a-generation chance to address pressing climate, health care, and immigration issues. The media, meanwhile, struggles to narrate the byzantine parliamentary moves required to push legislation through the Senate with a simple majority, making the entire fight difficult for a weary public to follow.

As the Democrats press forward with their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, the confusion has led to multiple cycles of coverage suggesting that this or that Democratic priority had been killed, or this or that provision had been approved. But in reality, the bill is still being written, and its ultimate authors are still picking from among the various pieces of text to pass through committees, ditching some elements and adding others that never went through the process. Its destination is the House Budget Committee and, most importantly, the House floor.

Democratic Reps. Kathleen Rice of New York, Scott Peters of California, and Kurt Schrader of Oregon were the focus of significant (and well-earned) ire last week for blocking a measure in the Energy and Commerce Committee that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. There are few policy priorities that Democratic candidates have spent as much time promising voters they’d accomplish if given the opportunity.

But the trio’s theatrical votes against the provision by no means doom it. Party leadership can reinsert it through a so-called manager’s amendment in the Budget Committee, meaning that those three members’ opinions on drug pricing are only worth caring about if they are strong enough to drive them to vote the whole package down. And if a member is opposed to the bill entirely — as Schrader has suggested that he is — then what they think of an individual provision is meaningless. Only their vote on the House floor matters.

On the floor, Democrats can afford to lose just three votes, and both Schrader and Stephanie Murphy of Florida are expected to be nays. Maine Rep. Jared Golden is always a tough vote for Democrats to get. But one formerly reliable no vote, Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, was knocked into retirement in 2020, thanks to a progressive primary challenge by the seat’s current incumbent, Marie Newman; she’s expected to vote yes.

Both Peters and Rice, for their part, are expected to vote to approve the final package on the House floor, having made their stand on behalf of Big Pharma in committee. So why did they make a show of voting against it there? The industry has flooded Peters with nearly $90,000 this year and has been steadily airing ads thanking him for his support in his district. Rice’s reasoning is a bit more obscure. Big Pharma has given her just over $6,000 in the same time frame, but the industry’s stakeholders are some of the New York Democrat’s biggest donors. An executive at Novo Nordisk’s largest shareholder, hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and his relatives have collectively given Rice Victory Fund, a political action committee affiliated with the congresswoman, more than $100,000 in the past three election cycles. And, a former Nassau County prosecutor, Rice ran for New York attorney general in 2010 and heavily weighed a second bid in 2018 before bowing out. She’s considered a likely candidate the next time the position opens up, and given the higher ambitions of Attorney General Letitia James, that might not be long.

The Budget Committee, whose members will be the ultimate writers of the reconciliation bill that makes to the House floor, is generally more progressive than the more powerful committees like Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce. This is because of the structural corruption on which Washington’s political economy is built. It comes down to fundraising: The latter committees have jurisdiction over the economy’s major power centers, so those industries shower members of those committees with campaign donations. Like a host shaping itself synergistically with a parasite, members of Congress who are most eager for corporate contributions tend to fight for spots on the committees, and leadership tends to award them. The concentration of more corporate-friendly members on powerful committees means that less powerful committees — Budget; Education and Labor; Judiciary — wind up being stacked with progressives.

Under regular order, the power imbalance works out well for corporate lobbyists. But a reconciliation process empowers the Budget Committee, making it a less effective defense against the landmark piece of legislation.

Peters sits on the Budget Committee, where he can again register his objection. But this objection will likely be harmless, because the rest of the committee — which is chaired by Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky and includes progressives such as Barbara Lee of California, Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and Jan Schakowsky of Illinois — is broadly supportive of the drug-pricing effort. One member who does have a centrist voting record, Jim Cooper of Tennessee, is facing a serious primary challenge from the left back in his district. The threat ought to help keep him on board.

The rising importance of the typically obscure panel was underscored this weekend when Yarmuth was invited to appear on “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.” Yarmuth suggested that the floor vote for the final package would slip past the September 27 deadline and into early October, but he expressed little doubt that the prescription drug provision would make its way back in.

“I’m not sure there are very many in the Democratic caucus on either side of the building that actually are opposed to negotiation on prices of prescription drugs, I just think it’s the methodology used,” Yarmuth said, adding that his committee would pull from other proposals being kicked around in other House committees and in the Senate.

The Senate, however, brings in another complication to the process. Many House Democrats are loath to vote on a large tax-and-spending bill that then dies in the Senate, creating pressure for what’s known as “pre-conferencing”: effectively a deal between the two chambers that is arrived at before the conference committee where they meet. Because of this, holdouts like Sinema and Manchin may actually have more influence over the Budget Committee and a potential manager’s amendment than any of the House members we heard from last week.

There are just days to go until the self-imposed infrastructure deadline and a possible government shutdown, and weeks from default if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling. Because the bicameral, multicommittee process is one of the party’s only shots to enact its agenda without grappling with the filibuster, everything is getting thrown into it — including immigration and labor reform. That structure is now reaching a breaking point. Over the weekend, the Senate parliamentarian, a staffer who serves in an advisory role that Democrats treat like a magistrate, warned that their version of immigration reform ran afoul of reconciliation rules. Democrats are able to move forward against her guidance if they wish but would again need buy-in from Manchin and Sinema to do so. Something’s gotta give.

The post Right-Wing Democrats Ramp Up Assault on Biden Agenda appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

A surprising coalition in the House of Representatives muscled a robust child care subsidy past skeptical deficit hawks in the Education and Labor Committee last week in the first significant demonstration of power of a budding alliance between vulnerable Democrats who represent suburban swing districts and outspoken progressives. The change eliminates means-testing to the subsidy, which will be included in the party’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.

Over the past generation, Democrats in swing seats — known in Congress as “front-liners” or “majority-makers” — have consistently voted significantly to the right of progressives, hoping that a moderate voting record would appeal to their divided districts. Often, those Democrats represented rural, culturally conservative districts in which federal spending was coded as federal help for Black and brown people.

The shifting terrain of American politics has upended that calculation, as vulnerable Democrats are now more likely to represent suburban districts where federal spending is weighed on its own merits, rather than pressed through the sieve of American race relations. The suburbs themselves are a creation of redlining, subsidies geared toward white families in the wake of World War II, and white flight following desegregation and the civil rights movement. But the suburbs have become more integrated, and many white suburban voters seem to consciously support racial justice movements, opening up new potential for a realigned politics.

At issue was the design of the child care subsidy, which is part of a reported $450 billion plan that also includes pre-K. Drawing from the traditional Democratic playbook, centrists suggested the subsidy, which caps costs of child care for a family at 7 percent of income, should be means-tested and available only to those who make up to 150 percent of their area’s median income. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, or CPC, wanted the subsidy to be universal — and found allies in swing-district Democrats whose voters would benefit from that universality. Many parents in the suburbs would find their incomes above the threshold for benefits yet have tremendous difficulty affording child care. When middle-class voters feel like their taxes are paying for benefits for others while they struggle themselves, it’s a recipe for economic resentment, which fuels the type of reactionary politics that powered Republicans in the suburbs for years.

Over the past several months, CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal teamed with front-liners interested in expanding the subsidy, including front-line Education and Labor Committee members Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J.; Jahana Hayes, D-Conn.; and Susan Wild, D-Pa. California Rep. Katie Porter, who is both a front-liner and a lead CPC member, played a part in the organizing too, Jayapal told The Intercept, given Porter’s leading role as a child care advocate.

Last week, Jayapal met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to lay out the group’s demands, and, according to Jayapal, Pelosi offered to move the threshold to 200 percent as a concession. That wasn’t enough, she said, as the demand was universality. The committee is stacked with progressives; Reps. Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Raúl Grijalva, and Mondaire Jones also serve on the panel. (The full text of the subsidy detailing what child care services would be funded has not yet been released.)

Jones said he was surprised the media didn’t pick up on the “major flex by progressives allied with moderates.” Jones, Bowman, Hayes, and Omar are serving on the committee only because they won primaries against more conservative Democrats. (Jones earlier this year introduced the proposal with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as a stand-alone bill called the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act, which called for a $700 billion investment.)

The group threatened to tank the entire bill if their demand wasn’t met, and Education and Labor Committee Chair Bobby Scott gave in. “I believe that the underlying bill is more than generous in terms of benefits,” Scott said, according to a report in Politico Pro. “And the reason that I’m giving credence to this amendment is because, without it, the members of the committee are threatening to jeopardize the entire bill.”

Jayapal said that what finally tipped the fight in their direction was an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office that making the program universal didn’t actually increase its cost significantly. After all, even though it’s universal, wealthy parents would be unable to claim it because their costs for child care won’t rise to 7 percent of their income.

The CBO estimated an added cost of only $10 billion, which helped gain the support of members who were undecided, said Hayes, who co-sponsored the amendment with Sherrill and Jones. “I think the CBO score moved some of the members who were on the fence,” Hayes said. “We also made the committee aware that we would remain united in our position.”

“That was the most important factor and it was what we thought all along but we could never get the CBO score until the very last night,” Jayapal noted.

On Twitter, Sherrill said the subsidy would be especially helpful to women who left the workforce as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and haven’t been able to return. Women represented just 12 percent of new jobs created nationwide last month and face major risks to their long-term earning power after taking a long time off work, she added.

“We all benefit when our best talent is participating in the workforce,” Porter said on Twitter. “But right now, parents—especially women—are being forced out due to the lack of affordable child care options. If we want a strong economy, we need to invest in making child care affordable for all families.”

This is at least the second time that progressives have aligned with front-line Democrats in recent memory. During Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s effort to split the infrastructure bill from the reconciliation package, a number of front-line Democrats publicly pushed back against him.

The post Unusual Progressive-Centrist Alliance Wins Universal Child Care Subsidy appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Heather Bresch, the former president and CEO of the drugmaker Mylan, worked directly with the CEO of Pfizer to keep prices of the company’s EpiPen product artificially high, according to new documents released as part of an ongoing lawsuit.

The documents also show Bresch approving a scheme to force customers, captured by the company’s monopoly, to purchase two EpiPens at once, regardless of medical need. The EpiPen is an auto-injectable device that injects epinephrine into the body and can be the difference between life or death for a person suffering a severe allergic reaction.

The documents were released as part of an ongoing antitrust suit in federal court. In June, Judge Daniel Crabtree issued a summary judgment partially siding with Mylan and partially siding with the plaintiffs, meaning the case goes on. Late last week, the judge unsealed some of the documents underlying the plaintiffs’ case.

Among the documents is an email sent on behalf of Bresch, who is the daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to her counterpart at Pfizer, then-CEO Ian Read. In the email, sent in January 2011, Bresch confirms a previous discussion with Read in which she says that the two agreed that as part of a deal, Pfizer would disinvest from its EpiPen competitor, Adrenaclick. Eliminating its main competitor would then allow Mylan to continue raising its prices.

Email on behalf of Heather Bresch.

Image: Federal Courts

In 2007, when Mylan acquired rights to market the drug from Merck (by buying its specialty pharmaceuticals subsidiary Dey), a two-pack cost less than $100, a tiny fraction of what it costs today. The result of the deal with Merck was that Mylan manufactured part of the EpiPen delivery system, but not the medication itself, while owning the brand name and the right to distribute the whole product. The drug itself was produced by King Pharmaceuticals, which manufactured it exclusively for Mylan.

King in 2010 announced it would be purchased by Pfizer, which was licensed to sell Adrenaclick, an EpiPen competitor, the previous year. The deal between Pfizer and Mylan led the former to withdraw its competitor from the market and partner with Mylan on Epipen, locking down a monopoly. Following the deal with Pfizer, Mylan drove the price above $600 within five years. Meanwhile, Gayle Manchin, Bresch’s mother, lobbied states to require schools to stock epinephrine as the head of the National Association of State Boards of Education. Gayle Manchin was recently confirmed to serve as co-chair of the federal Appalachian Regional Commission, a government agency tasked with promoting economic development across the region’s 13 states.

Cutting a deal with Pfizer to divest from its competitor may be brazen enough, but to memorialize the agreement in an email produces a startling window into the ways in which corporate executives are able to manipulate markets.

The email, sent on behalf of Bresch by her assistant, includes the subject line “Our discussion.”

I’m sending you this email as a reminder that you were to send me confirmation relative to our discussion regarding EpiPen. In that discussion, you indicated that you would be divesting your Adrenaclick product once the Pfizer/King deal closes. I understand your tender offer is closing today, so I would appreciate receiving your response as soon as possible.

Bresch did not respond to a request for comment, but Mylan has consistently said that it has done nothing wrong in how it sets the price of its EpiPens. In 2016, Bresch testified before Congress about the price increases and expressed some limited regret that some customers had paid the full list price, while noting that many others paid less due to agreements with insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers. “Looking back, I wish we had better anticipated the magnitude and acceleration of the rising financial issues for a growing minority of patients who may have ended up paying the full price or more,” Bresch said. “We never intended this.”

Amid news of the King acquisition, Mylan, according to market analyst reports at the time, was worried that Pfizer would push ahead with its generic version and also cut Mylan out of the market. In 2010, EpiPen was dominant, controlling 91 percent of the worldwide market and 96 percent of the U.S. market, according to its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but Adrenaclick was climbing quickly in market share.

A Mylan deal with Pfizer would enrich both companies: By divesting from Adrenaclick and continuing to allow Mylan to sell the EpiPen at inflated prices, both firms would split the profits from the more expensive version, allowing Pfizer to earn more than if it drove down prices with its cheaper version.

The two schemes were separate but mutually reinforcing.

With the monopoly locked down, Mylan made its next move, a plan to eliminate its single-pack EpiPen in the United States and instead require customers to purchase two pens at once. The monopoly had created space for the new scheme, and the new scheme created extra revenue that Mylan split with Pfizer — thus entrenching the monopoly and warding off generics — and also set aside to dole out as rebates to third parties who might complain, according to the internal correspondence. The two schemes were separate but mutually reinforcing.

The idea to eliminate the single pack was batted around internally in late 2010 and early 2011, according to emails produced as part of the suit. Mylan executive Bruce Foster proposed the idea as a way to “double revenue” and create a “strong potential generic defense.” By January 2011, it had become dubbed “Project X2” or “Project Times Two,” and executives spent the next several months executing it.

PowerPoint slide explaining Project X2.

Image: Federal Courts

The company’s executives cited no medical justification as the purpose for the change at the outset of the project and later sought to generate one.

Ivona Kopanja, an associate project manager in Mylan’s marketing and sales operations division, wrote to two other employees in March 2011: “Senior management is having a meeting with Heather April 1 and wanted to provide her with an update on Project X2. I know that you were working on creating a ‘medical’ rationale for Project X2? I’m pulling a slide deck together that will be used. Would you be able to forward me the information I should include for the rationale (and the way it should be worded)?”

In May, the company’s medical professionals raised concerns that the plan did not align with medical guidance, according to an email COO Lloyd Sanders sent to Bresch. But after Bresch “learned that the co-pay that ‘most’ patients pay is the same for a single as it is for a two-pack, she became VERY motivated to pull the singles,” according to an email from Sanders that was not released publicly but quoted by the judge in the recent opinion.

The company also conducted market research and concluded that since it was a matter of life and death, customers would suck it up and buy two pens if that was the only choice. Marketing material disclosed as part of the lawsuit includes a number of quotes from caregivers, physicians, and others making that point.

Excerpted from marketing research, a quote from a caregiver.

Image: Federal Courts

By May, the emails indicate, Mylan had begun pitching Pfizer on the project, suggesting that it could become a billion-dollar brand if done right. Bresch continued pushing the idea through June, and in July, the two companies met. “The team met with Pfizer,” wrote Sanders, “they are completely on board.”

Mylan executives told Pfizer that the scheme would likely succeed because EpiPen revenue was “‘below the radar’ for most managed care organizations,” according to an email released as part of the judge’s recent order. The judge’s order also quotes from Bresch’s deposition, in which she said Mylan didn’t “persuade … Pfizer on anything,” and called the latter company a “partner in the product.”

In August 2011, the EpiPen single pack was eliminated in the U.S., as the executives watched for public blowback. Mylan concluded there was no “need to call/write FDA,” as “it’s not necessary and will raise more questions than we have answers,” according to an email quoted in the order.

On August 20, 2011, Pfizer announced it was discontinuing its EpiPen competitor. A note from a Needham & Company analyst announcing the news observed that Adrenaclick “recently hit a peak share of 10 percent of the epinephrine market,” cutting into EpiPen’s dominance from a year earlier, when all competitors had been at just 4 percent. Pfizer executives forwarded the note with the subject line “One Less Risk to Worry About; EpiPen Wannbe [sic] from Greenstone Discontinued,” referring to the division of Pfizer that owned Adrenaclick. The email was sent around by Joanne Van Deusen, director of business operations for Pfizer, according to correspondence unsealed as part of the suit.

James Cannon, vice president for generic business alliances for Greenstone, asked an assistant to send the note on to “Dennis.” The assistant forwarded it to Dennis O’Brien. O’Brien had previously been president of King Pharmaceuticals Canada and was by then serving as Meridian Medical Technologies, the division of Pfizer that partnered with Mylan to produce the EpiPen. O’Brien subsequently forwarded the news to Tom Handel, senior vice president for commercial pharmaceuticals at Meridian.

By October, Mylan moved to raise prices. “Harry, Ron, Joe, Mike, and I are recommending a price increase now for EpiPen. The original plan was to increase in Dec or Jan assuming there was no backlash from Project X2 at payers. Project X2 implementation has been w/o ANY issues. Last price increase was May 2011. No push back on that either,” Sanders, the COO, wrote to Bresch. “The incremental sales … would be $5.5M – $6.0M and it all drops to the bottom line.” The price surged steadily in the years that followed.

Email recommending price hike.

Image: Federal Courts

Pfizer, while denying wrongdoing, has since settled a class-action suit for price fixing and will pay $345 million over the company’s practices related to the EpiPen market. A suit against Mylan, which also denies wrongdoing, is ongoing, and Bresch has faced scrutiny in the past for the company’s pricing of the lifesaving drug. In 2019, Mylan officially merged with Pfizer’s Upjohn unit to form a new company, Viatris, and Bresch began the process of stepping down, taking with her a $37.6 million exit package. She retired from Mylan in December 2020.

Bresch had been named chief operating officer of Mylan in October 2007, a promotion that immediately sparked a scandal when the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that her claim of having a master’s degree in business administration from West Virginia University was false. Bresch’s father Manchin was the state’s governor at the time, and the school soon corrected the paper, saying that she had indeed obtained the degree. A subsequent investigation concluded that the initial answer had been right: Bresch had been far short of a degree, and university administrators fabricated grades to get her over the line, leading to multiple resignations from the university’s senior leadership. Manchin was elected to the Senate in 2012.

Manchin last week urged Democrats to take a “strategic pause” in consideration of the party’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, the centerpiece of the Biden agenda. A key component of the bill would lower drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies. That market power would save the government and patients billions over the next decade, but perhaps even more importantly, it would give the government greater insight into how pharmaceutical executives set prices. The change could reveal the type of collusion that keeps those rates high, exposing companies to risk of regulation or prosecution.

The post Heather Bresch, Joe Manchin’s Daughter, Played Direct Part in EpiPen Price Inflation Scandal appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

On the afternoon of October 9, 2009, President Barack Obama met with his top generals, Cabinet officials, and his vice president to hash out strategy for the war in Afghanistan. Earlier that morning, Obama learned he’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The war in Afghanistan was now eight years old, and Obama had campaigned on the idea that the Bush administration’s effort there had been headed in the wrong direction.

Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus, along with much of the military brass, were pushing for a troop increase of 40,000 to 85,0000 in Afghanistan. Doing so would allow for a counterinsurgency strategy, they claimed, and would give the Americans time to recruit and train a larger Afghan national army and police force. The pivotal meeting is captured in Bob Woodward’s 2010 book “Obama’s Wars.”

Advocates for an expanded war found their most nettlesome opponent in Joe Biden.

“As I hear what you’re saying, as I read your report, you’re saying that we have about a year,” Biden said to McChrystal. “And that our success relies upon having a reliable, a strong partner in governance to make this work?”

McChrystal said yes, that was the case. Biden turned to Karl Eikenberry, a former general who was now ambassador to Afghanistan. “In your estimation, can we, can that be achieved in the next year?”

Eikenberry told Biden no, it was not possible, because there was no strong, reliable partner in Afghanistan. Eikenberry followed with a pessimistic 10-minute assessment of the situation and pinpointed another logical failure that would manifest itself more than a decade later. “We talk about clear, hold and build, but we actually must include transfer into this,” Eikenberry said, adding that to eventually withdraw, the transfer was key.

Eikenberry said he “would challenge [the] assumption” that the U.S. and the Afghan government were even aligned. “Right now we’re dealing with an extraordinarily corrupt government,” he said.

Petraeus, when he spoke, acknowledged what had become obvious. “I understand the government is a criminal syndicate,” he said. “But we need to help achieve and improve security and, as noted, regain the initiative and turn some recent tactical gains into operational momentum,” Petraeus said, adding that he “strongly agreed” with McChrystal’s pitch for a larger force.

Biden cut in: “If the government’s a criminal syndicate a year from now, how will troops make a difference?” he asked.

Biden was getting at something fundamental: Did anybody believe what the generals were proposing was actually possible? Biden’s questions were largely ignored by the war planners, but the conversation held in that meeting makes clear that the answer was readily available by 2009: It was not possible and would collapse quickly once U.S. support was drawn. Instead of following Biden’s lead, the Obama administration allowed the carnage to drag on fruitlessly for another 12 years.

Woodward’s next lines are the most telling: “No one recorded an answer in their notes. Biden was swinging hard at McChrystal, [Defense Secretary Bob] Gates and Petraeus.”

Biden pressed on. “What’s the best-guess estimate for getting things headed in the right direction? If a year from now there is no demonstrable progress in governance, what do we do?”

Again, no answer.

Again, Biden asked: “If the government doesn’t improve and if you get the troops, in a year, what would be the impact?”

Finally, Eikenberry responded. “The past five years are not heartening,” he said, “but there are pockets of progress. We can build on those.” The next six to 12 months, he added, “We shouldn’t expect significant breakthroughs.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, said that the dilemma was whether to focus on adding troops or better governance. “But not putting troops in guarantees we won’t achieve what we’re after and guarantees no psychological momentum. Preventing collapse requires more troops, but that doesn’t guarantee progress.” She added, “The only way to get governance changes is to add troops, but there’s still no guarantee that it will work.”

Richard Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, chimed in with a reality that was largely kept from the U.S. public. “Our presence is the corrupting force,” Holbrooke said. Woodward then paraphrased his explanation: “All the contractors for development projects pay the Taliban for protection and use of roads, so American and coalition dollars help finance the Taliban. And with more development, higher traffic on roads, and more troops, the Taliban would make more money.”

He added that the numbers were all fake, noting that he had sent staff to investigate the claims being made by contractors that they had trained a massive number of Afghan police. About 80 percent of the force was illiterate, he said, drug addiction was common, and that was for the police officers who actually existed. Many, he said, were “ghosts” who got paychecks but never showed up.

He said that with a 25 percent attrition rate, McChrystal’s projections for the growth of Afghan forces was mathematically impossible. “It’s like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it,” Holbrooke said.

Holbrooke’s argument is largely paraphrased by Woodward because, known as somebody willing to speak uncomfortable truths in high-level meetings, he was somebody the other officials had simply begun to ignore. Wrote Woodward: “Several note takers had learned to do the same thing when Holbrooke embarked on his discourse. They set down their pens and relaxed their tired fingers. The big personality had lost its sheen. He was not connecting with Obama.”

Biden’s summation, said Woodward, returned to the theme that the project was doomed due to the failure to have built a real Afghan government. Obama thanked his advisers for getting him closer to a decision. On December 1, he announced publicly he’d be surging 40,000 new troops into Afghanistan, while preparing for an exit. The surge came, but it was left to Biden to finally lead the way out.

The post Biden’s Basic Question in a 2009 White House Meeting Exposed the Folly of the Afghanistan War appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The dark-money group No Labels offered to raise $200,000 for two of the so-called Unbreakable Nine — the House Democratic faction blocking the party’s agenda this week — if they would cancel an appearance last Saturday at a Napa Valley fundraiser hosted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, according to two congressional sources familiar with the proposal.

Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux, D-Ga., and Vicente Gonzalez, D-Texas, had both been scheduled to appear at Pelosi’s fundraiser, which was jointly hosted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Their appearance would have created awkward optics for No Labels because the group had been working to project a united front of opposition to Pelosi’s legislative agenda, which hinges on a plan to hold back a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in order to maintain leverage over a complementary $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. The larger package includes significant tax increases on the private equity barons and other wealthy individuals who fund No Labels, and the group has unleashed a flood of money in order to stop it.

Bourdeaux attended Pelosi’s fundraiser. Gonzalez canceled his appearance. “Absolutely no such agreement was made,” said Isaac Baker, a senior adviser to Gonzalez. Margaret White, executive director of No Labels, denied there was any such offer. “This is false,” she said.

An official with the DCCC said that despite Gonzalez’s lack of attendance, his campaign will still benefit from the fundraiser.

“Congressman Gonzalez spent the weekend at home in McAllen, Texas, to work on safely evacuating Americans and our allies out of Afghanistan, and to monitor the urgent situation at the border and a spike in COVID-19 cases that is overwhelming local hospitals,” Baker added. Bourdeaux did not respond to texts or voicemail messages requesting comment.

On Tuesday afternoon, after the group secured a promise of a floor vote on the infrastructure plan by September 27, Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., the leader of the rebellion; Bourdeaux; Jared Golden, D-Maine; and Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., gathered over Zoom with dozens of No Labels donors for a victory lap. “You should feel so proud, I can’t explain to you, this is the culmination of all your work. This would not have happened but for what you built,” Gottheimer told them, according to a recording of the conversation obtained by The Intercept. “It just wouldn’t have happened — hard stop. You should just feel so proud. This is your win as much as it is my win.”

The call was led by Andrew Bursky, managing partner of Atlas Holdings, a major private equity fund in Connecticut, which operates heavily in the construction and development sectors. “When it comes to their ringleader this is about one thing and one thing only: blocking tax increases on the private equity guys who fill his campaign account,” said one House source, reflecting the broadly held view among House Democrats that the effort by Gottheimer and No Labels was singularly focused on preventing tax increases on the wealthy, corporations, and tax-advantaged sectors like private equity and hedge funds. “No Labels professes to value bipartisanship, but from my experience they value ‘buypartisanship,’” said Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a former No Labels member who resigned from the group when they declined to disclose donor identities. “Clearly they want to advocate for their donors more than good government, and that means things like corporate tax breaks and the like.”

The efforts by No Labels donors come as corporate groups have pushed to defeat the investments in combating inequality funded through taxes on the wealthy and certain business sectors. The finance industry has deployed dozens of lobbyists on Capitol Hill to block the infrastructure provisions centered on increasing taxes on private equity. Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of the largest publicly traded companies in America, has retained former Democratic staffers to fight the tax provisions.

Whether the House’s concession on infrastructure amounts to a win is dubious and hotly debated on Capitol Hill, but there’s no question No Labels has organized its donors to fight the taxing and spending battles of the Biden administration.

In June, No Labels co-founder Nancy Jacobson — the spouse of operative Mark Penn, a mentor to Gottheimer — was explicit in her plan to use donor money to “reward” members of Congress who voted the way the organization insisted, according to audio of another private meeting, which The Intercept obtained that month.

“Now the truth is, there’s no other group in the center that’s putting the hard dollars together,” Jacobson told a group of donors in the June meeting, which also included Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. The term “hard dollars” refers to money given directly to a candidate for federal office, which candidates find more valuable than outside spending because they have full control over their own funds, whereas super PACs make their own spending decisions. Candidates also have access to discounted television commercial rates, while outside groups pay the full freight. Jacobson noted that while many other dark-money organizations put up “big numbers … that’s a lot of soft dollars, it’s a lot of super PACs, it’s things they don’t control. They” — members of Congress — “love the hard dollars, and I would be hard-pressed to think of any other group that can raise that sort of money. Our hope is at least $20 million over the cycle with this group, and hopefully keep doubling it as we go.”

Jacobson added that the recipients of the largesse remained to be determined. “We’re gonna see what happens with this next vote and we want to reward those people that, you know, get to party solutions,” she said.

By making the linkage between votes — known in the legal ethics world as among a set of “official acts” — and campaign funding so explicit and direct, No Labels isn’t just exposing members of Congress it supports to accusations of run-of-the-mill corruption, but also potentially exposing them to legal liability. On the question of whether accepting campaign funds as a “reward” for the right vote on the infrastructure bill would break the law, a Congressional Research Service summary explains that accepting such money could indeed be off-limits, if it was given because of how they voted: “The prohibition on bribery precludes officials from accepting contributions in exchange for performance of an official act. The prohibition on illegal gratuities does not require that the contribution be made in exchange for the official act, but instead precludes officials from accepting contributions made because of the official act.”

On Tuesday, Gottheimer said that both the White House and congressional leadership had put intense pressure on the group, but the support they had from their donors was key to bucking up their strength. “We got on the phone every single day for a conference call and everyone stuck together. And they beat the shit out of us. Excuse my language. They really, really were tough on us. I mean, they used every single thing, every tool they had to put pressure on us and you know it, and they wanted us to break apart and we wouldn’t break apart,” he said during the Zoom meeting. “You had people from the DCCC threaten our members to cut them off financially. People threatened redistricting, people threatened primaries — our own people, our own leadership. Justice Democrats, which is the Squad, are running ads against me and my colleagues in our district right now. But we fought back and you all really helped us.”

Kurt Schrader, the former chair of the Blue Dog Coalition, told the group Tuesday that the so-called win gives them leverage to target the reconciliation package. “This is a big deal. I just wanna thank you guys so much for your support, having our backs, being a big part of why we are, where we are today,” he said.

“Let’s deal with the reconciliation later. Let’s pass that infrastructure package right now, and don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to spend trillions more of our kids’ and grandkids’ money that we don’t really have at this point,” Schrader said. The Oregon lawmaker went on to note that severing the traditional infrastructure vote from the broader package showed that bipartisanship is still alive and well. “You can build real relationships. … I’ve talked to a lot of our Republican Congress members. It’s a huge win.”

On Monday, Pelosi and her leadership team put the screws to Gottheimer and his crew, deploying the range of threats Gottheimer described later. No Labels put out an ad defending what they dubbed the “unbreakable nine,” characterizing them as heroes of our time and comparing them to the late politicians Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Chase Smith, and John McCain.

Aside from Bursky, the Tuesday evening donor call was attended by a slew of some of the country’s richest people, who all stand to pay high taxes thanks to the multitrillion-dollar legislation’s design to balance its spending with revenue increases on corporations and the wealthy. A variety of approaches have been floated, from raising the corporate income tax rate to increasing funding for the IRS so that the agency could pursue audits of complex, high-end tax returns. The bill’s backers also contemplate changing the structure of the tax code for private equity firms and hedge funds, whose partners currently enjoy much lower tax rates than wage earners.

The call’s list of attendees included billionaire Howard Marks, co-chair of Oaktree Capital Partners; Andrew Tisch of Loews Corporation, whose name is plastered around New York City thanks to the Tisch family’s charitable giving; Gordon Segal, the co-founder of Crate & Barrel, now managing director of the private equity firm Prairie Management Group; Kenneth Schiciano, managing director of major private equity firm TA Associates; Pelican Ventures’ Jim Stanard, founder of RenaissanceRe and former chair of TigerRisk Partners LLC; Jim Tozer, managing director of real estate investment firm Vectra Management Group; John Cushman, chair of global transactions at commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield; Steve Fifield, head of his real estate investment firm Fifield Co.; and former Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a co-founder of the group.

The source who provided the recording acted out of disappointment that powerful donors would come together to try to sink the side of the spending effort focused on “social economic inequities that we see in this nation.”

The broader reconciliation bill — focused on unprecedented investments in free child care, education, and health care — represents the most transformative program in decades to alleviate poverty, benefits that will disproportionately flow to many communities that have experienced systemic racism in the past. The source said the fact that No Labels would mobilize its strength to defeat such a groundbreaking proposal provided the motivation to share the recording with The Intercept.

“For every one dollar investment in the early development of a child, the returns are double digit, in terms of workforce participation, health care, longevity, crime reduction,” said the source.

“These No Labels donors are overwhelmingly old, rich and white people, from finance and from Wall Street,” the source added, noting that deficit concerns are only raised in the context of spending, not when taxes on the rich are slashed. “They don’t mind the tax cuts [they got previously]. And they don’t talk about ‘pay-fors’ when it’s a tax cut. They only care when it’s a program to confront systemic racism that is embedded in the numbers in terms of poverty.”

The post No Labels Offered Conservative Democrats Hundreds of Thousands to Spurn Nancy Pelosi Fundraiser appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

In January 2017, when Rep. Josh Gottheimer was a first-term Democrat representing a wealthy northern New Jersey district, he had an invitation to the 80th birthday party for a senior member of his state’s delegation. The region Rep. Bill Pascrell represented abutted Gottheimer’s, but it couldn’t have been more socioeconomically different, containing the working-class city of Paterson and a stretch of the Jersey Shore. Pascrell was hosting the party at a favorite hometown bar in Paterson, something of a dive on the outskirts of town called Duffy’s.

Paterson wasn’t the type of area where Gottheimer spent much time, but it wasn’t an actively dangerous spot. Not only was the bar a regular haunt of the local congressional representative, it was owned by Terry Duffy, a town freeholder, the state’s version of a city council member.

Gottheimer agreed to brave the journey to Paterson to celebrate his colleague. But when he arrived, it was clear that he’d taken a confounding set of precautions: Gottheimer was accompanied by an off-duty police officer and showed an unusual amount of bulk under his shirt.

“Are you wearing a bulletproof vest?” Pascrell asked his first-term colleague. Gottheimer acknowledged that he was but went on to say, by way of explanation, that he had been doing a ride-along earlier with the officer and had worn the vest as a result. The explanation, even were it true, failed to explain why he was still wearing the vest at the party. A round of heckling and wisecracking ensued, drawing the attention of Terry Duffy.

The freeholder was not amused. He threw Gottheimer out of his bar.

Gottheimer’s foray into Democratic caucus politics this week wasn’t much better thought out and didn’t end much differently than his foray into Paterson. After Senate Democrats approved both a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill on August 11, along with a budget resolution instructing Senate committees to write a $3.5 trillion package that would be passed using the rules of reconciliation — meaning that Republicans couldn’t filibuster it — Gottheimer announced a demand for an “immediate” vote on the infrastructure bill. That day, he got eight other Democrats to join him in signing a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outlining the demand. The dark-money organization No Labels, funded by a bipartisan set of billionaires and millionaires with opaque policy interests, soon began calling them the “unbreakable nine.”

On Monday night, Gottheimer succeeded in holding together his rebellion and even gained another dissident in Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla. This forced Pelosi to pull a vote on the resolution, which was bundled with a procedural vote on the infrastructure package and a voting rights measure. But by Tuesday morning, the resistance was broken. The demand for an immediate vote was placated by a promise of a vote by September 27.

The jockeying by Gottheimer was the latest effort by conservative Democrats to regain leverage over a process that has gotten away from them. The first effort to do so was the bipartisan deal itself. Though that legislation, which picked up 19 Republican votes in the Senate, is heralded as evidence that the Senate can still work despite the obstacle of the filibuster, it was the threat of passing a major piece of legislation via reconciliation — requiring a margin of 50 votes only — that galvanized the bipartisan crew to get to a deal. The hope was that the latter deal would drain support for the former. That didn’t happen, and Democrats pushed ahead with their $3.5 trillion project.

In an interview with Punchbowl News, Gottheimer said he wanted to pass the infrastructure bill quickly to get “shovels in the ground,” but his real motive became clear as negotiations unfolded. Pelosi offered the Gottheimer rebels a vote on the infrastructure bill by October 1, and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, suggested that the House could finish work on its final reconciliation package by then. It would be a tall order, but not impossible. Seeking to win back the leverage the conservative faction had recently lost, the Gottheimer group then shifted its demand to sometime earlier in September.

Gottheimer and his allies’ true motivation for insisting on an earlier vote was always baffling, according to Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. “I honestly really don’t [know] because we cannot spend infrastructure money until after the new fiscal year,” said Schakowsky, who serves in the Democratic Party’s leadership as senior chief deputy whip. “I’m mystified,” she said. “I can’t figure this out.”

Earlier on Monday, Democratic leaders painted a bleak picture of the consequences if enough lawmakers were to side with Gottheimer against the rest of their party. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland warned the caucus that defections would result in “mutually assured destruction.” That could be disastrous for the party’s agenda, because if Democrats lose their majority in 2022, they may not get it back “for 40 years,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C.

The $3.5 trillion bill is the legislative vehicle that Democrats are using to pass President Joe Biden’s most ambitious goals: a Medicare expansion to include hearing, vision, and dental; paid family leave; universal preK3 and preK4; an extension of the child tax credit to 2025; and billions of dollars for clean energy and other climate initiatives. With Republicans in stark opposition, Democrats are relying on the budget reconciliation process that allows Congress to pass spending and revenue measures with a simple majority.

Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Pelosi can hardly afford any desertions since Democrats hold a slight majority in the House and Senate. Anticipating hesitation from centrists, they devised a two-track strategy to attach the $3.5 trillion package to a smaller bipartisan infrastructure bill that funds new projects for roads and bridges that moderates have long championed.

While Gottheimer may have won a face-saving victory by securing a date, his win didn’t change the underlying dynamic that gave progressives leverage in the first place: Pelosi can promise Gottheimer a vote, and might even deliver on it, but she can’t promise enough votes to pass the bill. Democrats in the Congressional Progressive Caucus have pledged to oppose the infrastructure bill if reconciliation isn’t ready, and many of them reiterated those promises on Tuesday, even as members of Congress filtered off the House floor, having just approved the procedural motion 220-212.

Following the vote, the Chamber of Commerce, an ally of No Labels and Gottheimer during the fight, applauded the crew for having “decoupled” the infrastructure bill from reconciliation by winning the promise of the vote. But had they done so? If progressives still have the votes to sink the infrastructure bill without the accompanying reconciliation package, then the bills are not decoupled. That’s not a fundamentally different dynamic than prevailed last week.

“It has to be both, they have to be together,” said Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., the whip for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told The Intercept that the caucus’s insistence on coupling the two measures had not changed. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., agreed.

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, one of the “unbreakable nine” — who became 10 before being broken — told The Intercept that he wasn’t worried about progressives voting down the infrastructure bill if it broke onto its own track on September 27, because he expected to pick up Republican votes. “We’ve got at least 10, 12 Republicans,” he said, and the progressives will fall in line. “They’re going to support the president, I feel very confident.”

Gottheimer had felt equally confident. In an interview with The Atlantic, he explained that his move was an attempt to fulfill Biden’s agenda and that the White House was supportive of the effort. Asked if that was the case, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said simply: “No.”

The post Already, Cracks Emerge in Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s “Unbreakable Nine” appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Jack Keane has had a busy week.

The retired four-star general has been making the cable news rounds, offering scathing criticism of the White House in wake of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, he appeared on Fox News, where he told host Harris Faulkner that the administration “made a terrible mistake in pulling our troops out and giving the Taliban the opportunity to take the country over.”

“It’s going to become a more dangerous place, threatening America,” he warned. “And the world’s going to be a more dangerous place.”

On another Fox News program earlier in the week, Keane attacked President Joe Biden’s withdrawal plan as “embarrassing” and “ill-conceived,” suggesting that the administration should have delayed until “sometime next year.”

What neither Keane nor the host in either of these segments mentioned is that he has more than merely a patriotic interest in the continued occupation. Keane, a former board member at weapons maker General Dynamics, is chair of AM General, the company that makes Humvees. He also sits on the boards of Cyalume Technologies Inc., which manufactures military chemical lights and other technology deployed on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that publishes defense policy proposals with the aim of “developing the next generation of national security leaders” and is backed by CACI International Inc., General Dynamics, and other defense contractors.

Keane was just one of a parade of ex-military and ex-public officials who appeared on cable news this week to castigate the Biden administration for its withdrawal or for the way it was carried out. Among the other talking heads who took to cable news segments or op-ed pages without disclosing their defense industry ties were retired Gen. David Petraeus; Rebecca Grant, a former staffer for the Air Force secretary; Richard Haass, who worked as an adviser to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell; and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Cable hosts described these guests by their military credentials — not their current jobs as representatives of the defense industry, a sector that has seen extraordinary profits from the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

Petraeus, a retired four-star general who leaked classified information to his mistress and biographer, serves on the board of Optiv Security, a large cybersecurity firm that contracts with the Department of Defense, and is a partner at KKR and Co., a global private equity firm with assets in the defense sector. In early 2020, KKR bought Novaria Group, a corporation holding a growing number of aerospace manufacturers. He called the Afghanistan withdrawal a “Dunkirk moment” on Fox News and told the BBC, “We should literally reverse the decision,” adding, “I feared we would come to regret the decision and we already are. There’s no good outcome unless the United States and its allies recognise that we made a serious mistake.”

Like Keane, Petraeus sits on the board of the Institute for the Study of War; the two ex-military officials are joined by two executives at major defense contracting companies and former Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., known for being a “friend of defense contractors.”

“Nothing shows the value of American force presence like the absence of American forces as we’ve seen in the past month,” said the think tank’s founder and president, Kimberly Kagan, in an interview with Fox News. “America lost the war in Afghanistan. But it matters that we fought it,” wrote its national security fellow Jennifer Cafarella in a blog post. “No nation on earth has ever done more to advance the cause of freedom. No people has sacrificed more. Americans should be proud of that fact, even in defeat.”

Haass, described on MSNBC as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, questioned the decision to withdraw and leveled criticism at the way it was handled. “The first order question is, why the policy?” he said. “I think an incorrect policy was selected here by the president, obviously against many of the advices [sic] he was receiving from the military and others.”

Haass did not mention that he sits on the board of investment firm Lazard, which “actively serves companies in the industrials sector, including aerospace and defense,” nor did he mention his role with Palantir, a leading tech firm in the defense intelligence space.

Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta appeared on CNN with John King to lament a “Bay of Pigs” moment; he was referred to by his previous government service for Democrats rather than as senior counselor to Beacon Global Strategies, a defense consulting firm, or as a member of software corporation Oracle’s board of directors.

Cable news has been criticized in the past for its refusal to reveal conflicts of interest. In 2008, the New York Times exposed direct influence by the Pentagon of retired generals appearing on cable to talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last year, The Intercept uncovered countless links between on-air former military figures defending the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani and the military-industrial complex.

These conflicts of interest don’t just manifest on cable — they can also be found in online and print journalism.

Grant penned a column for Fox News arguing that the blame for the chaos in Afghanistan rests squarely with Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken. To its credit, Fox noted in her bio that as head of IRIS Independent Research “she has specialized in research for government and aerospace industry clients.” When she appeared on CNN Monday to make the same case, viewers were not told of her defense industry ties.

Rice, secretary of state under President George W. Bush, took to the pages of the Washington Post to argue for more time. “Twenty years was not enough to complete a journey from the 7th-century rule of the Taliban and a 30-year civil war to a stable government,” she said, eliding the U.S. role in toppling the pre-Taliban government. “Twenty years may also not have been enough to consolidate our gains against terrorism and assure our own safety. We — and they — needed more time.” She was described with her government titles as well as a current one: director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Left off the bio was her service on the board of C3 AI, a defense contractor.

Many media outlets also tapped former members of Congress to weigh in on the troop withdrawal without disclosing financial ties to the defense contractors that have profited handsomely from the conflict.

“If I was in charge, I wouldn’t have made this decision,” said former Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., speaking to NH Journal. Ayotte warned that leaving Afghanistan would mean that Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terror groups would rapidly “reconstitute in a way that could threaten our homeland in the course of 18 to 24 months.”

Earlier this week, she also appeared on Fox News, slamming the withdrawal as an intelligence failure that “will embolden countries like China and Russia in furthering their narrative, which I do not believe is true, that the U.S. is no longer the superpower.”

But the outlets that gave Ayotte a platform did not disclose that she currently serves as a board member to BAE Systems Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of the British defense conglomerate that has raked in substantial defense contracts throughout the war in Afghanistan.

BAE Systems has been tapped for a variety of services for the Defense Department, including a $50.5 million contract to provide intelligence services for U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan; a $2.7 billion contract for the production of an “Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System” for use in Afghanistan, among other countries; and a $21.9 million contract for services related to maintaining armored vehicles used in Afghanistan.

Trey Gowdy, a former GOP lawmaker from South Carolina, has similarly slammed the Biden decision. He appeared last Sunday on Fox News to deliver a stern monologue, warning that the Biden administration had not “kept our word” to protect the Afghan people. After his service in Congress, Gowdy joined Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP, a South Carolina-based law and lobbying firm that serves a range of defense contractors before Congress and helps defense clients navigate the procurement process with the Pentagon. Fluor Corp., the largest fiscal year 2016-fiscal year 2021 contractor in Afghanistan, which obtained over $3.1 billion in Afghanistan-related projects, is among Nelson Mullin’s most lucrative lobbying clients.

“The question is: Have we kept our word? Have we kept our word to the world that if you attack America, we will follow you to the ends of the Earth to mete out our punishment? No matter how long it takes. Have we kept our word to one another that never again will an attack like this happen on American soil?” Gowdy said.

Gowdy went on to suggest that U.S. troops should not return home unless “we’re leaving Afghanistan safer and freer and better for Afghan women and girls.”

Jim Naureckas, an editor at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR, a progressive media watchdog, said such conflicts of interest put a premium on potential atrocities over existing ones. “The imaginary future bloodshed of the Taliban has so much more emotional weight in the coverage than the actual people who have been killed by the U.S. in the last 20 years,” he said. “There’s a symbiotic relationship between media outlets who need sources, the weapons industry that needs favorable news coverage, and the former military officials who need jobs, and it all works out together.”

The post Cable News Military Experts Are on the Defense Industry Dole appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

The House of Representatives is often compared to a high school, and it’s a useful metaphor. Both have overlapping hierarchies that are at once defined and undefined, official and unofficial. There are official positions, like captain of the varsity basketball team or chair of the Ways and Means Committee, but there are also social hierarchies: who’s cool and who’s not; who has genuine power and who doesn’t.

For new members of Congress, one of the rites of passage is first-year hazing at the hands of more senior members. These rituals all have layers of different purposes, and how a member handles their hazing can influence the relationships they have going forward.

Josh Gottheimer reported to Congress after winning a 2016 election to represent a wealthy district south of Wall Street, and the ribbing at the weekly New Jersey delegation meetings began immediately. Yet five years later, the hazing — much gentler than it might be in a high school sports team — hasn’t stopped. Members of the delegation simply couldn’t bring themselves to stop giving Gottheimer a hard time. Whether it was Rep. Albio Sires putting a stopwatch on his phone whenever Gottheimer arrived, to time how long it took him to leave — never very long — or Reps. Bill Pascrell and Don Norcross mocking him for barely being a Democrat, the hazing has gone on for five years.

The reason is simple: Gottheimer’s colleagues simply do not like him — and that would be trivial gossip of concern to nobody outside a congressional cafeteria if it wasn’t having a real-world effect right now on the prospect of the Biden administration enacting both its bipartisan infrastructure plan and the accompanying $550 billion in infrastructure spending.

Gottheimer and eight of his colleagues have been facing off with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., insisting in a letter sent last week that she bring the bipartisan package for a vote “immediately,” rather than holding it back as leverage to pass the bigger piece. The not-so-veiled goal is to strip progressives of the leverage they have to enact a big reconciliation package, making it more vulnerable to being cut down to size or stopped entirely. Gottheimer worries the larger legislation will mean painful tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy — many of whom have supported his political ambitions. (A spokesperson for Gottheimer did not respond to a request for comment.)

During a House Democratic leadership call on Sunday night, Pelosi mocked Gottheimer’s effort as “amateur hour,” pledging to push ahead despite his threats to stop the legislation. Pelosi is not known for miscounting votes, suggesting that she is confident that enough of Gottheimer’s eight co-dissenters will not stick with him; she’s known to work the phones relentlessly and leaves little to chance.

In some respects, Democrats lucked out in the identity of the lead member of what’s been dubbed the “suicide squad.” Had the effort been organized by somebody less despised internally than Gottheimer, it may have gained more traction. “Josh Gottheimer continues his perfect streak of being the absolute worst member of the House Democratic caucus,” texted one member of Gottheimer’s business-friendly New Democrat Coalition. “A more likeable member could do more damage. But the fact that so many of my colleagues (and across the ideological spectrum mind you) consider him such [an unpopular figure] really does limit his influence.”

At least Gottheimer is making (some of) his donors happy with his challenge to Pelosi. Some of Gottheimer’s largest contributors this year work in private equity, investment banking, and corporate law — all of which stand to gain from the infrastructure bill’s giant investment in public-private partnerships but stand to lose a small portion of their profits if new tax increases are enacted.

According to data from the Federal Election Commission, his PAC, Josh Gottheimer for Congress, raised nearly $2 million in the first half of this year. NORPAC, a group dedicated to promoting strong supporters of Israel, gave $50,000 — most of which was earmarked for Gottheimer by individual donors, like the CEO of the multibillion-dollar Zimmer Partners hedge fund and his family.

Another $26,000 came from the Gottheimer Luria Torres Victory Fund, which is mostly bankrolled by New York-based private equity investor Eric Edell, his wife Deborah, and Randall Winn, a private investment executive based in Florida. Eric Edell and Winn co-manage an investment firm called 22C Capital, and the three collectively donated more than $17,000 to Gottheimer’s PAC during the first six months of 2021 as well.

Another $13,000 came from executives at Comcast, the largest internet service provider in the U.S., which is slated to make huge gains from the infrastructure package’s $65 billion broadband investment.

Gottheimer’s PAC also received $23,500 from executives at private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe; $15,500 from advisers at investment banking firm Centerview Partners; at least $13,000 from attorneys at Big Law firm Sullivan & Cromwell; and more from those working at major financial services companies like Bain, Barclays, and Blackstone.

These kinds of institutions stand to lose from the reconciliation bill’s tax hikes needed to offset the spending increases and have long been messaging about the risks to their investors and clients. On August 11, Sullivan & Cromwell, for example, issued a memo on Oregon Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden’s bill to close a private equity tax avoidance loophole, warning it would result in capital losses. (The corporate raider industry has been accustomed to unprecedented growth in recent years.)

Gottheimer’s effort to thwart the budget resolution has also been stunted by its tardiness, Democrats in Congress said.

“He was late to the game and is having a hard time realizing CPC leadership outsmarted him,” said one senior member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We whipped early and had Dem leadership on board with our strategy like 5 months ago.”

The makeup of Gottheimer’s eight other renegades does not augur well for his rebellion. Pelosi can afford to lose three votes and still get to the 217 she needs, assuming every Republican votes no. There are three vacancies: two in Democratic seats and one Republican seat. (Shontel Brown won’t be seated until November thanks to scheduling done by Ohio’s Republican governor; the seat is only open because Biden named former Rep. Marcia Fudge to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development.)

The eight that Gottheimer was able to cobble together for his letter are: Carolyn Bourdeaux of suburban Georgia; Jared Golden, from a Trump district in Maine; Ed Case from a deep blue district in Hawaii; Jim Costa, from the Central Valley in California; Kurt Schrader, from the central coast of Oregon; and Filemon Vela, Vicente Gonzalez, and Henry Cuellar, who represent adjacent districts in Texas along the southern border with Mexico.

Assuming Gottheimer himself holds firm and votes no, his most likely ally of that bunch is Schrader, a veteran Blue Dog who often bucks the party. Beyond those two, the list doesn’t include any members who Pelosi would have a hard time swaying her direction — whether it’s reminding Costa and Schrader that redistricting is coming to their Democratic-controlled states, or reminding Cuellar that she campaigned and fundraised for him when he faced a challenge from Justice Democrat Jessica Cisneros last cycle. Cisneros is running again, and Vela and Gonzalez will also need Pelosi’s fundraising largesse this cycle as they face difficult races in redistricted Texas.

Case would be crushed in a primary for tanking Biden’s presidency and is known to be highly concerned about climate change, so despite his penchant for deficit hysteria, he’s not a threat to the bill. And the idea that a first-term lawmaker, Bourdeaux, would stare down Pelosi is hard to imagine, especially since Rep. Lucy McBath from the neighboring suburban Georgia district is strongly backing both bills. Golden has shown independence, and Pelosi is likely to give him a pass, meaning she won’t object to his no vote, knowing she has the votes she needs and he believes distinguishing himself from Democrats in the general election is beneficial. (And he’s probably not wrong.)

“The dynamic of Congress is different and moderates aren’t really doing as well as they were under Trump and the Republican Senate,” said the senior CPC member. “Schumer, Pelosi and Biden are finding their agenda isn’t far from the CPC agenda and it’s an easier partnership than with moderates.”

“The dynamic of Congress is different and moderates aren’t really doing as well as they were under Trump and the Republican Senate.”

In 2010, Pelosi managed to win a majority for a climate change bill and for the Affordable Care Act, both of which were considered by swing-district Democrats to be political losers. Those who voted yes did so not because they thought there was a political advantage for them, but because the window for action was closing and party loyalty won out. This time, vulnerable Democrats think there could in fact be political upside in delivering on Biden’s agenda — the climate money, the child tax credit, universal pre-K — along with some potential downside, namely getting blasted for inflation.

But the latter is coming regardless of what Democrats do, so their plan is a novel one in American politics: Actually deliver something, and then run on it. No matter what Josh Gottheimer might think of it.

The post Josh Gottheimer’s Rebellion Was in Trouble From the Start appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.