Last week, Facebook filed a motion with the Federal Trade Commission demanding that its chair, Commissioner Lina Khan, recuse herself from any decisions involving Facebook. Two weeks earlier, Amazon filed the same request, with both tech giants arguing that her previously expressed views on concentration in the tech industry, coupled with her work in Congress investigating Silicon Valley, rendered her too conflicted to fairly regulate the industry.

It’s a brazen claim on one level, as companies never suggest that regulators who cheer on the success of major companies are equally biased in the opposite direction, and if the logic were accepted, it would create a situation in which only allies of Big Tech or those wholly unfamiliar with the industry would be allowed to regulate them.

On another level, it also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of Khan’s antitrust approach, said Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and antitrust expert in a recent interview for The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed. When Khan was nominated to the FTC, the news media universally referred to her by some version of “prominent critic of Big Tech.”

Khan earned that moniker partly through her work as a Hill staffer leading a bipartisan Judiciary Committee investigation into leading Silicon Valley firms, but also through her landmark law review article titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.”

That’s where the confusion comes in. Though Amazon is in the title of Khan’s pivotal 2017 Yale Law Journal article, the company is used as a case study to make a broader point, Teachout noted.

The article is often used to claim that Khan is hostile to Amazon itself, when in reality her paper was grappling instead with the intellectual underpinnings of 40 years of antitrust policy. The introduction to Khan’s paper makes that clear, noting the article “argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to ‘consumer welfare,’ defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy.”

The clarity of the paper’s argument helped drive a major rethinking among antitrust policymakers, as it made plain that the “consumer welfare standard” was simply unequipped for the internet age of platforms. She summarizes her argument in a way that is at once easy to understand and impossible to refute:

We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.

Given that Khan’s skepticism of the reigning antitrust orthodoxy is not specific to the technology sector, the rationale that she should recuse herself as chair would need to extend to every other industry where concentration exists in new ways, which is nearly every industry. As Teachout put it:

Khan’s article was really important about Amazon, but it was about much more than Amazon. It was actually about agriculture. And it’s about airlines. And it’s about pharma. And it’s about the way we think about economic policy. So my pet peeve is you will often see Khan described as a thorn in the side of big tech or a big tech opponent, anti-tech — she’s not anti tech at all. One of the things that we have seen is that these big tech companies are destroying innovations, they’re buying up competitors, they’re choking people who might have more exciting ideas. It’s pro-tech, and it’s about economic theory, not just tech policy.

So it’s very fact-based. It’s very much focusing on what actually happens, not what the theory does. And that’s where Khan’s training is. She started talking to chicken farmers about their experience. She wrote great articles about seeds, and patents, and Monsanto. So she actually started in ag. And then those insights helped her look at big tech without the blurriness and the sort of glamour that tech sometimes brings, where people say, “Tech is totally new! Everything’s disrupted! It’s never happened before.” She went in there and she’s like, “Hey, I’ve seen this. I saw this with Monsanto. I know these practices, because this is what Tyson does.” And I think it’s important to understand her as a pro-innovation, pro-worker, pro-small business, pro-changing-the-way-that-we-approach-equality.

Listen to the full interview here or wherever you get podcasts.

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Democrats have heralded Medicare expansion as a major component of the $3.5 trillion package agreed to on Tuesday night, but that provision is only now being written by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore. By vowing to take hold of the process, Wyden is in effect discarding several years worth of legislative work in the House of Representatives.

Wyden on Wednesday told reporters he believed he had House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s blessing for the rewrite of H.R. 3, House Democrats’ signature bill to allow Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies and use the savings to expand Medicare to cover hearing, vision, and dental insurance. On June 22, Wyden released a set of “principles” to guide negotiations over the Senate’s version of the legislation.

Committee chairs typically release sets of principles ahead of negotiations, which can often go on for several months or years. Wyden has just a matter of weeks as Democrats hope to have the details of the $3.5 trillion package finalized by August or September. “The last couple of weeks have, in my view, been very positive,” Wyden told The Intercept. “For example, after I laid out principles, I talked to a number of moderate senators, they really liked the provisions that promote breakthroughs and innovations in biotechs. They volunteered — a couple of them said, we read the principles, we went right to that section. And then, and I didn’t know about it ahead of time, the speaker apparently at a presser a couple of days ago, said, ‘I like the principles Senator Wyden laid out.’ So what that’s been is an indication that now as we go to writing the details of the program — and we will write the details, it is the job of the Senate Finance Committee — we’re starting with some pretty good signals.”

House Democrats, meanwhile, are concerned not just at the prospect of a full rewrite, but also worried Wyden will narrow what the House has already agreed to, allowing pharmaceutical industry lobbyists another opportunity to water down H.R. 3. Asked about those concerns by The Intercept, he demurred. “I’m not going to get into the details,” he said. “I will tell you that the speaker’s comments last week were very welcomed, particularly by me, because it was an indication that the coalition that I’m spending a lot of time to build — shuttling back and forth between the progressives and the moderates — has some life.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., a member of the Senate Finance Committee, hasn’t yet spoken to Wyden about his intentions for the bill, but he said, “I’m sure there will be elements of the House version but I don’t know that it will be exclusively a mirror of it.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said she hasn’t spoken yet with Wyden about allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, but she’s “looking forward to hearing more from him about what he has to say.”

“Look, I think we need to have Medicare negotiate drug prices. I think we have to bring drug prices down, and I think it needs to be in this package,” Jayapal said, referring to Senate Democrats’ $3.5 trillion deal.

H.R. 3 was sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone, D-N.J. Asked about his reaction to Wyden’s plans, Pallone said: “Empowering the federal government to negotiate prescription drug prices would help save Americans’ hard-earned money while also producing federal cost-savings that we could use to help pay for critical priorities in the upcoming reconciliation package. It’s time for Congress to come together to address high prescription drug prices.”

But Big Pharma is spending furiously to fight H.R. 3, and they even teamed up with some of the building trades unions to run an ad thanking Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., for sticking with them.

The ad, funded by the Pharmaceutical Industry Labor-Management Association, tries to make the case that revenue from higher drug costs allow companies to invest in more research and construction, creating union jobs. Meanwhile, a report this month from the House Oversight and Reform Committee found the 14 leading drug companies spent $577 billion on stock buybacks and dividends between 2016 and 2020: $56 million more than what they spent on research in that timeframe. At that rate, they’re slated to spend $1.15 trillion on buybacks and dividends between 2020 and 2029.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, sought to broaden an earlier version of H.R. 3 while the House Ways and Means Committee was marking up the bill in 2019. He introduced amendments to increase the number of drugs Medicare could negotiate and allow the uninsured to use the resulting lower prices, but only a few Democrats supported the provisions, and they ultimately were voted down by a majority of the committee members, including Chair Richard Neal, D-Mass.

One of the three other Democrats who supported giving access to the uninsured was Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va. Asked for a comment on Wyden’s plans to restart the process, Beyer spokesperson Aaron Fritschner said: “[We] don’t know the details on the Wyden approach and we strongly support H.R. 3, but the most important thing is the results, and if what Senator Wyden does can achieve broad decreases in the cost of prescription drugs Rep. Beyer will gladly support it.”

Democrats have long rallied around the idea of empowering the government to help lower drug prices — clinching to that goal rather than championing more transformative reform to the American health care system, like Medicare for All. After the 2016 elections, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee commissioned a survey that encouraged House Democrats to avoid discussing Medicare for All and instead focus on attacking Republicans trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and, if necessary, decreasing the costs of prescription drugs.

After the late John McCain, former Republican senator from Arizona, helped save Obamacare in 2018, lowering drug prices became a top talking point that Democrats in the midterm election campaigned on. After taking control of the House, though, they were unable to negotiate a deal with President Donald Trump, and again ran on the issue two years later.

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A Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting on Tuesday broke out into a furious argument over the House’s package of antitrust legislation, pitting Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., whose district encompasses a large part of Silicon Valley, against the authors of the series of six bills moving through the chamber.

The argument began when Lofgren, one of the most senior Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee and an opponent of the legislation, noted that she had raised an extraordinary amount of money from Silicon Valley companies over the years, but because she ran in a safe blue district, she hadn’t spent any of it on her own campaign since 1996 and instead distributed it widely to other campaigns.

Raising corporate money and spreading it around the caucus is a common tactic deployed by members looking to grow their power. But it is highly unusual to talk openly about the practice on a legislative caucus call. “It’s a pretty shocking thing to say,” one Democrat on the call said.

The debate devolved into unusually personal terms, sources present for the members-only call said. Lofgren argued that the legislation wasn’t just wrongheaded, but also poorly written — considered a cardinal dig on Capitol Hill. Lofgren said that she hadn’t had enough time to review the legislation sufficiently and knocked the unnecessary dead-of-night committee votes, arguing that the approaches the bills take won’t accomplish what could be worthy goals, while doing collateral damage to the economy. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the chair of the CPC, eventually cut Lofgren off, and noted that despite representing Seattle, the home of Amazon, she has been willing to take on Big Tech.

Antitrust Subcommittee Chair David Cicilline of Rhode Island, the lead author of much of the legislation, was blunt in his response to Lofgren. “Cicilline lost it,” said one Democrat on the call and, according to multiple sources, he accused Lofgren of merely parroting “industry talking points.”

“You may disagree with the bills, you may have other interests you’re trying to protect, but to suggest members of the subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee don’t understand them, with all due respect, is deeply offensive,” Cicilline said, according to multiple sources.

Late last month, the Judiciary subcommittee that handles antitrust policy passed six bills in a marathon 29-hour session. They’re aimed at reining in and breaking up Big Tech, and Lofgren emerged as the bills’ most outspoken Democratic opponent.

That the arguments made by Lofgren against the legislation are the same as those made by Big Tech is not in dispute. But to question the motivation of those arguments, or the link between those positions and campaign funds, is considered wildly out of bounds on Capitol Hill — something that is not to be spoken out loud. One member said Lofgren was offended enough that she was considering organizing a letter of complaint from the California delegation to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the Judiciary Committee chair, also spoke up against Lofgren, though sources differ on how aggressive his rhetoric was: Some said he joined in the ad hominem attacks, while others said he merely stood up for the committee process and for the legislation, though he seemed to enjoy seeing his longtime rival shredded by other committee members.

Nadler and Lofgren have a contentious history. In 2017, when Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers of Michigan stepped down from Congress, Nadler was in line to succeed him, but Lofgren challenged Nadler in what The Intercept described at the time as “the first battle of the anti-monopoly era.”

The article quoted antitrust attorney Jonathan Kanter as saying, “It certainly may raise questions to have someone from Silicon Valley in a position where one of the key responsibilities is to oversee the conduct of Silicon Valley.” Partly if not primarily as a result of those dynamics, Nadler beat her for the gavel, and the committee has been in aggressive pursuit of bipartisan antitrust legislation since. The committee embarked on a two-year investigation of Big Tech, primarily overseen by Judiciary staffer Lina Khan. Lofgren objected to the product of that investigation, a report which recommended legislation to tackle Big Tech’s runaway power.

That staffer, Khan, is now chair of the Federal Trade Commission. And that antitrust attorney, Jonathan Kanter, is rumored to be the leading choice to run the antitrust division at the Department of Justice.

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From left to right, the one thing political observers and participants around the globe seem to agree on is the neoliberal world order that arose out of World War II, and became hegemonic after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is in deep crisis, and has been since the financial crisis of 2008. 

What type of world order will emerge from this crisis is hotly disputed, a question that hasn’t been so open since the 1930s. How exactly the U.S. emerges from this crisis, and in what state, will be significantly determined by the legislative jockeying of the next few months. On left social media, the Biden administration’s obituary has long been written, its death pinpointed in the failure to attach a minimum wage increase to its early stimulus package, and subsequent lack of effort put into a public health insurance option or other campaign priorities. News Thursday of a bipartisan infrastructure deal struck between Congress and the White House was met with a mixture of scorn and boredom. 

Yet the Biden administration agenda that is still very much alive carries arguably far more potential consequence for a fundamental reorienting of the American economy. If the neoliberal order is collapsing, the next few months offer Democrats a perhaps final chance to build something new in its place. 

Democrats have zero margin for error — or senatorial morbidity — in a Senate divided evenly 50-50. In the House, a 4-seat majority gives the party barely more room. 

But Democrats, including their leadership and rank-and-file, are unusually motivated for a party that flinched at its own shadow for the past 40 years. There is broad recognition within the party that Democrats are likely to lose one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections, and that 2022 is unlikely to yield significant legislative opportunities. It’s now or never. 

By enacting major spending bills before that happens, Democrats will be able to continue governing and investing in public infrastructure over the next six years even without control of Congress. This marks a departure from the Obama administration, whose final six years were a tangle of economic stagnation and congressional confrontations over austerity — culminating in the election of Donald Trump. 

And so it is no coincidence that the bipartisan agreement has only been reached after progressive Democrats in the House and Senate insisted loudly that no bipartisan deal could happen without a simultaneous pledge to push through the transformative, multi-trillion dollar agenda using reconciliation, which requires just 50 votes in the Senate.

Over the past week, as Congress negotiated the bipartisan infrastructure package that would include less than $600 billion in new spending, a slew of Democrats in the House and Senate said that they won’t vote for any bill that lacks sufficient funding for climate-related projects and social investments. The White House announced the bipartisan bargain had been agreed to Wednesday night, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, said Thursday morning that the House would not pass the bipartisan bill without a reconciliation package.

“There ain’t gonna be no bipartisan bill unless we’re going to have a reconciliation bill,” Pelosi told reporters at her weekly press conference. “We will not take up a bill in the House until the Senate passes the bipartisan bill and a reconciliation bill. If there is no bipartisan bill then we’ll just go when the Senate passes a reconciliation bill.”

Biden echoed her strategy. “If this [bipartisan deal] is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” he said.

The latter package could add up to another $6 trillion over the next decade, and carries with it the fate of the Biden administration and will significantly shape how the United States emerges from the crisis produced by the collapse of the neoliberal order.

The world order ushered in in the late 1970s and early 1980s involved the destruction of the capacity to govern, deregulation of finance and a hands-off approach to corporate concentration, the crushing of organized labor, and the privatization of public assets, all of it fueling runaway wealth and income inequality, driving millions into poverty, and eroding civic and democratic norms. Upending that order requires a reassertion of the public’s role in the economy. It requires a government willing and able to govern. Essential — though not entirely sufficient — to that projection is the $2.3 trillion package dubbed the American Jobs Plan and the $1.8 trillion American Families plan.

Biden’s first move, a $1.9 trillion rescue package that included direct checks and sizable child tax credits that began rolling out this month, has been followed by months of legislative stagnation. 

The most celebrated element of that initial package was the advent of child tax credits that deliver between $300 and $360 per month, per child to all but the wealthiest families. Those checks began arriving this month, and the main criticism of the project has been that it lasts only one year. The new measure would extend it well into 2025, with some Democrats pushing to make it permanent. 

The American Jobs Plan also includes the PRO Act, sweeping labor reform, much of which can be enacted through reconciliation. Immigration reform advocates have pushed to include elements of their agenda that can go through under reconciliation as well. That’s on top of the hundreds of billions in climate-related infrastructure investments included in the AJP.

News of the bipartisan deal was a blow to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has been working to string out talks as long as possible, with the hopes of running out the clock. But the fact that he has dragged the process along as long as he has is a win, with Democrats now up against the July 4 recess. On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters that the bipartisan bill and the first phase of the reconciliation package would be passed in July. 

The reconciliation bill is a complex process, first requiring a Senate floor vote to set a top-line number and refer work to various committees to fill in details. Once the committees have done their work, they will send the package to the Budget Committee, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who will then move it back to the floor, where it will undergo what’s called a “vote-a-rama” — a night or two of amendments — followed by a final vote. Congressional sources in both chambers said this week that the work on the reconciliation package is far advanced and on target for July.

Some Democrats have argued the entire process must be complete before the House votes on the bipartisan bill, while others have said that as long as it is underway, it’s ok to move. 

“I think we need more than evidence. I think they need to be moved pretty much at the same time,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told The Intercept earlier this week, echoing a strategy she’d first promoted earlier in the month. “I don’t think they can hold the House vote and keep the caucus together unless we have both.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., a member of the Budget Committee, said Monday that Senate committee staff and House Budget Committee staff had been in talks about that very strategy. “The House is the ultimate backstop. My view is that we should get the commitments here,” he said, meaning that all 50 members of the caucus must be committed to doing a reconciliation package before he and other holdouts would vote for a bipartisan bill. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The Intercept earlier this week he’d refuse to vote for a bipartisan bill without a promise of a reconciliation package. “We’d need to be in caucus, look these members in the eye and get a commitment not only that we are going to do reconciliation but some guarantee on the substance of that reconciliation package,” said Murphy. “I think we’ll have to have some tough conversation in the caucus before there are enough votes to proceed on this package.” 

“We just have to have an ironclad commitment that we’re going to go big,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii. 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren used the same phrase. “Ironclad,” she said, when asked what type of assurance she needed that both would get done. Asked what that meant specifically, she said, “It may mean the order of votes. And remember we’re going to have two key votes around reconciliation and getting those top-line votes through in July will be a big step toward getting all of the Democrats committed to a reconciliation package that will ensure that what we do on infrastructure meets the problems that are out there.”

“We have two tracks,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., “but ultimately the two tracks all have to meet in the end to make sure we actually have a climate infrastructure package that dramatically lowers emissions, that has environmental justice at its heart, and that it creates millions of new union clean energy jobs.” (On Thursday, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., started sounding like Markey, telling NBC News, “It’s the only strategy we have—is two track.”

“I think it’s politically close,” Schatz said, adding that the details still needed to be worked out. “It’s a pretty realistic pathway. Everyone has their incentives in line.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have said they won’t support a package that has too much in the way of climate. But they recognize they don’t have the numbers to stop Democrats if they remain united. 

Asked if his support for a bipartisan infrastructure package hinged on Democrats committing not to use reconciliation for a second package, Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said it did not. “It hinges on getting a good infrastructure [bill],” he said. “I don’t have any control over what they do next.” 

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In 1890, responding to a wave of violent suppression of Black voters in the South, Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge, a Northeastern Republican, pushed through a bill to ban poll taxes and give the federal government the power to enforce the 15th Amendment, which allowed all men regardless of race the right to vote. That amendment had been run through Congress on a party-line vote.

The Lodge bill passed the House by six votes, again along party lines, and it headed to the Senate, where it was filibustered for months by Democrats. Despite having majority backing, supporters couldn’t bring it to a final vote, and it was finally taken off the floor in January 1891. With the threat of federal intervention removed, the terror campaign of lynchings and mob violence accelerated. The multiracial populist movement collapsed, as white populists turned on their erstwhile Black populist allies. Deprived of political power and beset on all sides by violence, as many as 6 million Black residents of the South eventually decamped for the North.

There would be no further federal intervention in voting rights for 67 years, until passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, culminating in the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since 1965, the idea that the federal government has a role to play in protecting the right to vote has been a universally held opinion among elected officials. In 2006, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized by Congress and passed the Senate by a vote of 98-0. It included a provision that required states with a history of discrimination in voting laws to preclear any new election laws with the Justice Department. In 2013, in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts struck the preclearance provision down, arguing that the South had changed and that it was no longer necessary.

Southern states began immediately to amend their voting laws, with court documents showing the explicit purpose being to minimize the power of the Black vote in an effort to boost Republican candidates.

On Tuesday, the Senate moved to take up debate on S. 1, the “For the People Act.” The parties having switched sides on the question of voting rights, S. 1 represents the Democratic response to recent voter suppression laws.

This time, 130 years after the Lodge bill, it would be Republicans who filibustered. In explaining the party’s position, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act as recently as 2006, declared that the federal government ought to have no role in elections, a view that would have been at home between 1890 and 1965, but is strikingly radical in a post-civil rights era.

“This is not a federal issue. It oughta be left to the states. There’s nothing broken around the country,” McConnell said at his weekly press conference when asked why Republicans were blocking a voting rights bill from being debated on the Senate floor. “The system upheld very well during intense stress in the latter part of the previous Congress. There’s no rational basis for federalizing this election. Therefore, there’s no point in having an election — a debate in the U.S. Senate about something we ought not to do.”

McConnell was asked what he made of states such as Arizona, which is engaged in a lengthy “audit” of the presidential vote, with state Republicans hoping to overturn the results.

“I’m OK with the states sorting this sort of stuff out,” McConnell said. “The most important election in the country is the presidential election. It’s not decided in Congress, it’s decided in the Electoral College; those are state-by-state decisions, and so regardless of what may be happening in some state, there’s no rationale for federal intervention. They’ll figure it all out, they’ll go to court, they’ll determine whether or not there’s any rational basis for this. That’s not unusual in this country.”

If McConnell considers 1965 through 2013 to be an exception when it comes to federal protection of voting rights rather than the rule, then he’s correct: It’s not unusual. That’s not something to be proud of.

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All 50 Senate Democrats voted to move forward to a debate Tuesday on S. 1, the “For the People Act,” in an unusual display of party loyalty that was met by equal party unity on the Republican side. 

In technical terms, Democrats made a motion to invoke cloture to overcome a silent Republican filibuster of a motion to proceed to debate the legislation. In other words, without actually talking on the Senate floor, Republicans successfully blocked the bill from even moving toward a floor debate. Under Senate rules in place since 1975, 60 votes are needed for cloture. The motion fell 10 votes short of 60.

A yes vote from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was significant, won as a result of weeks of negotiations. In talks that continued through the past weekend, Manchin agreed to a new set of voting rights reforms that went beyond what he had previously entertained, congressional sources who were involved told The Intercept. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told reporters that if Republicans had agreed to move forward, Manchin’s amendment would have been the first up for debate. Manchin continues to tell colleagues that he hopes to find 10 Republican votes to move forward with his legislation, though so far he has only gotten Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to express general support for a voting rights bill.

Manchin’s legislation is still being negotiated and will include new provisions to counter Republican takeovers of election boards, a source involved said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Tuesday she was still in talks with Manchin over a number of provisions. Manchin wants to mandate voter ID, which Klobuchar and other Democrats oppose. Manchin’s version also requires all states to allow mail-in and early voting but does away with no-excuse absentee balloting.

In a statement Tuesday, Manchin said his compromise requires disclosure of any political spending above $10,000. It would also ban partisan gerrymandering, a key goal for Democrats ahead of the 2022 midterms. 

Klobuchar, who chairs the Senate committee that held hearings on the measure, said that the public push for S. 1 would continue over the next several weeks. With 50 Democrats on board for some significant voting rights reform, the question will be whether Manchin agrees to reforms to the filibuster once he concludes that there are nowhere near 10 Republicans willing to go along.

“This is not a finalized proposal, but when you read it, you will see the good-faith effort he has put into it, and it’s not like one of those things where he just puts it out there and we start negotiating,” Klobuchar said. “We’re very far along.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who has been in talks with Manchin, said that the two hadn’t ironed out every difference but that they were moving in that direction. “The important thing is we’re all on the same bill. There’ll be amendments, and Democrats are united around this idea that this is a definitive moment in which we have to protect the sacred right to vote,” Warnock said. 

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he expected text of the Manchin substitute to be released “very, very soon.”

“We’re driving toward consensus, and I think we will get there,” said Blumenthal.

Ahead of the vote, Manchin, who had recently published an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail headlined “Why I am voting against the For the People Act,” released a statement explaining why he would now be voting to move forward on it. 

“Over the past month, I have worked to eliminate the far reaching provisions of S.1, the For the People Act — which I do not support,” the statement reads. “I’ve found common ground with my Democratic colleagues on a new version of the bill that ensures our elections are fair, accessible and secure.”

Voting to move to debate would allow Republicans and Democrats to offer amendments, Manchin said — the type of legislating he often elevates as the goal of the Senate. 

“Unfortunately, my Republican colleagues refused to allow debate of this legislation despite the reasonable changes made to focus the bill on the core issues facing our democracy,” Manchin said in his statement, expressing the kind of frustration Democrats have long said is key to winning his support to reform the filibuster.

The final showdown over the filibuster is likely to come in late July, once it becomes clear that the new version of S. 1 has no serious Republican support. The argument will be helped along if bipartisan infrastructure talks, which have hit a logjam over the fundamental question of financing and taxes, have collapsed by then.

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Republican senators are anything but confident that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., will stand by his op-ed in West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mail this weekend promising to oppose his party’s effort to reform the filibuster along with Democrats’ signature democracy reform legislation.

On Tuesday, civil rights leaders met with Manchin to persuade him to abandon his opposition. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York told reporters that negotiations with the West Virginia senator were ongoing and that changes could still be made to the bill, S. 1, the “For the People Act,” to placate Manchin.

Republicans said they are nervous the pressure will work. “You think it’s over?” asked Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., rhetorically. “I’m not confident on anything until the day after it’s been done, so I appreciated his comments and thought that was a strong, smart move for the country, and I hope that he continues to have that approach to S. 1 as well as to the filibuster.”

S1 would ban gerrymandering and require states to set up independent redistricting commissions, expand the time and avenues people have to vote, and automatically register voters. It would effectively overturn the voter suppression bills Republican legislatures have raced to pass in the wake of the 2020 elections. Without those reforms, experts warn, the U.S. is moving to a form of governance in which Republicans representing a minority of the populace will have durable control over Congress.

The sprawling legislation also includes campaign finance disclosure reforms and federal matching funds for candidates, elements that could be jettisoned in talks with Manchin.

Asked if he thought Manchin’s opposition was a done deal, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., shook his head: “You can’t guess at that.”

Under current Senate rules, set in 1975, any senator can object to moving forward on a bill, and the majority needs 60 votes to overcome the objection. In 2013, Senate Democrats reformed the rules to allow nominees below the Supreme Court level to be approved with a majority vote. In 2017, Senate Republicans again reformed the rules, this time allowing the 50-vote threshold to apply to Supreme Court nominees as well. Democrats in the Senate are now pushing to move all legislation to a 50-vote threshold or require the minority to actually talk on the Senate floor in order to stall legislation.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said that he was encouraged by Manchin’s statement but that given the pressure he was under, the question was far from answered. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said much the same, though in his characteristically more colorful manner. “I don’t know whether he will or won’t,” Kennedy told The Intercept. “He understands that peace of mind up here comes with grabbing a principle and hanging on. He’s pretty good at withstanding the pressure, but they’ve put a lot of pressure on him, they really have. They’ve beat him like he stole Christmas, and they’re not gonna stop. They’re gonna call him names, they’re gonna talk about his mama, they’re gonna do everything they can. Knowing Joe as I know Joe, I don’t think it’ll do any good.”

Sen. Richard Shelby, a one-time Democrat from Alabama who became a Republican as the parties realigned, said that he wasn’t sure if Manchin would hold. “I read the article; it was a strong, explicit statement. I would think it would be a strong word, knowing him, but you need to ask him that,” Shelby said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., insisted that Manchin would remain firm. “I think he will, because I think that’s where West Virginia is at,” he told The Intercept. “He’s a Democrat, and he wants to help his Democratic colleagues, but he represents West Virginia, so from his point of view I think he’s doing his job, he’s telling his Democratic colleagues, from where I come from, this is a bridge too far.”

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In the lead-up to this year’s state primaries in Virginia, two dueling figures have taken center stage: the state’s influential energy company and a clean energy PAC that aims to undercut its influence.

Both groups have poured nearly $6 million dollars combined into rival Democratic primary candidates for state and local races. A race for a state House of Delegates seat in southeast Virginia has seen twice the amount of spending from the two stakeholders alone than it had during the three previous elections combined. In the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, the clean energy group, Clean Virginia, said it would spend $125,000 in attack ads against one candidate just because she accepted donations from the energy company, Dominion Energy. “It’s a war,” said local journalist Brandon Jarvis. “It’s really apparent in these House races; it’s also apparent in the governor’s race.”

The attorney general’s race has played out more quietly. Clean Virginia, which was founded by Charlottesville multimillionaire Michael Bills in 2018, has thrown its support behind progressive challenger Jay Jones, contributing more than a quarter of its total $1.9 million funding. But Dominion has remained out of the picture. Two-term incumbent Mark Herring said in 2018 that he would no longer accept donations from Dominion, arguing that appearing aligned with the energy monopoly helped undermine the public’s trust in government.

But the mysterious $800,000 during the closing weeks of the June 8 election has the Jones campaign crying foul. “DAGA and the Mark Herring campaign are citing legal technicalities and trying to distract voters to cover for their scheme to obscure herring donors from public scrutiny,” said Christian Slater, Jones’ communications director. “The question for Mark Herring is simple: Why are you so desperate to cover up the identities of your donors so voters can’t see them until after the election?”

The funding comes from the Democratic Attorneys General Association, an organization that works to elect Democratic attorneys general across the country and counts Dominion as one of its hundreds of corporate donors. Although DAGA says it is not allowed by law to earmark the donations it receives for certain uses, the organization and its Republican counterpart, RAGA, have previously received millions of dollars in contributions from corporations seeking to anonymously fund attorney general candidates whose jurisdiction overlaps with particular corporate interests. A 2014 investigation by the New York Times revealed the ubiquity of this practice. “Several of the largest donors to the Republican and Democratic Attorneys General Associations are companies or groups that have been targets of investigations or are seeking help from attorneys general in challenging federal regulations,” Times reporter Eric Lipton wrote in the piece.

DAGA’s PAC doesn’t have to disclose its contributors until the Federal Election Commission’s second quarter filing deadline in July. (Virginia election law allows federal PACs registered with the state’s Department of Elections to spend on behalf of local and state candidates.) But even then, the source of the $800,000 between April and June, when the money was spent on payroll, digital consulting, and media, won’t ever be clear, since DAGA’s second-quarter filings won’t reveal how DAGA spent the contributions it received.

“Several of the largest donors … are companies or groups that have been targets of investigations or are seeking help from attorneys general in challenging federal regulations.”

Although it’s difficult to know exactly where the $800,000 came from, Dominion is the fifth-largest donor in Virginia politics this cycle (right after Clean Virginia) and has donated to all of Herring’s past campaigns, save for his brief gubernatorial run in 2018, dating back nearly every year between 2006 and 2017. Critics have accused Herring of going easy on the energy giant in the past: In 2018, Herring declined to speak up against a controversial pipeline funded in part by Dominion and a state bill that would make it difficult for the state to lower electricity rates. When reached for comment about the $800,000 in DAGA spending, Herring’s press secretary referred The Intercept to a DAGA spokesperson.

Herring took a harder stance against Dominion in 2020, denouncing the company’s pipeline and suing the monopoly for environmental violations. Herring’s office has also expressed support for changes to Virginia’s regulatory framework that would prevent Dominion from collecting millions of dollars in over-earnings every year, following outcry from the state’s general assembly.

Jones has been a vocal opponent of Dominion for years and has made public utility regulation a touchstone of his campaign. During his tenure in the state’s House of Delegates, Jones served as chair of the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, where he filed several bills aiming to reel in Dominion’s unchecked power by compelling Dominion to refund its over-earnings to customers. In a Washington Post op-ed Jones co-authored in 2019 with another state delegate, the candidate called for “reform” to Virginia’s energy economy and for “restructuring our energy market to remove barriers to entry” — a potential threat to Dominion’s monopoly.

The attorney general is tasked not only with prosecuting the utility monopoly for illegal activity, such as environmental violations, but is also expected to weigh in on the current statewide debate raging about Dominion’s over-earnings and outsize power.

Dominion isn’t the only possible funder of the DAGA campaign for Herring. It’s plausible that one of DAGA’s larger contributors, such as a powerful law firm, could have been behind some of the contributions or that the money came from a wide variety of sources, as DAGA itself has claimed.

“We are in full compliance with all federal and state campaign laws,” said DAGA Executive Director Sean Rankin in a statement. “All required filings have been made, and our next filing is due in July. DAGA does not accept contributions that are earmarked by donors for a particular race.”

Rankin added that the Jones campaign, which has decried the $800,000 in spending as nefarious, has known about DAGA’s support of Herring all along.

“DAGA supports its incumbents and we have provided support for Mark Herring since the beginning of 2021 including TV ads,” Rankin said. “DAGA told the Jones campaign at the beginning of this race that we would support Mark and that is what we have done. We have not said a negative word about Jay Jones.”

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In late April, attorney Patricia Pastor led a press conference for her client, a former volunteer with Scott Stringer’s 2001 campaign for public advocate named Jean Kim. The conference kicked off a series of events that upended the New York City mayoral race, as Kim accused Stringer, then polling third in the ranked-choice contest, of assaulting her when she served as an intern on his campaign.

Pastor told reporters not to contact Kim but to funnel all questions through her. What she didn’t tell them, however, was that she had worked for political opponents of Stringer’s long before Kim’s allegation came to light. Though Pastor refers to herself as a sex crimes attorney, she has spent the bulk of the last decade as general counsel for companies controlled by Ron Lattanzio, a controversial construction industry executive whose business was locked in a long-running feud over union labor and the development of Hudson Yards. Stringer supported the union, said multiple sources involved in the dispute, who spoke with The Intercept on condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal.

Pastor declined to comment on questions concerning her representation of Lattanzio’s businesses. That previous relationship does not indicate that Kim’s allegations are false.

Lattanzio owns and operates a network of companies with overlapping executives, attorneys, and consultants. Pastor “served as head of legal and compliance for a group of construction service entities,” at Lattanzio’s Construction & Realty Services Group, or CRSG, where she “[p]rovided education and management training on EEO compliance, workplace conduct, sexual harassment and employment discrimination,” and “[d]evised strategies to respond to government investigations,” until January 2018, according to her LinkedIn profile. In court filings, Pastor represented Trade Off, another company in Lattanzio’s network of construction-related firms, which provides cheap, nonunion labor and became central to a dispute between the unions, supported by Stringer, and the developers behind Hudson Yards.

Related Companies, the outfit leading the development work, at first relied heavily on union workers but in 2017 began shifting to Trade Off as part of a move toward low-wage, nonunion labor. As the fight spilled into the public, sources involved in the dispute said, City Comptroller Stringer became an outspoken advocate for the union, Local 79 of the Building and Construction Trades Council. The feud was intense, and Related Companies CEO Jeff Blau made no secret of his animosity toward Stringer. A business associate, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Intercept that in 2018, Blau said bluntly: “Scott Stringer is an enemy.”

In March, Stephen Ross, chair and founder of Related Companies, announced a major intervention in the mayoral race: a super PAC with the aim to “help us get this mayoral election right.” Blau’s wife, Lisa, led a campaign to persuade Republican and unaffiliated voters to register to vote in the Democratic primary. Related Companies did not respond to a request for comment.

As Trade Off’s counsel, Pastor filed two lawsuits against the union jockeying with the firm, and the union reported Trade Off to the New York attorney general for a shockingly abusive workplace culture. The attorney general’s office later concluded that women at Trade Off were repeatedly groped, sent explicit videos and photos by co-workers, and pressured to have sex in exchange for overtime pay. (Trade Off settled for $1.5 million and agreed to overhaul its sexual harassment policy in 2020, alleging that some complaints were “driven by a long-lasting dispute with a union that had trouble competing with Trade Off for labor services.”)

For veterans of the Hudson Yards war, it appeared that the battle had spilled into the mayoral contest. In March, the building trades union endorsed Stringer for mayor, and in April, it was Lattanzio’s former general counsel who called a press conference to announce that an alleged victim of Stringer’s harassment planned to come forward. On April 24, according to Google cache data, Pastor’s name and bio were still on Lattanzio’s CRSG website. By April 28, the day of the press event, Pastor’s name had been scrubbed.

Within days of the press conference — before the allegation had been independently investigated, and before anybody had come forward to corroborate it — a slew of progressive organizations and elected officials withdrew their support from Stringer. But subsequent reporting by The Intercept showed that many of the claims embedded in Kim’s account, which could be checked against public records, were either proven false or contradicted. Kim had made some of the false claims herself, but many others had been made by Pastor.

In addition to falsely stating that Kim had never applied to work for Stringer’s 2013 comptroller campaign, Pastor told reporters Kim had not donated to Stringer, which Kim later corrected. While Pastor described Kim as an intern, the 2001 Stringer campaign’s intern coordinator said that she had not been one, but rather had been a volunteer. At the press conference, Pastor told reporters that Eric Schneiderman, the former New York attorney general who resigned facing allegations of physical abuse in May 2018, had introduced Kim and Stringer in 2001. Kim, confirming The Intercept’s reporting, later said that claim was not true: Schneiderman had not introduced them; the two had met socially prior to her involvement with Stringer’s campaign.

Pastor also made small errors, like misspelling Kim’s name as “King” in a statement and calling Stringer “Tony” — the name of Kim’s fiancé — in an interview, according to local reporters.

Just as Pastor’s role in Kim’s allegation does not make it untrue, nor does it mean that Stringer has never been guilty of harassment. But in a media and political environment that at times treats exaggerated or unsubstantiated allegations the same as those with serious corroboration — the congressional campaign of Alex Morse, for example, was quickly undone without a single specific allegation or accuser — the source of those allegations becomes increasingly important.

For six years, Pastor served as Lattanzio’s general counsel at CRSG, the umbrella firm linked to a network of Lattanzio construction companies. In 2017, on behalf of Trade Off, she filed two lawsuits against Local 79 of the Building and Construction Trades Council, the union that ultimately brought the allegations of harassment at Trade Off to the attorney general’s attention.

In one, a defamation suit, Pastor sued a former Trade Off worker for saying that site safety was compromised, and specifically that workers high up on a building didn’t have the needed harnesses, arguing that the occurrence was fabricated. Far from fabricating the claim, the worker produced a video of the incident, which was later reviewed by The Intercept.

Later that year, Pastor filed another lawsuit on behalf of four Trade Off executives against the labor union and many of its members. The claim sought $4 million and alleged that her clients feared for their lives and were the targets of harassment during various incidents, including a confrontation with the union’s famous 12-foot inflatable rat at a labor protest outside Trade Off Vice President of Operations Jason Abadie’s house. At the time, the union had been organizing Trade Off employees. A later National Labor Relations Board complaint seeking withdrawal of the defamation lawsuit, and arguing that employees were retaliated against for organizing, alleged that workers were surveilled outside of work and fired for their union sympathies.

Collapsed into a single NLRB complaint, the lawsuits were later closed as part of an informal settlement.

Although Pastor litigated the suits under her independent firm, Law Office of Patricia M Pastor, PLLC, she was employed at Lattanzio’s CRSG as its general counsel and vice president at the time, and she used her CRSG email address when filing with the court.

At Trade Off in 2016, after repeated complaints of sexual harassment and assault on the worksite, the company’s Integrity Monitor filed a report with upper-level management, detailing the severity of the crisis and a failure to respond effectively to it.

The firm’s management, according to the attorney general’s report, took no action to improve the situation, and ultimately fired at least 12 women who had complained. Pastor, then serving as Lattanzio’s general counsel and a vice president at CRSG, declined to comment on whether she received the memo. In response to a series of questions, she told The Intercept: “I cannot answer any of these questions as to do so would violate the rules of professional conduct for attorneys as well as the attorney-client privilege.”

Local 79 got word of the harassment and alerted the New York attorney general, triggering the investigation begun by Eric Schneiderman in March 2018 and concluded by Letitia James in June 2020. Pastor told The Intercept that she was no longer working for CRSG or Trade Off by the time of the investigation.

The allegations of harassment and abuse, as laid out in the attorney general’s findings, were extreme. The attorney general’s investigation concluded that “at least seven different Trade Off supervisors harassed female workers,” including:

• “Repeated quid pro quo offers to at least five women to falsify timesheets, and thereby increase female workers’ pay, in exchange for sex.”
• “A Trade Off supervisor forcibly kissed at least two female workers and circulated naked photos and videos of subordinates.”
• “At least one supervisor regularly tried to touch female workers’ buttocks and breasts while at work.”
• “At least two supervisors sent pictures of their penises to female workers and one sent a video of himself masturbating.”

Complaints to supervisors only made the situation worse. The office of the attorney general “concluded victims and witnesses to harassment repeatedly notified the highest-level management at Trade Off of the instances of harassment. … Nevertheless, management repeatedly failed to take appropriate action and, in fact, repeatedly intervened to protect the harassers and fire women who complained of harassment.”

Less than a year after the attorney general released the findings of her investigation, Pastor was in front of the media, introducing the city to Jean Kim.

Soon after the press conference, Scott Stringer began to point out inconsistencies in Kim’s story. Both parties came under intense media scrutiny, and the idea that Stringer was smearing Kim quickly took hold.

“I needed to make two things very clear to the public and to my supporters,” Stringer said in a statement to The Intercept. “First, that I support the right of women to come forward and be heard, and second, that the allegations are false and completely antithetical to the way I have conducted my entire life, both in private and public. I wish the circumstances had been different to allow for a more thoughtful conversation.”

In the days after the allegation, Stringer lost the endorsements of many progressive groups, including the Working Families Party, previously a coalition of progressive activists and labor unions that is now significantly funded by progressive foundations. Since Kim’s allegation emerged in April, Stringer’s support among organized labor has only grown, providing him with a foothold that has kept him barely viable in a fluid race in which ranked-choice voting makes the outcome difficult to determine.

“We approached the decision with the input and discussion from our members it required and with intense deliberation by our leadership,” Sochie Nnaemeka, director of NY Working Families Party, told The Intercept. “It was Stringer’s response to the allegations that made it impossible for us to elevate him as our champion over other progressives in the race.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, endorsed Kathryn Garcia, a centrist candidate and former Sanitation Department commissioner who has climbed in the polls. A May 25 survey had her on top for the first time, edging out Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams (a former Republican) in second, former presidential hopeful Andrew Yang in third, and Stringer in fourth. No other candidate reached double digits in the polling.

With the Democratic primary set for June 22, early voting starts June 12. A debate is scheduled for Wednesday evening.

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Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin are locked in a voting rights standoff.

Senate Majority Leader Schumer, D-N.Y., shot down an effort from Sens. Manchin, D-W.Va., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to focus narrowly on reauthorizing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, instead championing the For the People Act as the more immediate fix for systemic problems in the U.S. electoral system.

For the uninitiated: The For the People Act, also known as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate, would amount to a sweeping overhaul of election and campaign finance law; the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, or H.R. 4, would work to re-implement Justice Department oversight of voting laws in states that have a history of voter suppression and discrimination.

Schumer dismissed the Manchin gambit in unusually blunt terms. “Here’s the bottom line: … The Voting Rights Act is actually authorized until 2032, so their letter to us saying authorize it, well, it’s pretty much done,” Schumer told reporters during a press conference Tuesday.

The necessity of revisiting the question of voting rights stems from a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2013, in which Chief Justice John Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by striking down its key provision, known as preclearance, which mandated certain jurisdictions with histories of discrimination obtain approval from the federal government before they could change their voting laws. Stripping out preclearance allowed states to pass ever-expansive voter suppression laws.

“This decision effectively gutted one of the federal government’s most effective tools to preserve confidence in our nation’s elections, and we are seeing the results manifest themselves in state legislatures across the country,” Manchin and Murkowski, the lone Republican in support of reauthorization, wrote in a letter to leadership in Congress on Monday.

Manchin and Murkowski may have identified the problem, but their solution is untenable.

Experts say reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act would be insufficient to address the restrictions to ballot access that Republicans are cheering in the states. Put simply: Because the Roberts court has already struck down preclearance, it could easily do so again.

Roberts’s decision instructed Congress that if the legislature wanted to re-implement preclearance, it would have to build a strong case over time that the states where it would apply, concentrated in the South, were indeed engaged in discriminatory voter suppression. Convincing an average observer of that reality would not be difficult, but Roberts, in his 2013 decision, effectively declared racism over.

In order to re-implement the Voting Rights Act, Congress would either need to appoint new justices to the Supreme Court or go through the lengthy process of building a case to convince not just Roberts but at least one of his colleagues to his right. H.R. 4, which Manchin recently suggested Congress focus on in lieu of the For the People Act, is designed to build that lengthy case, specifically aimed at winning approval from the court.

The For the People Act, or H.R. 1, takes a more direct approach, simply outlawing many of the most effective suppression tactics. First passed by the House in 2019, it also mitigates the role of big money in politics and bars partisan gerrymandering — which by itself is potentially enough to give Republicans the House majority. (Title I of the bill, focusing on ballot access and countering voter suppression, was largely written by Lewis before he passed away last July, but the decision was made to add his name instead to the new voting rights legislation. Support grew for the 1965 Voting Rights Act after the brutal beating of civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, where Lewis had his skull fractured and nearly lost his life.)

Manchin, for his part, had suggested that the John Lewis Voting Rights Act could win enough Republican support to overcome a filibuster. But Republican leaders have quickly shot down Manchin’s proposal to focus on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican, guessed that no Republicans would sign on to Manchin’s proposal, and even if they did, the stacked Supreme Court would be unlikely to approve it, he noted to HuffPost last week. “That is a way to do through the back door what [the For The People Act] is trying to do through the front door,” he said. Cornyn’s estimate was off, as Manchin did manage to secure Murkowski’s signature on his proposal to focus on the Voting Rights Act, though finding nine more Republicans remains a long shot at best.

Schumer’s argument against concentrating on reauthorization is that, while good, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is in no way a substitute for H.R. 1. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act’s long and legally circuitous timeline would also mean that it would do nothing about the voting rights laws being pushed in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Florida. H.R. 1, however, would directly override those new laws, along with the others implemented since Roberts cleared the way.

Manchin last week floated the idea of subjecting all 50 states to preclearance as a compromise for a wider embrace of the Voting Rights Act (again, Supreme Court hurdles make that approach seemingly impossible), but he skipped a Democrat caucus meeting last week where For the People Act sponsors made their pitch for the bill.

While Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and Schumer cautioned against solely moving forward with the Voting Rights Act, Manchin was in West Virginia, visiting the state with first lady Jill Biden.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., told The Intercept after the meeting that simply focusing on the Voting Rights Act alone would do nothing about the immediate onslaught of ballot restrictions enacted across the country by Republicans since the November election.

“It’s not sufficient to do anything about the attacks that are underway right now by state legislatures,” he argued.

He said the caucus heard from Democrats representing places like Georgia, Montana, and Wisconsin, where Republicans are looking to enact laws to preserve “election integrity” — which Murphy said was “bullshit” that stood in for an approach that amounted to stacking the deck. “They’d much rather have a group of elite, corporate billionaire-friendly folks running the government,” he said.

Democracy reform advocates say using this moment only to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act would squander an opportunity.

“HR1 is brick. HR4 on its own is straw.”

“HR4 without HR1 doesn’t make any sense to me, other than as pure symbolism. If the big bad wolf is going to blow your house in, you’d better build it out of brick. HR1 is brick. HR4 on its own is straw,” said Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America’s political reform program and author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.” Even if the John Lewis Voting Rights Act survived the Supreme Court, preclearance itself is less of a tool in such a polarized moment, he added. “I look forward to the Ron DeSantis DoJ handling preclearance in 2025,” he quipped, referencing a potential presidential run for the Florida governor.

Worse yet, said Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, a dangerous possibility could be that Manchin actually does manage to get Republicans to cynically co-sponsor his approach. “The reason you see Republicans supporting HR4 is that they believe that this bill will be passed by Congress and kill HR1 but then be struck down by the Supreme Court and lead us back to where we are right now,” said Lessig, author of “They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy.” “The reality is, bipartisanship is not possible with the Republican leadership on voting rights reform because they are convinced the only way they maintain power is by preserving the ability of the states to make it harder for Democrats to vote.”

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In July 2014, as Israel was launching one of its invasions of Gaza, Jessica Ramos, then a Democratic Party district leader in Queens, took to Facebook to post what might seem like an anodyne message: “Palestine <3.”

But the world of local Democratic politics erupted. A headline in the Queens Chronicle summed up the shock: “Dem official expresses sympathy with Gaza.”

It was an allegation so serious that the subhead included a response: “Jessica Ramos says Palestinian post on Facebook is about advocating for peace.”

The article noted that Ramos was part of a nascent faction of progressive Democrats challenging the party establishment, and that the party brass “have all historically taken staunch pro-Israel views, as has Rep. Joe Crowley (D-Queens, Bronx), the party’s chairman.”

It provided a platform for an anonymous Democratic operative to warn that Ramos “is not the only one who has made a comment expressing support for the Palestinians, but she is the only one in hot water with the leadership and facing a primary. Nevertheless, it’s not probably something you’d want to touch if you’re in a tight race.”

Four years later, Crowley himself was facing a primary challenge, and his opponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, spoke forcefully against yet another assault by Israel on Gaza. 

Her upset of the hawkish Crowley was treated in the Israeli press as an omen. “Progressive Democrat who accused Israel of Gaza ‘massacre’ upsets NY incumbent,” headlined the Times of Israel. “Congressional primary win for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Sanders supporter, seen as a sign of growing strength of Democratic politicians willing to criticize Israel.”

Ramos, meanwhile, had continued her rise, winning a Democratic primary against a Crowley ally, Jose Peralta, to take a New York state Senate seat. 

Within weeks of her primary victory, Ocasio-Cortez was pressed on her position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. She stumbled badly, making clear that while she knew where her moral compass faced on the question, she was not well-versed on the details. She would largely resist weighing in on the issue in a high-profile way over the course of the next year. Her fellow members of what would become the Squad had their own histories on the question. Rashida Tlaib’s mother was born near Ramallah and her father in East Jerusalem; now she represented Detroit, Michigan. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis, Minnesota, has been the most outspoken congressional critic of U.S. foreign policy. Ayanna Pressley of Boston, Massachusetts, meanwhile, had a history of being to the foreign-policy right of the incumbent she ousted. That the four of them together would collectively create a historic moment on the House floor Thursday suggests that the most important factor at play is a generational and social shift in the direction of Palestinians, rather than anything distinct to an individual member. 

Two years later, they were joined by Reps. Cori Bush in Missouri and Jamaal Bowman in New York. Bush was running against longtime incumbent Lacy Clay Jr., who used Bush’s sympathy for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against her in mailers featuring a photo of Bush with Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour. Bush’s campaign stuck by it: “Cori Bush has always been sympathetic to the BDS movement, and she stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people, just as they have stood in solidarity with Black Americans fighting for their own lives.”

Bowman was challenging Rep. Eliot Engel, one of the most strident Israel hawks in Congress, and the group Democratic Majority for Israel put in $1.5 million to defeat him. Bowman won anyway.

As the Times of Israel predicted, all of it was leading to the rise of a new kind of Democrat, one that might not be versed in all the details — Ocasio-Cortez showed that again in an April interview  with the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York — but one unafraid to apply the same standards of justice to Israel as is applied everywhere else in the world. 

It finally broke through on the floor of the House of Representatives on Thursday evening. Omar bluntly but not inaccurately called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “ethno-nationalist.” Tlaib, a Palestinian American, added, “I am a reminder to colleagues that Palestinians do indeed exist.”

In the House, though, Omar recalled her own experience as an eight-year-old huddled under a bed in Somalia, hoping the next round of bombs wouldn’t hit her home next. “It is trauma I will live with for the rest of my life, so I understand on a deeply human level the pain and the anguish families are feeling in Palestine and Israel at the moment,” she said. 

Pressley, the elder of the Squad and the least inclined to challenge the status quo on Israel-Palestine, spoke directly to the political guardrails put up around members of the House of Representatives, and then ran right through them. “Many say that conditioning aid is not a phrase I should utter here,” she said, “but let me be clear: No matter the context, American government dollars always come with conditions. The question at hand is should our taxpayer dollars create conditions for justice, healing, and repair, or should those dollars create conditions for oppression and apartheid.”

Ocasio-Cortez hit hard, too. “Do Palestinians have a right to survive? Do we believe that?” she asked, reminding the House that Israel had barred Omar and Tlaib from traveling to the country. “We have to have the courage to name our contributions,” she said, referring to the U.S. role in perpetuating and funding the fighting.

When Bush spoke, she began, “I and St. Louis rise in solidarity with the people of Palestine.”

The Squad was not alone. Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota rose to criticize the assault on Gaza, as did Reps. Andre Carson of Indiana, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Joaquin Castro of Texas.

McCollum, who has influence over U.S. foreign military aid as chair of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, said she will continue to support funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system in this year’s spending bill. However, she criticized the billions of dollars in unconditioned military aid the U.S. sends Israel annually.

“The unrestricted, unconditioned $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid…gives a green light to Israel’s occupation of Palestine because there is no accountability and there is no oversight by Congress,” McCollum said. “This must change. Not one dollar of U.S. aid to Israel should go towards a military detention of Palestinian children, the annexation of Palestinian lands or the destruction of Palestinian homes.”

Castro thanked Tlaib for her presence, agreeing with her statement: “My mere existence has disrupted the status quo.”  He seemed to address Israeli leaders directly when he said, “creeping de facto annexation is unjust.”

Israeli leaders have been watching the rise of congressional skepticism of their settler project closely. And while the dam may have broken in the House, it’s holding in the White House, as Biden has largely stuck to the old regional script. 

“The forced eviction of families in Jerusalem is wrong,” Castro said Thursday night. That’s not a controversial assertion, but it’s a foreign one to the House floor.

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On February 18, four of the eight candidates vying to replace the outgoing New York institution Cy Vance, who is not running for another term as Manhattan’s district attorney, gathered for an online debate hosted by a group of public defenders. Most of the candidates are far to the left of Vance, with decarceration a running theme. All four have vowed to cut the office’s budget, decriminalize sex work, and vastly reduce the number of low-level misdemeanors that the district attorney’s office prosecutes, among other reforms.

The amount that they have in common has made for a crowded field in which it’s not easy for voters to discern their differences. Instead, the candidates’ identities and backgrounds have become frequent refrains — and, sometimes, sticking points.

At the debate, Tahanie Aboushi, who is running as a civil rights attorney, challenged the only public defender in the race, Eliza Orlins, questioning whether someone with her “privilege” could serve effectively.

“You’ve often referred to people you’ve represented as your clients, those that you seem to have transactional relationships with,” Aboushi said. “How do you reconcile your privilege, having not had the experience of the overwhelming majority impacted by the office, with the need to have that lived experience for the next district attorney of Manhattan?”

Aboushi has leaned heavily on her family history in the campaign. Both of her parents were born in occupied Palestine. Aboushi and her nine siblings, including New York Jets player Oday Aboushi, were raised by their single mother. Her father was arrested and sentenced to 22 years in federal prison for charges related to his involvement in a conspiracy to rob commercial trucks and their drivers, according to court documents.

But the implication that the relationship of public defenders to their clients is purely transactional strains credulity. Orlins has spent more than a decade with The Legal Aid Society, which does not charge defendants to represent them.

Orlins, visibly annoyed, underscored her bond with the people she works with and for. “You can ask any public defender … and they’ll tell you that the comments about us ‘clocking out’ are kind of offensive,” she said, before adding that she recognizes her clients of color face police aggression that she doesn’t. “Certainly I recognize, Ms. Aboushi, that I am white. I have never really spoken any other way.”

Aboushi’s performance at the debate was followed, in early March, by a major endorsement from New York’s Working Families Party, which cited Aboushi’s “first-hand personal experience” with the criminal justice system alongside her professional bona fides. She’s also racked up endorsements from significant progressive power players, including New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, New York state Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon.

Orlins, for her part, has leaned heavily into her career as a public defender. “I am the only public defender in this race,” she said on Monday, launching her first ad, which broadcasts the fact that she has represented 3,000 defendants over the past decade-plus. Her messaging calls to mind the campaign of Tiffany Cabán, a public defender who captivated the city’s social justice movements and came within a handful of votes of winning the Queens County District Attorney race in 2019. While Cabán was able to lean on her background — growing up a queer Latina in a Queens housing project — as well as her career as a public defender, Orlins — a graduate of the prestigious Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. — can lean only on her experience. (She has also had brushes with celebrity, competing as a high-profile contestant on Survivor in 2004, when the show was at the peak of its cultural relevance, and, in 2018, on The Amazing Race.)

“In New York City politics, representation matters,” said Nick Encalada-Malinowski, a campaign director at the grassroots organization Vocal New York. “It’s something that people in general think about. So Tahanie’s story of having her father incarcerated speaks to people in a way that other candidates aren’t able to.”

Alvin Bragg, the only Black candidate, meanwhile, often mentions being stopped at gunpoint by police three times while growing up in Harlem. And while the left remains divided among progressives, Wall Street has strategically coalesced around a single candidate, hoping to snatch a victory for the status quo even as the public clamors for change.

Tali Farhadian Weinstein, formerly general counsel for the Brooklyn DA and one of the most conservative candidates in the Democratic pool, has dramatically out-raised every other candidate, raking in more than $2.26 million by January. Bragg reported $1.3 million in donations, Aboushi raised about $771,000, and Orlins raised just under $600,000.

An internal poll paid for by Aboushi’s campaign, conducted by Tulchin Research of 500 Manhattanites and released on April 14, ranked Farhadian Weinstein at the top of the pack alongside Aboushi, both with 11 percent of the vote. Two other candidates, Bragg and Dan Quart, tied for second with 5 percent, and Eliza Orlins got 2 percent, with 57 percent of voters undecided. And since the election is a county race and won’t have ranked-choice voting, there’s a real possibility that Farhadian Weinstein could rake in the most votes in the primary on June 22.

But the endorsements haven’t cleared the field for Aboushi either; while Aboushi ranked above the other three progressives in her campaign’s internal poll, her lead is anything but certain. With more than half of the voters undecided according to the single poll, the race remains fluid.

And some endorsements yielded their own backlash. The Working Families Party’s endorsement of Aboushi, which wields significant power because of the party’s influence in New York state, was slammed by some members of the party’s Manhattan chapter, which had voted to endorse Orlins by a 10-to-9 margin, according to Working Families Party spokesperson Ravi Mangla. In the tight world of New York City movement politics, the director of a group that played a large role in the Working Families Party’s endorsement of Aboushi, New York Communities for Change, is married to a partner at a consulting firm doing work for Aboushi’s campaign.

With more than half of the voters undecided according to the single poll, the race remains fluid.

Until the January filing period, Aboushi had lagged behind Bragg, Quart, and Orlins in fundraising, but she has since kicked her efforts into high gear, raking in more than $1 million as of May 7, according to her campaign. Bragg, who’s won a number of high-powered allies from his years working as a state and federal prosecutor, is projected to raise around $2 million by the next filing deadline, according to his campaign, while Quart expects to raise “several hundred thousand dollars more” by the May deadline in addition to the $632,000 filed in January. Orlins, meanwhile, has raised $1,001,000, her campaign said. Farhadian Weinstein’s campaign did not respond to a request for an updated total.

Farhadian Weinstein’s war chest has allowed for a powerful digital ad campaign and frequent mailers that have helped propel her candidacy. The former federal prosecutor has fashioned herself as a “progressive prosecutor” to the left of Vance — advocating for the elimination of cash bail and promising to increase funding for violence interruption programs — as have many mainline prosecutors recently, as support for criminal justice reform has finally become politically beneficial. But she has stopped short of backing some of the more robust reforms that Aboushi or Orlins have endorsed, such as pledging not to seek sentences of over 20 years.

And her close ties to Wall Street raise questions about her stated commitment to prosecuting white-collar crime. Not only is Farhadian Weinstein married to Saba Capital Management hedge fund executive Boaz Weinstein (the couple purchased a $25.5 million apartment on Fifth Avenue in 2012), but a significant portion of her $2.26 million in donations comes from Wall Street and business leaders. Of the donations she received during the last filing period, 21 were $30,000 or more, and many came from Wall Street executives and business interests. Each contributor can donate a maximum of $37,829 total; one business leader, Standard Industries executive David Millstone, and his wife, Jennifer Millstone, donated $35,400 each.

Farhadian Weinstein, for her part, has repeatedly told her story of flying from Iran to New York in 1979 with her family as a child, where a border agent let them in despite slapdash documents. That the childhood memory of being cleared through customs is the most profound experience with law enforcement she can muster says more than the story itself.

The focus on personal experience has also distracted from a more meaningful look at the candidates’ professional backgrounds.

A closer look at Aboushi’s legal career complicates her image as a civil rights attorney. Her day-to-day lawyering involved work on behalf of employers or on other cases that did not involve civil rights claims. The Aboushi firm, made up of three members of the Aboushi family, practices all kinds of law: commercial litigation, employment law, white-collar crime, immigration, corporate, public interest/pro bono, personal injury, not-for-profit, and bankruptcy law. In some cases, she actually worked on the opposite side of the person fighting for their civil rights.

Aboushi is not listed as the attorney of record in many cases, as many settle before going to court, but one prominent example is Echevarria v. Insight Medical. In the case, decided in 2015, Ingrid Echevarria sued her former company, claiming that she had been sexually harassed and then retaliated against when she filed a claim about it. Echevarria’s case clearly falls within what is understood as a civil rights case, but Aboushi represented the company, not Echevarria.

A closer look at Aboushi’s legal career complicates her image as a civil rights attorney.

Aboushi filed a motion during the case attempting to force the woman to pay Aboushi’s legal fees, which she listed as $350 per hour but was willing to settle for $300 per hour. Instead, the case went to trial, and Aboushi’s client lost and was ordered to pay Echevarria $50,000 in addition to covering her own legal fees of more than $80,000.

To be sure, Aboushi has done real civil rights work, much of it pro bono, on behalf of those seeking justice for civil rights abuses. Among other cases, she represented children in a Harlem public school who were beaten by an aide in 2018 and won a case later that year against the New York City Fire Department for implementing policies that disproportionately hurt Black firefighters. Several of her cases have involved holding the New York Police Department accountable: In 2015, she represented a protester attacked by police at a Black Lives Matter event, and in 2018, she sued the police force for forcing three Muslim women to remove their head coverings.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong with a corporate law practice whose partners take on civil rights cases as well; indeed, many corporate firms entice progressive-minded early-career attorneys by highlighting such opportunities. And attorneys who work on civil cases, even when on behalf of employers fending off worker lawsuits, often refer to themselves as civil rights attorneys.

Aboushi’s campaign manager argued that the critics of Aboushi’s lack of criminal court experience misunderstand the largely supervisory role of the district attorney. “[It’s] a weird understanding of what the district attorney does,” said Jamarah Hayner. “The head of the Postal Service isn’t delivering your mail.”

“After the past year and especially the Chauvin verdict, I can’t think of anything more tone deaf than questioning the role of civil rights attorneys in systemic reform of the justice system,” she said. “As a black woman myself—whose rights are quite literally the result of decades of civil rights litigation—I’m really shocked and frankly hurt at the narrowness of that line of thinking.”

Aboushi’s lack of criminal experience has come up, in a limited way, in the election. In one early debate, Aboushi endorsed the use of gang conspiracy prosecutions, which opponents argue are deployed in an overbroad and racist manner to criminalize otherwise legal behavior. Two days later, under pressure, Aboushi clarified that she only supported such prosecutions in limited situations.

“My suggestion at the forum this week that I may pursue gang conspiracy charges under some circumstances reflects my determination to use all the tools at my disposal to hold the powerful accountable,” she posted on Twitter.

“It occurred to me that, under the statute, groups of people who, for example, force women and children into prostitution or who conspire to abuse or silence protestors could meet the definition of ‘gangs.’ If those statutes would allow me to bring individuals to justice who abuse people that are vulnerable or marginalized, I will certainly use them.”

That reasoning, however, is the same that standard prosecutors use to defend the tool and that public defenders across the city continue to object.

I would like to make my policy on gang conspiracy prosecutions very clear. My suggestion at the forum this week that I may pursue gang conspiracy charges under some circumstances reflects my determination to use all the tools at my disposal to hold the powerful accountable. 1/5

— Tahanie Aboushi (@TahanieNYC) October 15, 2020

None of the candidates have emerged unscathed from the campaign trail. Bragg, who has prosecuted cases with the New York Attorney General’s Office and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, has come under fire during candidate forums for incarcerating people for nonviolent offenses and for declining to take hard-and-fast stances on many hot-button issues, such as whether to restrict sentences to 20 years and stop cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Others have criticized Orlins, Aboushi, and Quart for lacking managerial experience, given the district attorney’s more than 1,000 employees and $169 million budget.

Orlins has had her own awkward moments. In an interview with Filter, an online magazine, Orlins did not promise to stop prosecuting drug possession entirely.

“I can’t say I’d categorically never prosecute possession because I don’t think people should be bringing in kilos of heroin or fentanyl or crack or anything of the above, because, you know, they’re endangering people in our community,” she said. “Personal possession is different than a truck of 10 kilos.”

But someone with such a large quantity of drugs would not be charged with possession, but intent to distribute, a fact Orlins must know.

For now, candidates on the left will remain divided unless some candidates drop out — an unlikely outcome, according to a civil rights lawyer and former candidate in the race.

“Given the importance of this race, progressive leaders should have intervened much earlier, and more intentionally, to figure out who the best left candidate was, and encouraged folks to coalesce behind them,” said Janos Marton, who dropped out of the Manhattan district attorney race in December and recently endorsed Alvin Bragg. “To ask candidates to drop out now, after petitioning, after endorsements, after all that fundraising, isn’t really fair to the candidates.”

It will take a unified effort among the left to galvanize behind one progressive candidate, Marton said.

“Though if we see polling down the stretch that suggests a way to unite behind a progressive to beat Tali Farhadian Weinstein, that could change someone’s mind.”

During a televised debate last week, Farhadian Weinstein complained that her opponents were “putting forward purity tests” but said that, ultimately, she was beating them all. “In the end, everyone’s taken the same approach,” she said. “I’ve been more successful.”

The post With a Crowded Progressive Field, Wall Street’s Candidate Gains Steam in Manhattan DA Race appeared first on The Intercept.

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Shontel Brown’s campaign for Congress is blaring one of the least subtle messages sent to a super PAC since the outside money groups were legalized by the Supreme Court in its Citizens United v. FEC decision.

Brown’s campaign has listed on its website a set of negative talking points about her opponent Nina Turner, all enclosed in a bright red box. Directly under the red box is a quote from Democratic consultant Mark Mellman, the leader of a major pro-Israel super PAC that has consistently spent large sums of money against Sen. Bernie Sanders and his congressional allies. (“Red box” is a campaign industry term, referring to the spot on the website that candidates use to communicate with outside groups like Super PACs.).

Both Brown and Turner are competing in a special election in Ohio to replace former Rep. Marcia Fudge, who was confirmed to be President Joe Biden’s secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The primary in the heavily Democratic district is scheduled for August 3.

With Turner, a former Ohio state senator and Sanders’s most prominent campaign surrogate, running for Congress, the messaging on Brown’s campaign website suggests she’d welcome an outside intervention from Mellman’s independent expenditure operation to blanket the airwaves.

The hybrid super PAC run by Mellman, Democratic Majority for Israel, spent heavily against Sanders during the presidential primary, dropping $1.4 million in its effort to slow him in Iowa and beyond. The super PAC also spent more than $1.5 million attacking Jamaal Bowman and supporting then-incumbent New York Rep. Eliot Engel. (Despite their efforts, Bowman won.) It also threw in $179,000 against Alex Morse, who challenged House Ways and Means Chair Richie Neal in a western Massachusetts primary. DMFI also bankrolled a super PAC that tried to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar in her Minnesota Democratic primary, sending $500,000 to Americans for Tomorrow’s Future, which spent more than $3 million taking on Omar and also worked against Bowman.

The communication on Brown’s website is a textbook case of red-box signaling, used to communicate with outside groups within the letter of the law. To understand how the signaling works, it’s useful to review the conventions of post-Citizens United campaign practices. Per the Citizens ruling, campaigns cannot coordinate with outside groups and doing so is a clear violation of one of the few bright-line rules in campaign finance. The challenge, then, for a campaign is figuring out how to guide a super PAC or outside supporter’s messaging without running afoul of the laws around coordination. For that, campaigns have developed what is called the “red box.” The candidate posts opposition research or videos on their website about their opponent, which anyone in the public is then free to use for any purpose. The oppo also generally includes messages about both candidates that have tested well in polls, allowing the super PAC to align its communications with the campaign’s.

What makes Brown’s approach unique is both how blatant it is and how beseechingly it directs itself to a particular head of a particular super PAC.

First, the oppo research Brown’s campaign posted is literally inside an actual red box, removing any confusion as to the purpose of the exercise. If any confusion still existed, the linked PDF is called “SB4C Red Box.”

“It’s incredibly common for candidates to rely on resources provided by super PACs and vice versa and so this dance is never explicit, but it doesn’t need to be, because both sides are aiming for the same objective. This is pretty explicit and extreme,” said Lawrence Lessig, after being shown Brown’s campaign site. Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard Law School and an expert on campaign finance law. “They certainly assume that [an Intercept reporter] was not going to notice this.”

The oppo research that appears on Brown’s website has nothing to do with Turner’s stance on Israel; it doesn’t even mention Israel. The criticisms of Turner revolve around her insufficient loyalty to Democrats: citing her lukewarm support for Biden in the presidential election and her refusal to back Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. The praise of Brown centers on her local record. Yet just underneath the red box are three rotating quotes validating Brown’s support for Israel. The first is from Mellman, and though he wears many hats — most prominently as head of the Mellman Group, a polling and consulting firm — the site labels him “DMFI PAC President.” DMFI endorsed Brown in February, but has not disclosed any outside spending on her behalf.

Brown for Congress

The second is from Michael Siegal, who previously chaired the Jewish Federations of North America and is a donor to Brown’s campaign.

Brown for Congress

The third is from Jeff Mendelsohn of Pro-Israel America, which was allied in 2020 with Americans for Tomorrow’s Future. Pro-Israel America, the Brown campaign, and DMFI did not respond to requests for comment.

Brown for Congress

That this type of coordinating-without-coordinating has grown so common undermines the core rationale of Citizens United, Lessig said. “The premise of Citizens United, or the whole line of cases that assume there’s such a thing as independent spending, is that there’s independence. Obviously there can be technical independence, but if both sides are building a strategy based on the same data they’re essentially coordinating,” said Lessig, who authored the book “They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy.” “In the context of antitrust we’d have no problem understanding it as coordination.”

And because the independence isn’t real, the debt politicians owe to super PACs is real. “What that means is there’s no real separation that would undermine the sense of obligation or sense of gratitude that a member would feel for the super PAC’s intervention,” said Lessig. “There’s no quid pro quo, but there’s a dependence on the super PAC.”

The post Nina Turner Opponent Shontel Brown Is Low-Key Pleading for Super PAC Support appeared first on The Intercept.

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In the wake of the allegations made by Tara Reade against then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020, Maya Wiley co-authored a thoughtful essay framing how to respond to such claims in a fraught time.

“Accepting the allegation and investigating it is what we mean when we say believe all women. Corroboration is key here,” Wiley wrote of Reade’s allegation, adding that “believing women doesn’t mean we don’t also ask for further information, context and clarification.”

Wiley at the time recommended “assessing the accused’s credibility and response to the allegation in comparison to the credibility of the accuser and supporting evidence.”

Wiley is now running for New York City mayor, a race that was upended last week by an allegation of sexual abuse and harassment by Jean Kim against another candidate, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer. Many of the progressive groups and elected officials who had backed him abruptly withdrew their support before engaging in any such process of investigation.

Upon closer examination, however, The Intercept has found evidence contradicting elements of Kim’s claims.

The explosive news initially broke on April 28 by the local Gothamist in an article headlined “Former Campaign Intern Accuses Scott Stringer Of Sexual Abuse, Harassment.” It described Kim’s allegation, made in a statement provided by her attorney, that in 2001, while she was working as an intern on his campaign for New York City public advocate, Stringer “kissed me using his tongue, put his hand down my pants and groped me inside my underpants.” “I pulled away and tried to avoid him,” she said. Later that day, at a press conference, Kim reiterated her allegations, setting off a spiral of denunciations from rivals and former supporters of Stringer. Stringer flatly denied the allegation, saying he and Kim had been involved in an on-again, off-again consensual relationship — a “light relationship,” he called it at one point.

Kim, in an interview with local media, denied a consensual relationship with Stringer of any kind, leaving three major open questions and many more minor ones. The biggest question — whether Stringer groped Kim without consent — is unanswerable without witnesses or corroborating evidence, neither of which has so far been presented by Kim or her attorney or reported elsewhere. But an attempt to confirm Kim’s role on the campaign and the nature of her relationship to Stringer has produced evidence that paints a different portrait of the power dynamic at play.

Jean Kim speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York City on April 28, 2021.

Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP

Kim, in the statement, said that she was hired as an unpaid intern on Stringer’s campaign after she was introduced to him, then a candidate for public advocate, in 2001 by Eric Schneiderman, the former New York attorney general who resigned in disgrace in 2018 following multiple, credible allegations of assault. “In 2001, she met Eric Schneiderman when he was running for state Senator. Schneiderman introduced her to Scott Stringer, who at the time was the head of the Community Free Democratic Club on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Jean joined the club and became immersed in its activities,” her attorney, Patricia Pastor, said at the press conference.

A number of sources, including documents and records from the time, cast doubt on Kim’s claim to have met Stringer for the first time in 2001. While Kim claimed to have been an unpaid intern on the Stringer’s 2001 campaign for public advocate, others involved in the campaign said that by that point she was already an established member of the group’s social set helping out a friend running for office.

Three longtime mutual friends of Stringer and Kim, who declined to speak on the record for fear of facing professional reprisal, said that the friendship between the two went back to the 1990s — when both were part of two social and political clubs: Community Free Democrats and DL21c, a young urban professional Democratic leadership group — and extended well into the next decade.

The sources, who worked or volunteered for Stringer’s 2001 campaign for public advocate and knew both Stringer and Kim, supported Stringer’s version of the story, each saying that the pair were in a casual relationship and that Stringer’s description of it as a “light relationship” matches with their own impression.

“They definitely had a more-than-friends relationship,” said one woman who volunteered for the campaign and was friends with both Stringer and Kim. She asked not to be named so as not to have her name “plastered across the newspapers,” but, like the others, recalled the pair getting cozy at bars, or walking with arms around each other, among other signs of intimacy that buttressed a widespread understanding of the nature of their relationship.

Pastor, at the press conference, said that Kim would not be answering questions. “If anyone has any follow-up questions, you can contact me,” she said. “Please do not attempt to contact my client, Ms. Kim. She will not be giving direct statements.” Pastor declined to comment for this article or to make Kim available.

A fourth source, the field director for Stringer’s 2001 campaign, said he ran the campaign’s internship program and only hired high school and college students. Kim, who was 30 years old at the time, was described by Stringer as a volunteer. “She was a volunteer, as many of my friends were volunteers,” he said.

Kim has made much of the status of intern, saying that her decision to come forward was connected to the way she was treated. “I said, ‘I can’t take this anymore.’ Especially when I know what he did to me, what I believed he did to other interns, it just sickened me and I couldn’t sit still,” Kim told local PIX11 news, explaining others had told her, “Scott has an intern problem.”

The claim that Kim and Stringer knew each other prior to 2001 is also supported by membership and donation records. Community Free Democratic Club records obtained by The Intercept show that Kim became a dues-paying member of the club on January 27, 2000. People involved in the club said that it is rare, if not unheard of, for a person to become a dues-paying member of the club on their first visit. Stringer, club members said, never missed a meeting — gatherings of only several dozen people — meaning the two likely would have met earlier.

And, according to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, Kim first donated to Stringer’s campaign in May 1999, kicking in $25, along with $50 a month later. She made three more contributions between then and 2001. There was little infrastructure at the time for small donors to make online contributions to local candidates, so the amounts are consistent with the types of social fundraisers common to New York City politics, often hosted in bars or restaurants. As Stringer’s campaign heated up, his social set rallied for him, volunteering on nights and weekends while holding down day jobs. Kim was no different, said the friends. The donation records also list her as working for a PR agency called Trimedia. At the press conference, Kim explained the job as necessary because she wasn’t being paid by Stringer. “I worked at a PR agency. Since I was unpaid at this job, I needed to pay my bills,” Kim said.

Democratic candidate for New York City comptroller Eliot Spitzer, left, walks with Jean Kim, right, during a campaign stop in Corona, Queens.

Photo: Angel Chevrestt/Alamy Stock Photo

Two versions of the Stringer-Kim relationship have been put forward. Kim’s version is that she was an unpaid intern preyed upon by a powerful politician, with whom she never had a consensual relationship. Stringer’s is that Kim was part of an Upper West Side peer group and the two had a consensual, if casual, relationship. Between those two versions, of course, is an endless gray area, and it is easily conceivable that Kim is wrong about when they first met, wrong about her role on the campaign, lying about whether they were in a casual relationship, and yet was still the victim of an overly aggressive Stringer who crossed lines.

Other nontrivial discrepancies have emerged about what happened in the years following the alleged assault. Kim claimed that, after the experience with Stringer, she left Community Free Democrats. “She had few friends in the city, outside of the club, and she viewed the club members as her surrogate family. She did not want to risk losing them in the event that Stringer chose to use influence against her. She also knew that Stringer was well connected in New York, and she feared that he could negatively impact her future and her career,” her attorney said at the press conference. “Alternately, Jean moved across town, to the East Side, and quit the club.”

Club records show she remained a dues-paying member at least through 2006. Members of the club remember her attending events and remaining involved for many years after. Her 2013 résumé lists her as a member of the group. An email from April 2013 that she wrote to an associate, reviewed by The Intercept, describes an evening she had just spent with the club. Simply put, her claim to have quit the group after an alleged assault is demonstrably false, as she remained involved in the group for at least another decade.

In 2005, Kim was an active volunteer on Stringer’s campaign for Manhattan borough president, according to two people with knowledge. Unlike his bid for public advocate four years earlier, this one was successful. In 2008, when Stringer ran for reelection as borough president, Kim began donating to him again, making two modest contributions. She also made a contribution in May 2010 to his upcoming NYC comptroller campaign. (Kim over the years has made more than $9,000 in contributions to a slew of Democratic candidates, according to campaign finance records.)

Kim also said that she had never applied for work with Stringer’s 2013 campaign for comptroller, but the Stringer campaign subsequently produced an email Kim sent, résumé attached, asking whether she could be helpful on the campaign. Kim ended up volunteering for Stringer’s opponent, Eliot Spitzer, instead. Spitzer had been expected to dominate the field given his name recognition, but Stringer pulled off an upset. Kim’s contributions to Stringer’s political career stopped.

In 2006, Kim started lobbying, on a freelance basis, for TLM Associates, where she remains today. Since 2015, TLM has represented the American Petroleum Institute, Bank of America, and a slew of other corporate, nonprofit, and developer clients. Stringer, as comptroller, led the largest divestment from fossil fuels in the world.

Last week, Stringer’s campaign accused Kim of working for Andrew Yang’s rival mayoral campaign. Kim denied this and has said she remains undecided on her choice for mayor. But public records show she collected petitions for a slate of candidates including Yang as recently as March. In October 2020, she gave $50 to Maya Wiley’s mayoral bid.

Jean Kim also claimed that she had not done any work for Andrew Yang’s mayoral campaign, but public records show she collected signatures for him as recently as March.

Image: New York City Board of Elections

Again, none of this information on its own means that Kim’s allegation is false. A person who collected signatures for Yang still has the standing to make an allegation of abuse by another candidate. As the Harvey Weinstein case showed, victims of abuse can later say positive things about them or seek their help advancing professionally.

The current standard, journalistically, for reporting a sexual harassment or assault allegation, is to present corroborating evidence from the time of the alleged incident. Kim’s attorney was asked by a reporter if Kim told “anybody at the time, contemporaneously, or in the years following, that she was harassed by Mr. Stringer?”

“Yes, she did,” Pastor said. “We’re not going to provide any of that information today. Thank you for the question.” So far, no corroborating evidence has been presented, no friends or relatives who say they heard the story from Kim years earlier.

But progressive groups, elected officials, and Stringer’s opponents alike wasted no time weighing in. Progressive state Sens. Alessandra Biaggi and Julia Salazar, state Assembly Members Catalina Cruz and Yuh-Line Niou, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman all withdrew their support of Stringer. The Working Families Party, one of Stringer’s most high-profile endorsers, dropped its support of the candidate.

“Jean Kim shared her experience of sexual assault and Scott Stringer failed to acknowledge and consider his responsibility for that harm,” the statement read, condemning Stringer for denying the allegation. The Sunrise Movement — which, like WFP, stepped back from its support of congressional candidate Alex Morse last year after bogus allegations were leveled at him — also dropped its support of Stringer.

Even Wiley called for Stringer to step aside. “It is time for Scott Stringer to remove himself from this race,” she said.

“The best case scenario in the story is that Scott Stringer doesn’t understand when someone says no,” Wiley added. “There is simply no man who can tell a woman whether or not she has consented to a sexual relationship — that is not how it works.”

Stringer, however, has vowed to stay in.

The post Claims by Scott Stringer Accuser Unravel as Progressives Flee New York Mayoral Candidate appeared first on The Intercept.

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When the Trump administration filed a lawsuit against Google in October, it was joined by Republican attorneys general in 11 states. When Texas launched an antitrust suit against Google in December, it was joined by 10 other states — again, all of them led by Republicans.

But in December, when Colorado also filed a suit against Google that was highly similar to the Justice Department case, it was joined by 37 other states with a mix of Democratic and Republican attorneys general.

At the center of this divide was Democratic antitrust attorney Jonathan Sallet, one of two leading picks to become assistant attorney general for the antitrust division inside Joe Biden’s Department of Justice. Sallet, a former senior official in that division during the Obama administration, is today a senior counsel for the coalition of attorneys general going after Google in the Colorado case.

“Sallet was a key player in persuading most states to stay out of the Trump administration’s case,” Politico reported earlier this month. People familiar with those discussions confirmed the assertion to The Intercept and added that Sallet also persuaded states to stay off the Texas case, led by the state’s controversial attorney general, Ken Paxton.

“There was a reluctance to [sign on to the Texas complaint] that was political, notwithstanding the fact that the quality of the complaint was high,” said one source familiar with the decision-making who was not authorized to speak publicly. “Sallet was very much in the camp of people who considered Texas anathema.”

It’s not that Democrats objected to taking on Google’s monopoly power. The anti-monopoly movement tends to have supporters in both Democratic and Republican camps. But in general, Republican states have been far more willing to back Democratic antitrust suits than vice versa, a partisan imbalance threatening the fragile anti-monopoly coalition.

The Colorado case helmed by Sallet focuses on Google’s monopoly over internet search and the anti-competitive practices it allegedly uses to maintain and exploit its dominance. The federal case, filed under President Donald Trump but now being handled by the Biden administration, went after Google’s search monopoly as well, with the Colorado suit rehashing many of the Justice Department’s allegations. In March, Texas filed an amended complaint with four additional states, finally adding a Democratic-led state — Nevada — after months of beseeching. That case accuses Google of colluding with Facebook to unfairly siphon ad money away from publishers and is generally considered the strongest of the three.

Sallet’s stance could also hobble his confirmation. The strength of the burgeoning antitrust movement is its transpartisan politics — an unusual coalition where ultra-conservative Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, can lavish praise on Lina Khan, an associate professor of law at Columbia University and an outspoken progressive who has long been critical of Big Tech. Cruz enthusiastically supports Khan as Biden’s pick to head the Federal Trade Commission.

The other leading candidate for head of the Biden Justice Department’s antitrust division, Jonathan Kanter, is also an outspoken progressive. His career, spent challenging Big Tech, and his willingness to work with Republicans paradoxically makes his potential path to confirmation much breezier than Sallet’s. Kanter would start with the antitrust wing of the Democratic party in his corner, while the rest are unlikely to buck Biden on a critical nominee. He would add to that tally Republican skeptics of Big Tech like Cruz and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.

Sallet, by contrast, has pushed back on the transpartisan alliance. He’d have work to do to win over skeptics like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., or Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who are known to prefer Kanter. Votes from the GOP antitrust wing senators such as Cruz or Hawley would likely be off the table. And without either of those factions, he would need to rely on business-friendly Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. It’s a plausible path to confirmation, but it’s narrow.

That’s before the debate over Sallet’s possible conflicts of interest is brought into the mix. After his time at the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice, Sallet became a partner at the law firm Steptoe & Johnson in 2017. Steptoe represents Apple and Facebook, and the White House has declined to say whether he did work for either of those accounts. Democratic senators are unlikely to accede to a confirmation vote without an answer to that question.

If Sallet has done work for Apple or Facebook, it would have broad implications for his role at the Department of Justice. Immediately, a link to Apple would implicate his approach to the Colorado antitrust case, in which he argued against attaching an app store objection to the complaint. Big Tech critics have long said that Google and Apple’s complete dominance of the only two real app stores is a blatant antitrust violation, but people familiar with the drafting of the Colorado complaint say Sallet insisted on excising it from the suit.

Instead, attorneys general around the country are taking up the issue separately, evidence that there was no lack of will for taking the issue on.

Correction: April 28, 2021

This article previously stated that Ted Cruz voted in favor of Liz Khan’s nomination to head the Federal Trade Commission. Cruz supports Khan’s nomination, but the confirmation has not come up for a vote yet. The text has been corrected.

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A week and a half after the Senate rejected an effort by Vermont independent Bernie Sanders to attach a minimum wage increase to a coronavirus relief package, his neighboring Democratic senators, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, gathered with constituents for a teleconference. 

The New Hampshire senators were joined on the March 15 call by Tom Boucher, who was recently appointed to the board of the National Restaurant Association, known in Washington as “the other NRA.” Boucher also serves as a trustee on the association’s Education Foundation and is CEO of Great NH Restaurants, Inc. Boucher laid out for the senators just how perilous the past pandemic year had been for the restaurant industry and profusely thanked them for their help in thwarting the minimum wage increase, telling them they had prevented countless restaurants from closing down.

Democratic state Rep. Maria Perez said that, during the call, she was stunned by how similar Boucher’s rhetoric sounded to that of the senators and that she had heard the same arguments coming from their staff when she had lobbied them to support a wage increase. “The language that I heard from the senators is the same language I heard from the Restaurant Association,” Perez said.

Central to the National Restaurant Association’s argument, as parroted by Shaheen and Hassan, is that workers themselves, particularly ones who rely on tips, are strenuously opposed to increasing the minimum wage, worried it will mean fewer shifts or put businesses at risk of closure. In their view, this opposition applies especially to the tipped minimum wage, which allows businesses to pay a lower wage to workers who get a significant portion of their pay through tips. (The federal tipped minimum wage is $2.13 per hour.)

James Haslam, executive director of Rights & Democracy, a local progressive organization which operates in both New Hampshire and Vermont, said that Hassan’s and Shaheen’s staff have told him repeatedly that they have gotten a high volume of letters from service industry workers opposed to raising the tipped wage. Haslam said the senators appear not to understand, or willfully misunderstand, that employees in the service industry are under intense pressure to repeat the talking points of their bosses. There are essentially no unions for service staff, and restaurant bosses have an extraordinary ability to make or break a server, both through the power of scheduling — Saturday night and Tuesday afternoon are likely to bring much different paydays — and the power to assign servers to particular sections, some of which are far more lucrative than others. 

“In an industry that’s nonunion, there’s almost every incentive to do what your employer says,” Haslam said. “Every single advancement of workers’ rights, going all the way back to slavery, has always been opposed in these terms: that it’s going to be worse for workers.”

But the recent elevation of the minimum wage into a major national issue is altering that dynamic. Haslam said that in a meeting last week, Shaheen’s staff conceded that they were also hearing from a high number of service industry workers who disagreed with their bosses and supported raising the tipped minimum wage.

Managers have long been known to exploit their power to prey on staff, and they can easily deploy it toward political ends. If sending a letter to Congress opposing a minimum wage increase might lead to a better schedule and section — and if refusing might bring the opposite result — the decision isn’t a hard one for a server on an individual basis. After all, a smart server would likely presume the letter would be discounted anyway by a senator who should know better than to trust the validity of a public comment made under such conditions. That server may be presuming more savvy on the part of their representatives than exists in reality.

The minimum wage in New Hampshire sits at $7.25 an hour. In 2019 and again in 2020, the state’s legislature tried to raise it, to $10 an hour the next year and $12 an hour in three years. Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed the bill each time, arguing to his libertarian-leaning base that “artificial increases in the minimum wage hurt the lower-wage workers an increase is aimed at helping, because businesses may be forced to reduce hours or eliminate jobs entirely.”

Business owners looking for a champion who will fight against minimum wage increases could do little better than Sununu. He’s assured of significant support from the restaurant owners who make up the National Restaurant Association, as well as other companies that have waged war on the wage hike. But workers looking for a similar champion on their side have no obvious option.

Hassan is up for reelection in 2022, and national Republicans hope she’ll face Sununu, who is riding a wave of popularity in response to his handling of the pandemic. He was reelected as governor in 2020 with 65 percent of the vote.

People familiar with New Hampshire’s insular politics say that Sununu, the brother of former Sen. John Sununu, has long made clear that he has zero interest in going to Washington. But the governor is under intense pressure to help Republicans take back the Senate, and a recent poll found him with a 51 percent approval rating among Democrats in the state. The same survey had him edging out Hassan in a head-to-head match. Democrats control the Senate by just one seat, and both Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., face reelection next year.

Since the Civil War, New Hampshire’s Senate seats have, with a few exceptions, been in the hands of Republicans. The pattern broke in 2008 when Shaheen ousted then-Sen. John Sununu, scion of a local political dynasty, and fully busted in 2016, when Hassan, the state’s outgoing governor, won her narrow election against Kelly Ayotte. Ayotte, who lost her reelection bid to Hassan by just over 1,000 votes, has not ruled out a rematch.

In the Democrats’ barely controlled Senate, Sanders’s amendment to the coronavirus relief package garnered 42 votes: 8 short of the number needed for a majority. Some of those votes — such as the two Delaware senators — would have been easily gettable by President Joe Biden if he’d tried. Others, such as Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have long been known to be skeptical of raising the wage. The two holdouts from New Hampshire were the hardest to explain.

Sinema, Manchin, and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, are currently pushing a slimmed down proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $11 an hour. Both Sinema and Manchin spoke at the National Restaurant Association’s annual conference this week, and both share a fundraiser, Ashley Flanagan Kennedy, who is married to Sean Kennedy, the top lobbyist for the National Restaurant Association. 

Sean Kennedy was a longtime aide to Rep. Dick Gephardt before becoming a telecom lobbyist. He swung back through the revolving door to work for then-Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., an early supporter of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and then served Obama as special assistant to the president for legislative affairs. His charge now is to help the restaurant association block a minimum wage increase. 

Flanagan Kennedy, a West Virginia native, is a partner at the fundraising firm Fulkerson Kennedy & Company, which, according to FEC records, works nearly exclusively for Senate Democrats and has pulled in millions in fundraising consulting fees since 2017.

The firm has done recent fundraising work for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in charge of reelecting Senate Democrats, as well as its affiliated super PAC, Senate Majority PAC. (Consulting for both the DSCC and the Senate Majority PAC requires strict legal guardrails, as the two are not allowed to coordinate.)

Fulkerson Kennedy & Company has also recently fundraised, records show, for Manchin, Sinema, and Hassan, as well as Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, who is chair of the DSCC.

The firm also does fundraising for Granite Values PAC, which is Hassan’s leadership group; a PAC affiliated with Manchin called Country Roads; and one tied to Sinema called the Getting Stuff Done PAC.

On March 31, Sean Kennedy contributed $2,000 to Hassan’s reelection campaign. On December 20, he gave the maximum allowable amount, $2,800, to Sinema.

At the National Restaurant Association’s conference this week, Kennedy heaped praise on Sinema and Manchin. “You and your staff have been absolutely amazing in working with small businesses, including the National Restaurant Association, in finding a commonsense path, so we can wrap up that aspect by just saying thank you,” he said.

The fight to raise the minimum wage nationally to $15 is moving in parallel, and at times in tandem, with the related push to phase out the sub-minimum wage. While the tipped minimum is the most well-known sub-minimum wage, current labor law also allows companies to pay some workers with disabilities less than the full minimum wage. Defenders of the policy say that it encourages companies to hire disabled workers who would otherwise be unable to compete against able-bodied ones, giving them an independent source of income and a way to participate more fully in society. Opponents cite the law’s patent exploitative potential.

When it comes to the question of raising the tipped wage, service industry workers are not monolithic in opinion. Like in all industries, particularly nonunionized ones, some workers do far better under the status quo than others. Servers who pocket hundreds of dollars in a four-to-six-hour shift would see no increase in their paycheck if the underlying wage were increased. Under current law, restaurants are supposed to make up the difference between the sub-minimum wage and the standard minimum if tips don’t cover it. For many servers, that isn’t necessary — but when it is, the law is rarely enforced. 

Managers also use the sub-minimum wage law to squeeze nonservice work out of their wait staff, scheduling workers to arrive several hours before a restaurant opens, for instance, to perform so-called side work. Labor laws allow bosses to require some basic preparatory work, but managers routinely stretch its definition far beyond that, putting servers to work doing custodial or other tasks that ought to be paid at a full minimum wage. Because a server can make well above the minimum wage when business is bumping, managers get away with making them work additional hours essentially for free to reduce their average hourly pay. 

The effort to phase out the tipped wage has received far less national attention than the fight for $15, and given the skepticism of holdouts like Shaheen and Hassan, it’s not hard to see service staff getting stiffed in a final compromise — if one is ever reached.

The post New Hampshire’s Democratic Senators Are Quietly Resisting a Minimum Wage Hike appeared first on The Intercept.

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Sen. Mark Kelly has resisted co-sponsoring a major piece of labor law reform legislation known as the PRO Act, with him citing a policy of not endorsing measures that don’t also have Republican support, according to sources familiar with the reasoning provided to advocates of the bill.

Winning Kelly’s support for the legislation is crucial, as it is hoped that if he comes on board he could bring his Arizona colleague, Sen. Kysten Sinema, with him, leaving backers just three cosponsors short of the 50 that would bring the bill to the floor. Kelly has told advocates that he doesn’t want to be the only Arizona senator to cosponsor the bill, so backers of the bill are hoping to win the two in tandem.

The PRO Act, short for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, has already passed the House of Representatives. The legislation would make it easier to form a union and win a contract, harder for companies to union-bust, and easier for the National Labor Relations Board to crack down on rule-breaking companies. It would also make more workers eligible to unionize, including independent contractors. It would arguably be the most transformative piece of legislation enacted since the 1970s.

Amazon’s ability to snuff out a union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, this week, replete with what the union has called out as unfair labor practices during the election, has highlighted the need for the PRO Act, as workers often face insurmountable obstacles under current labor law. Currently, even when workers do vote to unionize, companies are able to stall collective bargaining agreements, sometimes for years.

The act of co-sponsoring the legislation has taken on heightened importance in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s pledge to bring the bill to a floor vote if it obtains at least 50 co-sponsors, as The Intercept previously reported. The bill has 45 co-sponsors, including 44 Democrats and independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The other holdouts include Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Mark Warner of Virginia, Angus King of Maine, and Sinema of Arizona.

Though five Republicans voted for it in the House, there is no credible scenario in which a Senate Republican endorses the PRO Act, meaning that Kelly’s rationale would doom it to failure. And a review of Kelly’s legislative history suggests that he is not generally uncomfortable sponsoring bills that don’t have Republican support, and that unions still have a path to winning his support.

A review of Kelly’s legislative history reveals that he has previously endorsed controversial legislation that has no Republican support.

Kelly is a co-sponsor of S.833, which empowers Medicare to negotiate drug prices, a bill hotly contested by Republicans and the drugmaker lobby. Another bill, S.440, the Continued Funding for Senior Services During COVID–19 Act, has no Republican support.

Neither, unsurprisingly, does the Background Check Expansion Act, which Kelly, a champion of gun safety reform, has co-sponsored.

Kelly has also endorsed the bill that Republicans consider to be the most partisan of any legislative effort currently underway: S.1, a democracy reform package known as the For the People Act.

“Senator Kelly is evaluating the legislation and speaking about it with stakeholders in Arizona as he focuses on building an economic recovery that benefits working Arizonans who have been hit hard by the pandemic,” said a Kelly spokesperson. “As always he puts a high value on bipartisanship and makes decisions based on what is best for Arizona.”

Kelly is up for reelection in 2022, Sinema in 2024. Arizona has some of the lowest union density in the country, at less than 6 percent. Virginia sits at 6 percent, while West Virginia has more than double that number, above 13 percent. In Maine, 13.5 percent of workers are represented by a union.

Supporters are hopeful that Maine’s independent King, who caucuses with Senate Democrats, will soon co-sponsor the legislation, according to multiple sources involved in the lobbying effort.

King’s staff, in conversations with members of the Maine AFL-CIO at the end of March, cited a massive volume of calls to his Senate office from workers around the state, according to people familiar with the conversation. That helped balance out extraordinary pressure from capital and employers working against the measure. “They said he had been ‘inundated’ with calls from both sides,” said one labor official, who asked to speak anonymously, citing the private nature of the conversations. King’s office declined to comment.

Many of those calls were organized by a coalition of unions and the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA has made passing the PRO Act among its highest priorities, as part of the broader coalition led by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and the Communications Workers of America. DSA has organized at least 500,000 calls into the offices of the five holdouts — now four — urging them to sponsor the bill.

“Our coalition has been able to mobilize working people because the PRO Act is such a wildly popular piece of legislation. That’s certainly true in Maine, but it’s also true in Virginia, West Virginia, and Arizona,” said Ryan Kekeris, communications director for the IUPAT and lead organizer on their campaign to pass the PRO Act. “We know that labor rights are civil rights, and we know that the PRO Act would be the biggest expansion of fundamental rights to working people in generations. Roughly 90 percent of all working people do not have the freedom to collectively bargain, and millions say they would join a union right now if given the opportunity. We intend to give them that opportunity. We commend Sen. King for listening to his constituents. We urge Sens. Warner, Manchin, Sinema, and Kelly to do the same.”

DSA has long had internal debates over how much effort to put into electoral or legislative efforts and how much energy to dedicate to outside pressure on the political system — either by organizing workers into unions, challenging corporate power or fossil fuel projects, or establishing mutual aid networks.

In this case, the Green New Deal committee and the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission both independently decided to make the PRO Act their top priority and joined forces in the effort. “This was the most unifying thing in DSA since Bernie,” said Thea Riofrancos, an assistant professor of political science at Providence College and a member of DSA’s Green New Deal campaign committee. A Green New Deal won’t be possible without a broader base of organized labor fighting for it, Riofrancos argued.

Sanders, whose 2016 presidential campaign revived DSA, has repeatedly amplified the coalition’s call for volunteers to sign up for phone shifts.

The only way we are going to rebuild the disappearing middle class in America – the only way – is to rebuild the trade union movement and give workers a seat at the negotiating table. We must organize to pass the PRO Act NOW. https://t.co/Lkb7rv5AQY

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 27, 2021

In Virginia, DSA is running a campaign called #WhyWontWarnerWednesday, hoping to push him to sign the legislation. In Arizona, DSA is coordinating on a statewide basis with organized labor. In West Virginia, the coalition has been organizing calls to Manchin’s office.

Passing the PRO Act with 50 votes will also require reforming the filibuster, which means that Manchin needs to be pressured both to sign the legislation and reform Senate procedure so that it can pass.

King, the sources said, plans to push for a change to how the legislation deals with joint employers, though what change in particular he’s advocating is unclear. Currently, the act would change labor law so that both companies with direct and indirect control over employees are considered employers.

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If Democrats manage to escape the traditional midterm curse and don’t drop a single vote from 2020 to 2022, they would still lose control of the House of Representatives simply as a consequence of Republican gerrymandering following the census. Unless, that is, there’s a change to current laws or an overwhelming Democratic wave on par with 2006 or 2018.

The decisive impact of gerrymandering is well understood by campaign operatives and party leaders but is barely acknowledged in national political conversations — the elephant’s weapon in the room, so to speak — even as analytic focus narrows to the details of particular voter suppression bills.

Yet Democrats are in a peculiar position: With control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, they have the opportunity to ban gerrymandering, restore a semblance of democratic balance to House races, and at the same time give themselves a fighting chance to hold on to the lower chamber. But it’s far from a guarantee that the party will do it. Democrats may choose instead to voluntarily march themselves into a political abyss for no reason other than their own inertia and lack of imagination.

The bill that could stop this, the “For the People Act,” has already passed the House of Representatives as H.R. 1. The dawning reality of the upcoming gerrymander heightens the importance for Democrats of passing the Senate version and signing it into law. To do so would require reforming the filibuster, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed to oppose the bill with everything he has. Sen. Joe Manchin, the deciding Democratic voter on filibuster reform, penned a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday swearing that he would never vote to eliminate or “weaken” the filibuster, but a reform he suggested previously — mandating that senators actually occupy the floor in order to use it — could strengthen it as an institutional device, forcing engagement by the minority. Under current rules, as Manchin has noted, all a senator has to do to “filibuster” is send an email to a floor staffer, and everything shuts down.

Republicans’ ability to simply redraw their way into the majority comes partly as a function of their overperformance in 2020. Democrats had expected to expand their 36-seat majority, but instead they now hold just 222 seats — or they will once all the vacancies are filled — meaning that they can only lose four and hold on to a bare 218 majority.

A precise number is impossible to land on, but if gerrymandering remains legal, the best estimates suggest that if the 2020 margin remained constant in 2022, Democrats would lose at least 15 to 20 seats. In 2012, the last midterm after a census, Democrats won more than 51 percent of the House vote, yet Republicans held on to the lower chamber comfortably.

In 2012, the last midterm after a census, Democrats won more than 51 percent of the House vote, yet Republicans held on to the lower chamber comfortably.

Once the new census numbers are out — and recall that the Trump administration installed political operatives to game the count for partisan advantage — congressional seats will be reapportioned, with states that have lost relative population losing members of Congress and states that have grown getting more.

The losers: California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia.

West Virginia will go from three Republicans and zero Democrats down to just two Republicans, but in the other eight states, Democrats risk losing ground. New York, depending on the final count, may in fact lose two seats. Democrats will work hard to make sure that those losses are Republican seats in the states they control, but it will be no easy task. Many of them, such as California, have independent redistricting commissions.

Texas, meanwhile, is picking up a full three seats. Republicans will hold 23 seats to Democrats’ 13 before the three new ones are added, and the Texas Legislature, dominated by the GOP, gets to redraw the lines with no input from Democrats. Republicans could plausibly pick up all three while also drawing a handful of those 13 Democrats out of their positions, flipping a 10-seat cushion to 15 or more.

Texas alone, with or without the voter suppression measures currently making their way through the state Legislature, could flip the House to Republicans, even if Democrats again win a majority of votes nationally.

Texas alone could flip the House to Republicans, even if Democrats again win a majority of votes nationally.

The same can be said for Florida, which is also picking up two new districts, and Republicans there can likely take both and knock out a few Democratic ones, netting another four seats or more.

Additional seats will likely go to Arizona, where Republicans control the redistricting process, and to Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, and Oregon. Democrats could net a seat each in Oregon and Colorado, but Montana and North Carolina are likely to go Republican, and the latter will have a chance to redraw its lines. Republicans would have a strong chance to pick up 15 or more seats among those states.

Aside from the states picking up or losing members of Congress, Republicans have other opportunities for mischief. In Kentucky, for instance, the party, which holds a veto-proof majority in the General Assembly, is eyeing the Louisville seat held by Democratic Rep. John Yarmuth since 2006, which could be redrawn to include conservative voters from northern Kentucky — though that would make nearby Republicans vulnerable. Republicans are also looking at Rep. Jim Cooper’s district in Tennessee. The Blue Dog Democrat is facing a primary challenge from Odessa Kelly, who was recruited by Justice Democrats, but it might not matter: Republicans could eliminate his seat. Republicans in Georgia, too, will be looking to blow up districts held by suburban Democrats.

Democrats, meanwhile, have a few redistricting opportunities, such as in Maryland, which could see its last Republican, Rep. Andy Harris, drawn out of a seat. Oregon, which is in Democratic hands, is likely to be able to add a Democratic seat, cramming as many Republicans into Eastern Oregon as possible.

The 2020 House election was unusual in that its outcome accurately reflected voters’ preferences. In 2012, Democrats won 51.1 percent of the House vote yet were rewarded with just 46 percent of the seats, thanks to effective Republican gerrymandering after the 2010 census. That resulted in a 21-seat gap compared to what they ought to have controlled based on their vote share. With Barack Obama’s reelection to the White House and Democratic control of the Senate, the party would have controlled all three bodies and been able to legislate in any reasonably democratic outcome. In 2014, the gap was 18 seats, and in 2016, it was 23. That year, Democrats won 49.8 percent of the vote yet claimed just 45 percent of the seats.

In 2020, Democrats won 51.3 percent of the vote, but unlike in 2012, they walked away with 51 percent of the seats. The reason for the different outcome was that people are constantly in motion, moving from town to town and region to region, with new housing developments going up endlessly. Demographic preferences changed along the way too: While a suburban voter was more likely to be a Republican in 2012, by 2018 they were pulling the blue lever.

The districts methodically drawn after 2010 can no longer be counted on for precision. Yet the technology has improved exponentially since the last round, with significant strides made in mapping and voter data, and if Republicans are given another chance to redraw the lines, there’s no reason to believe they can’t at least recreate that 20-seat gap between what voters ask for and what they get.

Democrats may be on such a heightened sense of alert about all manner of Republican electoral perfidy that they may behave as if they are out of power.

In 2018, Democrats were able to gain huge numbers largely because of that demographic flip in the suburbs but also because Pennsylvania’s courts redrew the commonwealth’s unconstitutionally gerrymandered lines. That year, Democrats won 53.7 percent of the vote and controlled 54 percent of the seats in the House.

It’s not out of the question that Democrats could buck the midterm curse. Popular conception of the midterm drop-off is misunderstood. The president’s party doesn’t lose seats primarily because voters change their minds or disapprove of the president’s performance, or even because they’re unhappy with the economy. All of those elements are a factor, but the biggest variable in the equation is who shows up to the polls. And members of the party out of power are more driven to show up to the polls: They’re angry at having lost the previous cycle and have endured two years of frustration, so they turn out at slightly higher rates. The party in power tends to be more comfortable, so they’re less likely to bother to show up. All of that could change in 2022, though. Nobody knows whether the irregular voters inspired to go the polls by former President Donald Trump will show up for a generic Republican in a midterm, and 2018 suggests that they might not, especially if the economy is humming on the back of Biden’s stimulus and the reopening of the economy post-vaccination.

And Democrats may be on such a heightened sense of alert about all manner of Republican electoral perfidy — from the storming of the Capitol to Georgia’s voter suppression legislation and beyond — that they may behave as if they are out of power. That’s certainly what Democratic leaders hope.

With Republicans in need of just five more seats to flip the House, Democrats will need to either run up 2018 wave-like numbers or ban gerrymandering if they want to retain control. There’s no other option.

The post Republicans Are Poised to Gerrymander Their Way Back to the Majority appeared first on The Intercept.

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The architect of the Trump administration’s immigration policy, Stephen Miller, “belongs in prison,” Rep. Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from Texas, said during an interview for The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed.

Miller, a White House adviser and longtime aide to former Sen. Jeff Sessions, was instrumental in implementing President Donald Trump’s child separation policy, which drew international outrage in 2018. Escobar was responding to a question as to whether prosecutions of Trump administration officials ought to be pursued, and at what point Democrats should similarly call for prosecutions of Biden administration officials if the crisis at the southern border is not resolved.

“I think Stephen Miller should be behind bars,” Escobar said. “I think he committed heinous human rights violations, and I think that those around him who helped plot this out should be held accountable as well.”

Doing so, she acknowledged, will not be easy. “That is going to be very difficult, but it kills me that these people could potentially walk away and even potentially rebuild their reputations. I find them to be just among the most reprehensible, abhorrent people that our generation could have ever produced,” she said.

Escobar sits on the House Judiciary Committee, along with the panel’s subcommittee on immigration. The committee is actively investigating the Trump administration’s immigration record. The child separation policy was piloted in El Paso, Texas, in mid-2017 before being rolled out across the border in April 2018, running for several months until it was largely, though not entirely, rescinded. Some 4,368 children were separated from their parents as a result of the policy; hundreds remain apart, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Miller was a key proponent of Trump’s most inhumane immigration policies, including the zero-tolerance stance that prosecuted all unauthorized migrant parents crossing the border, detaining them without their children. And he is headed for the courts regardless. Miller recently launched America First Legal, a right-wing organization built to launch legal challenges to Democratic initiatives.

Escobar spoke to The Intercept after a visit to a migrant housing facility in El Paso. The Biden administration has opened several temporary facilities to house an influx of minors at the southern border and yesterday asked federal workers to volunteer to serve at understaffed facilities.

NASA just sent employees an email seeking volunteers to help staff facilities for unaccompanied migrant children, per internal email provided to me: pic.twitter.com/erAGwjK3KB

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) April 6, 2021

Prosecution isn’t yet appropriate for Biden administration officials, Escobar argued, saying that the White House is making forward progress improving the situation at the border.

“To your second question, I am in good frequent communication with the Biden administration on what’s happening, and as long as I continue to see progress and movement in the right direction and input from folks on the ground — including advocates and attorneys who shoulder the consequences of horrific policies right alongside their clients and the migrants who they’re advocating for — as long as the admin is moving in the right direction, I will keep working with them and will keep providing them with ideas for reform and for forward movement,” she said. “But if at any point I feel like we are sliding backward, or there’s not absolutely every resource and effort being put toward a more humane and compassionate system that does justice to our values, I will be among the Biden administration’s loudest critics.”

Escobar also floated a full revamp of immigration policy at the border, suggesting that Border Patrol agents be largely excluded from the refugee and asylum process, and that once a minor has been fingerprinted and processed, a matter that should take just hours, they be released to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, which can connect them with family already in the country as they await asylum proceedings.

Escobar said she expected resistance from some in the Border Patrol. “I do think they would resist this,” she said, adding that she recently floated the idea while meeting with Border Patrol officials, and one of them approached her after the meeting to raise objections. “His view was, then how are we going to investigate, basically, fraud cases. And said I think there’s a way to do it, but right now what’s happening is the reverse of what should be happening. We are keeping children and families in what feels like criminal custody, and the vast majority of them, their one violation is a civil violation.”

The full interview with Escobar is available here.

The post Rep. Veronica Escobar: “Stephen Miller Should be Behind Bars” for Role in Trump Immigration Policy appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is considering putting a $15 minimum wage into the next reconciliation package, which will be focused on infrastructure, multiple sources familiar with the New York senator’s thinking told The Intercept.

Senate Democrats attempted to include the wage hike in President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief package, but the Senate parliamentarian ruled it was out of order, and Senate Democrats allowed that ruling to stand. An effort to overturn the ruling, which required 60 votes, garnered just 42.

Schumer has suggested to progressive groups that there is a glimmer of hope that the parliamentarian would rule differently this time: The new legislation is focused on infrastructure, and setting wages is directly related to the budget impact of any infrastructure spending. If there’s even a small chance of it working, he reasoned, it’s worth the fight.

Schumer, though, is encountering resistance from some backers of increasing the minimum wage, who argue that attempting to include it is doomed to fail just as it did last time, and in the process it will trigger another wave of indignation from the public at the failure. Debate over the $1.9 trillion relief package was consumed in its final days by anger over the lack of inclusion of the wage hike, with pressure on progressives to vote it down.

Internal congressional critics of the Schumer idea argue that the link between the policy and whether it clears reconciliation is irrelevant — after all, Republicans included drilling in the Arctic in Trump’s tax cut legislation, two policies that had nothing to do with each other — and that the parliamentarian is likely to rule the same way again. Taking another run at it, for some in the Senate, recalls a favorite maxim of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who would often say, “There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.”

Sources familiar with Schumer’s thinking say that he is buoyed by the fact that the parliamentarian’s ruling was just one line long, meaning it didn’t offer any analysis that could be read as precedent. That the parliamentarian’s analysis of the question was just one line long rankled some Senate Democrats, given that the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is a staffer and her role is supposed to be advisory. It would be as if a president asked for an analysis on whether waterboarding was within the executive’s authority and the legal counsel responded with a one line memo either up or down. Putting the minimum wage question back to MacDonough might force a more serious grappling with it — or it could result in a copy-and-pasting of the original rejection.

The idea is also to continue pushing on all fronts — filibuster reform and a series of new reconciliation bills — until the party finds a soft spot in the line to push a higher minimum wage through.

Along those lines, a Schumer aide said the majority leader is also arguing that there are opportunities within Senate rules for additional reconciliation bills beyond those that had been expected, relying on language contained in Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. “At any time after the concurrent resolution on the budget for a fiscal year has been agreed to pursuant to section 301, and before the end of such fiscal year, the two Houses may adopt a concurrent resolution on the budget which revises or reaffirms the concurrent resolution on the budget for such fiscal year most recently agreed to,” the section of the law reads.

By pushing for multiple rounds of reconciliation, Schumer would also perhaps be strengthening the case for reform of the filibuster by once again establishing the 50-vote threshold as the standard way of passing major pieces of legislation. Once it becomes standard for the Senate to make decisions with a majority vote rather than 60 votes, it becomes harder to justify maintaining the current rules for some legislation but not for other pieces. And the cumbersome reconciliation process would feel pressure under the weight of its own absurdity. At the same time, the creative exploration of new procedural maneuvers worries backers of the fight against the filibuster that the party leadership lacks confidence in the ability to get it done.

The Senate still needs to lock down 50 votes in support of hiking the wage, however. Of the eight Democrats who voted no last time around on overruling the parliamentarian to enact a minimum wage, most are assumed to be gettable in a clean vote, though doing so could mean giving ground on the tipped minimum wage, a key priority of the National Restaurant Association. That would still leave Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., but there is hope that a package of small business tax credits, which would subsidize the wage increase, could get them there. There is also talk of including the measure in other must-pass pieces of legislation, creating a process where there wouldn’t be a standalone vote on the minimum wage but rather on the entire package, Senate sources said.

The post Chuck Schumer Eyes a Second Shot at Raising the Minimum Wage Through Reconciliation appeared first on The Intercept.

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When President Joe Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the filibuster was rarely deployed, and when it was, it could be beaten back by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate. That almost never happened, and instead the threat of a filibuster would sink legislation, not because the majority couldn’t overcome it but because they didn’t want to waste a few weeks on it and had other pressing business to get to. In 1975, the rule was reformed to lower the threshold from 67 down to 60, though it was still rarely used.

The Senate that Biden grew up in — remember, he was 29 when he was elected — largely passed bills by a simple majority vote, including controversial bills. When the debate was over, even senators who opposed the underlying bill would vote yes on what’s known as “cloture,” which means closure of the debate. That began to change, first with Harry Reid, D-Nev., as Senate minority leader, determined to fight President George W. Bush, but went into overdrive under Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. McConnell effectively raised the threshold any legislation needed to 60 votes in order to undermine President Barack Obama. (For more on the history, this Deconstructed episode from last month has you covered.)

For somebody like Biden, that phenomenon — that legislation needs 60 votes to pass — is a relatively new innovation, not the beating heart of the Senate as some people claim. And nobody knows that better, perhaps, than Biden himself. He alluded to his old-school cred in an interview with George Stephanopolous published Tuesday evening by ABC.

“I don’t think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days,” Biden said. “You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking.”

“You’re for bringing back the talking filibuster?” Stephanopulos asked.

“I am. That’s what it was supposed to be,” Biden said. “It’s getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning.”

Notice that Biden is using the credibility he owns as a Senate traditionalist — he was elected six years before I was even born, and I’m getting old — to make the case that reform is necessary to defend democracy and return the Senate to the working condition it was in when he got there. It’s no secret that Biden was far from progressives’ first choice to win the Democratic nomination, but he may possess a unique ability to disarm centrist and conservative Democrats who otherwise might oppose the same project or program if it was proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., or, really, anybody but Biden.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently criticized Biden as “boring but radical.” While Cruz is never serious about anything, and Biden is far from a radical, there’s some truth, even if Cruz doesn’t recognize it, behind that point. A $1.9 trillion stimulus just scans among the public as more “reasonable” when coming from Biden than it would from a Democrat whom Republicans could more easily paint as a radical, a task that they managed to accomplish with Obama even though he governed as a centrist. There is a genuine only-Nixon-could-go-to-China element to Biden’s gentle evisceration of the filibuster.

Had Sanders or Warren suggested changes to the filibuster, you can be sure that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the self-styled exemplar of the moderate Democratic centrist, would be hearing none of it. Instead, in his interview Tuesday night, Biden was merely following Manchin, who has recently opened up to the idea of bringing back the “talking filibuster.”

How Biden Can Do It

So what would these new filibuster rules look like?

Nobody yet knows, but from conversations with Senate sources over the past few weeks, months, and years, I can take a few stabs. First of all, the 60-vote threshold for cloture has to go. The current rules put the onus on the majority to marshal 60 votes, which no majority is likely to have for the foreseeable future.

If Democrats do manage to reform the filibuster, you have to assume this much: They will not go through all that trouble simply to leave McConnell with a veto over their agenda. How they strip that veto remains to be seen, but the new rules would shift the onus from the majority, which today needs 60, to the minority, which today barely has to show up. As Manchin says, you have to extract a cost for the minority to obstruct, to make them actually be there on the floor. “Maybe it has to be more painful, maybe you have to make them stand there,” Manchin told Fox News earlier this month.

If Democrats do manage to reform the filibuster, they will not go through all that trouble simply to leave McConnell with a veto over their agenda.

So if cloture can’t stay at 60, how do you get it to a place where a majority can reasonably reach it? One solution is to deploy the “present-and-voting” approach. The possible rule goes like this: If three-fifths of senators present and voting support cloture, then cloture is invoked, and the debate is over. Democrats who support the notion of 60 for cloture could think of three-fifths as a synonym. That would mean that if all 50 Democratic senators showed up at 3 a.m. to call the vote, Republicans would need, by my math, 34 senators ready to vote no. They can do that sometimes, but eventually Democrats — or any future majority — would wear them down and find a moment where enough of them are literally sleeping that they can move it across the floor.

Another approach could be to require 41 votes to sustain a filibuster at any time. Under the current rules, if a cloture vote gets 59 yes and zero no votes, the no votes still win. You could flip that to say that unless 41 senators insist that the talking continue, the debate is over. And again, if that vote is called at 3 a.m., there may not be 41 senators able to get there within the allotted time.

The present-and-voting standard has a long Senate tradition — longer, in fact, than the 60-vote threshold. In 1917, as the U.S. was gripped with war fever, a handful of anti-war senators filibustered their way into Senate adjournment, blocking a vote on a declaration of war against Germany, a story recounted by longtime Senate aide Adam Jentleson in his new book “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy.” Amid an uproar, the Senate implemented a cloture rule that allowed two-thirds of those present and voting to bring debate to an end. When the threshold was moved down to three-fifths in 1975, the present-and-voting standard was replaced by an affirmative need to hit 60. Biden and Manchin’s reform would return it to how it was when Biden entered the Senate.

In a roundabout way, Manchin confessed to Fox News that the current iteration of the 60-vote threshold is on the chopping block. “There’s different ways to get to that 60 vote, and people have to make sure that they’re willing to show up — it would be great, don’t you think, if someone was down there telling you why they’re objecting,” he said.

To parse that a bit, consider the first piece. How are there different ways to get to 60 votes? On its face, that’s absurd: There’s only one way to get to 60. So what is Manchin actually trying to say there? If the vote is on the question of whether debate should be extended or should be brought to a close — cloture — it’s not unreasonable to assume that anybody not voting is also not interested in debating anymore. If they were, they’d be there. Flipping the onus to the minority to marshal votes would align with the spirit of Manchin’s answer. What he’s doing is counting the nonvotes with the yes votes. So unless the minority can show that they have 41 votes to keep debate going, it’s assumed that the majority has 60.

Both of those approaches — three-fifths present and voting or a requirement for 41 senators to be on the floor at any time to stop cloture — would satisfy a key requirement of Manchin’s: that the minority has a real chance to be involved. “You have to give the minority the ability to object or involve themselves,” Manchin said — and I’d emphasize the “or” there. The minority would have substantive involvement in the form of floor speeches but could also offer amendments to the bill.

Defenders of the current “silent filibuster” warn that a 50-vote threshold would turn the Senate into some sort of rump version of the House, where party leadership just muscles through bill after bill. But the talking filibuster would make that so hard for the majority that the chamber would retain its reputation for, to put it politely, deliberation. It just might, in the end, actually get something done.

The post What Biden’s Talking Filibuster Could Look Like appeared first on The Intercept.

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In 2018, Liuba Grechen Shirley was one of thousands of women across the country galvanized by the election of Donald Trump to jump into the political ring — but first, she had to grapple with child care. She couldn’t simultaneously stop working, run for Congress, and also pay for someone to watch her two kids, ages 3 and 1 at the time. Since child care was essential to her ability to campaign, she appealed to the Federal Election Commission to allow her to use campaign funds to put the kiddos away for the day.

Her Democratic opponent in the Long Island primary, DuWayne Gregory, argued that the FEC should bar such spending, reasoning that her children were her own responsibility. In a landmark decision, the FEC sided with Grechen Shirley, creating a precedent available today for parents running for office.

Unimpressed, however, was the Women’s Equality Party, a party in New York state with ballot access that — ostensibly — supported women running for office on a platform of, well, equality for women. The WEP weighed into the primary and endorsed Gregory, her male opponent.

I was a first-time candidate running for Congress with two babies.

The “Women’s Equality Party” refused to interview me, but endorsed my opponent — a man who said I shouldn’t spend my campaign funds on childcare. https://t.co/uJpk1NvhFE

— Liuba Grechen Shirley (@liuba4congress) March 14, 2021

When the New York Times came inquiring about the oddity, Susan Zimet, the chair of the WEP, more or less apologized and said that it was out of her hands. “I see that Liuba is running a pretty remarkable campaign; I admire her,’’ she told the Grey Lady. “But DuWayne came as a recommendation through our state committee person.”

It was no secret who controlled the WEP state committee Zimet was referring to: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the same man who had founded the “party” four years earlier while facing an unexpectedly robust primary challenge from law professor Zephyr Teachout.

Gregory had run the previous cycle against incumbent Republican Rep. Peter King and been hammered by 24 percentage points, repeating a pattern of Democrats putting up machine-aligned candidates who didn’t seriously challenge King, who is a longtime ally of Cuomo’s, despite — or, perhaps, because of — coming from a different party. That same cycle, the WEP endorsed Cuomo ally Rep. Joe Crowley against challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Grechen Shirley ended up narrowly beating Gregory, and Cuomo gave her a half-hearted endorsement. At a rally with Grechen Shirley, he didn’t name King and afterward said he had no choice. “This is more the situation he is in,” Cuomo said of King. “He has a leadership that has sworn allegiance to the president that is anti-New York and I don’t believe situationally he can change it.”

King said that there were no hard feelings. “I don’t take it personal,” King told Newsday of the endorsement. “The governor is facing a primary from the left. … Andrew has to do what he has to do.”

At debates and town halls, King made clear he still had Cuomo’s support. “In the words of Andrew Cuomo, God bless Peter King,” he’d say.

King held on by 6 points against Grechen Shirley. First elected to Congress in 1992, King declined to run for reelection in 2020.

“Governor Cuomo thinks he can buy women’s votes by cynically creating a new party to advertise values he hasn’t fought for in office,” Teachout said in a statement in 2014. “A real Democrat would have already passed the Women’s Equality Act and would be fighting for paid family leave.”

In 2018, the WEP once again endorsed Cuomo, this time against Cynthia Nixon. Zimet was again apologetic. But what could she do? “Yes, Cynthia is a woman, and yes she represents a lot of our values, but we have a governor who literally created the party,” she pleaded to the Times.

The WEP was doing double duty on the ballot, aimed not just at voters sympathetic to women’s equality, but also as a hedge against a party with an almost identical acronym: the Working Families Party. In 2014, the WFP flirted with endorsing Teachout but won a set of promises from Cuomo and ended up endorsing him. He quickly broke all the promises, and the WFP endorsed Nixon in 2018, touching off a civil war that has led to the rapid fracturing of Cuomo’s political architecture.

That year, Cuomo and his running mate Kathy Hochul embarked on a tour of the state aboard the “Women’s Equality Express,” a pink-and-blue striped campaign bus.

The public has since learned that while Cuomo was cynically engaging in an identity politics bit that would have been too absurd even for the writer’s room at “Veep,” he was, according to at least six women who have since come forward, simultaneously sexually harassing subordinates and creating a hostile and abusive work environment for women and for men — though not for women and men alike.

Officials at the top of the Democratic Party, including New York Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, along with dozens of state senators and assembly members, have called on Cuomo to resign. The Women’s Equality Party, however, has yet to be heard from. In 2018, it fell beneath the required 50,000 votes needed to maintain ballot access.

The post Cuomo’s “Women’s Equality Party” Might Just Be the Most Cynical Political Move of His Career appeared first on The Intercept.

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Tara Reade, who last year accused presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993, is locked in a battle with the New York Times and other outlets over their portrayal of her educational and professional background. Reade, through an attorney, has demanded a correction or clarification over the media’s claims that she lied about having a college degree from Antioch University in Seattle, her undergraduate institution. Letters have also been sent to the Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, and Politico. The Times and other outlets who have responded are standing by their reporting.

“We believe our story is accurate,” said Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy.

To prove her case, Reade, through an attorney, obtained a cache of records from her college and law school, which were provided to the Times as well as other members of the media, including The Intercept. The question of whether she graduated from the college where she later served on the faculty is complicated. The documents do make it clear, however, that the story Reade told of her graduation — that it was handled in a unique, private way due to her domestic violence-related legal name change — is consistent with the records in her file.

Last year, twin claims — that Reade had not graduated college and had not been a member of the faculty at Antioch — were major blows to Reade’s reputation. The claims, widely repeated in the press, were sourced to an Antioch spokesperson and prompted the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office to launch a probe into whether Reade had lied about the degree or her employment in court. (The probe has since been concluded with no charges filed.) The reporting also led Seattle University School of Law, where she graduated from law school, to threaten to rescind her law degree unless she could produce a transcript from her undergraduate years.

“[Reade] attended but did not graduate from Antioch University. She was never a faculty member. She did provide several hours of administrative work,” Karen Hamilton, an Antioch spokesperson, told CNN in May.

CNN also reported that Reade claimed “she received a bachelor of arts degree from Antioch University in Seattle under the auspices of a ‘protected program,’ personally working with the former president of the school to ensure her identity was protected while she obtained credits for her degree.” The outlet added: “An Antioch University official told CNN that such a ‘protected program’ does not exist and never has.”

The New York Times dialed up the charge, writing about her time in law school:

She was so poor she had to borrow law books and occasionally brought her daughter to class when she couldn’t find child care. Her classmate Jenifer Robinson, who now practices law in Seattle, recalled her “heavy, dark sadness” and said it “appeared to be a real, genuine fear and was a huge part of her identity.”

She also harbored a secret. She had never obtained the undergraduate degree required for law school admission.

The claim that Reade “harbored a secret” is unusual for the Times, as the paper often tells readers that while it can describe actions, it can’t penetrate the thoughts of its subjects in order to know whether they are lying. The Times story not only claimed that Reade hadn’t graduated but also that Reade knew she had not graduated, casting doubt on Reade’s explanation: that there was an arrangement between her college and law school that was connected to a protected program for domestic violence victims.

The Post, meanwhile, did not go as far as the Times. In its response to Reade, the paper noted that the university publicly claimed Reade had not graduated, and the Post merely reported the discrepancy between Reade’s claim and the one made by her school. Indeed, the university said much the same to The Intercept in a request for comment, though the sharpness of the original response — that she “did not graduate from Antioch University” — is shaded a bit. “Based on our records, Ms. Reade was not conferred an undergraduate degree by our institution,” said Rebecca Todd, the university’s general counsel.

Like much else with Reade, who has led a life the New York Times described in its headline as a “tumultuous journey,” her undergraduate and law school files are complicated and difficult to untangle. In 1998, Reade received what’s known as a Tarasoff warning, according to court documents. Under California law, confidentiality agreements can and must be breached by officials such as social workers or therapists if they come upon information that a person’s life is in imminent danger. Reade’s former husband’s probation officer issued one such warning, and local police alerted Reade that she and her daughter were in danger. Reade, through a program run by the Walnut Avenue Family & Women’s Center, moved to Seattle, where she was transferred to the organization New Beginnings, traveling through a network of domestic violence shelters. The mother and daughter received judicially sealed name changes and new Social Security numbers.

In September 2000, under the name Alexandra McCabe, Reade enrolled in Antioch University Seattle’s bachelor’s degree completion program. Reade had, to that point, attended at least four colleges: Cuesta College, Long Beach City College, Pasadena City College, and UC Santa Barbara. Antioch University Seattle operates on a quarter system rather than standard semesters, so after converting, she had earned nine quarter credits at Cuesta, 13.5 at Long Beach City, 60 at Pasadena, and 13.5 at UC Santa Barbara, for a total of 96 quarter credits that were qualified to be transferred to Antioch University Seattle, according to her transcripts.

The completion program required 180 quarter credits for a degree, including a minimum of 36 credits in residence. At the time, Antioch allowed for up to 60 credits to be earned based on life experience, and Reade’s time as an aide on Capitol Hill and in the California legislature easily qualified. Adding those would give her 156 quarter credits toward the 180 needed, meaning she was just 24 short when she entered Antioch’s program — though she still needed to complete a full 36 at Antioch to meet the residency requirement. To convert the life experience into course credit, students at Antioch worked with members of the faculty to demonstrate what they learned from the experience (Reade later served as one of those affiliate faculty evaluators). In the fall, she took the first course in that direction, according to her transcript, titled “Learning from Life Experience.”

Documents show she completed the first draft of the project needed for the life experience credits. “Alexandra’s draft prior learning package clearly demonstrates her well developed critical thinking and writing skills,” reads the note from evaluator Candace Harris. “She brings a wealth of information and experience with her to the completion of her liberal studies education and this knowledge will contribute significantly to her degree.”

Reade’s attorney provided both an official transcript from Antioch as well as one that had been produced in 2007 for a credit report. The official transcript lists 35 completed credits, one short of the 36 residency credits needed. The second transcript includes two courses, worth seven credits between them, marked as “IN” for incomplete. In other words: To graduate, Reade would have needed to complete one of those two courses and also finish her life experience project. Her claim that she completed the project and Antioch’s records are flawed is buttressed by the fact that the college later hired her to evaluate other student projects, but neither Reade nor Antioch have retained or could produce a record of it. The nonofficial transcript projects a December 2001 graduation date.

Tara Reade photographed in 2020 for her book, “Left Out: When the Truth Doesn’t Fit.”

Photo: Darrin Hayes; Courtesy Tara Reade

Reade applied to Seattle University School of Law’s Alternative Admission Program in January 2001. In March, University of California official Delores O’Brien, an expert in the field of domestic violence, provided the law school with an affidavit. “Due to the consequences of domestic violence and the related fear, Alexandra’s records are not available. Thank you for keeping her safety at the forefront of your rules and expectations,” O’Brien wrote in an affidavit and letter of recommendation reviewed by The Intercept. The affidavit was received in March 2001 and confirms Reade’s assertion that her name change implicated her records, but it also testifies that Reade had graduated, which was not yet true; Reade says she completed all her coursework and met the requirements to graduate later that spring and that it was her understanding that Antioch conveyed this privately to the law school.

Reade began law school classes that summer, but that fall, she got a letter putting her registration on hold, as the registrar observed there was no final transcript from Antioch in her file. Donna Deming, associate dean for student affairs at Seattle University School of Law, then emailed Deann Ketchum, the law school’s associate registrar. “I wanted to let you know that we waived the requirement that Ms. McCabe furnish us with an official transcript,” she wrote.

There should be a memo in the file to that effect. If there is not, please let me know and I will write one explaining the circumstances as to why we will not receive an official transcript. I should tell you that in making this decision, Dean [Rudolph] Hasl was consulted. Would you please take whatever steps are necessary to clear her record regarding the receipt of a transcript.

The email from Deming to Ketchum was found in Reade’s law school files and provided upon request to Reade’s lawyer, but the memo Deming said she would write, laying out the specifics of how the affair was settled, is not. Reade’s lawyer provided a copy of the email to The Intercept.

Also in the file is further evidence of Hasl’s involvement. An email from Reade to Deming in February 2001 begins, “As per our meeting with Dean Hasl I had Dr. O’Brien mail an affidavit.” O’Brien has since died. The documents Reade’s attorney provided to the media also include a statement from Reade’s friend, Carson Marshall, who recalled waiting outside the rooms as Reade met separately with Antioch’s academic dean and president to sort out her records. Marshall later went on to work for Antioch.

Ketchum, the law school associate registrar, replied to Deming with an email that was also provided to Reade’s attorney and to the media. “I did not see a memo in Ms. McCabe’s file to this effect, but will be sure to include a copy of this e-mail for future reference. She should not receive any additional correspondence regarding this matter, nor will she be at risk for having a hold placed on her account. I will be sure to flag her record with the appropriate code.”

If Reade met the requirements, why would there be no degree in her file? Reade claims the inability to link all of her credits given her change in name and Social Security number meant that a normal file wasn’t possible, and she understood that the agreement between the schools was a facsimile for a degree.

There appears to be enough documentation to complicate the Times’s claim that she was deliberately lying about her degree, but her case against the other outlets is not as strong, as they only reported that Antioch claimed she hadn’t graduated, and Reade claimed she had — a discrepancy that remains alive.

Antioch’s claim that Reade was lying about having served on the school’s faculty is flimsier. And on that matter, Antioch has backed off. Previously, an Antioch spokesperson told reporters, “She was never a faculty member. She did provide several hours of administrative work.” The university, in a statement it has recently provided to an attorney for Reade, Lauren Hruska, now acknowledges that Reade “worked for Antioch University as a Prior Learning Evaluator in 2008, 2009, and 2010.”

The statement stops short of acknowledging that Reade’s position made her a faculty member, but Antioch has been quite explicit that this position is indeed part of the faculty. A 2006 form letter, obtained by Reade’s attorney, spells it out: “It is our practice to extend to persons who provide evaluator services a courtesy appointment to our faculty—so that, in this case, you become an affiliate faculty member in leadership and liberal studies.”

The letter, signed by the academic dean, goes on: “It is my hope that you will see this appointment as an expression, if a non-material one, of the importance of your contribution to our continuing work.”

That such a role qualified as faculty is confirmed by two other Antioch documents. “Affiliate faculty members perform defined tasks related to student learning for a specified period in a manner prescribed by the University,” reads the school’s “Faculty Classifications” document from the time, which was also provided by her attorney. An Antioch official, Carson Marshall, Reade’s friend from her time in undergrad, worked with the program while Reade was an evaluator and provided a statement to Reade’s attorney further validating Reade’s claims. “Several years after her graduation from law school, Tara was hired temporarily and part-time by Antioch University Seattle as affiliate faculty. She conducted prior learning evaluation for students seeking credit in areas related to her academic areas of expertise,” Marshall said in the statement. “I do know she worked multiple terms, but I couldn’t say how many.”

The school’s course catalog from around that time similarly described such evaluators as faculty, saying that students “must document and demonstrate their learning to qualified evaluators, who may be regular members of the Antioch faculty or outside professionals who serve, for this purpose, as affiliate faculty.”

The attorney who contacted the media outlets on Reade’s behalf, Jeff Moshe, said that he didn’t include a request to clarify that error, considering it below the level of defamation. “I did not reference the provably false statement that Tara was not a faculty member at Antioch because I do not feel that the claim rises to the necessary level of defamation and does not have the same harm as claiming she lied on her law school application and as a witness under oath,” Moshe said.

The questions over Reade’s graduation and her service on the faculty are linked. In order to graduate, Reade would have needed to complete her life development project. Documents confirm a first draft was produced, but the record stops cold. Yet it is hard to imagine Antioch, just a few years later, hiring her as a faculty member to evaluate such student projects if she had not completed her own. Reade said she did complete her project and believes the confusion around her final months is related to the missing documents.

It is also plausible that following the conversations between Antioch and Seattle University Law School, there remained loose ends to tie up that were never taken care of. Either way, the New York Times’s confidence in its assertion that Reade knew she had not graduated appears misplaced. More appropriate may be a version of the assessment made by Times columnist Michelle Goldberg of the more significant Reade charge: “It would be easier to know what to do with Tara Reade’s accusation that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her if her tale were more solid, or if it were less.”

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