Andrew Cuomo has survived more serious scandals than any other sitting governor in the country. He shut down the Moreland Commission — set up to investigate corruption by politicians — when it started getting too close to home. His top aide was convicted as part of a sweeping corruption probe. And he’s come out of them largely unscathed.

Yet this time is different for the New York governor. At a news conference on Friday afternoon, a defiant Cuomo rejected the weekslong drumbeat of sexual harassment and misconduct allegations. But all around him, New York politicians at both the state and federal level are demanding his resignation, with proceedings launched in the state Assembly that could lead to impeachment.

And it’s different because the interlocking system of protection Cuomo had long constructed around himself has been washed away by twin, reinforcing political currents: resistance liberals and democratic socialists. One explanation for Cuomo’s vulnerability has been the removal of Donald Trump from the public scene, finally making space for news that didn’t revolve around him to break through. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t explain why this time, unlike all his pre-Trump misdeeds, scandals are finally sticking to Cuomo.

Now that so many progressive members of the resistance are paying close attention to New York politics, said one state assembly member who asked not to be named in order to speak freely, the nature of the harassment allegations is playing a role. “It’s their political identity to hold people accountable on this issue,” the member said of the revived Democratic, anti-Trump voters.

Before Trump’s election, Cuomo had built a unique political system in New York in which power flowed upward to him. Republicans controlled the state Senate, significantly thanks to Cuomo, who helped create a renegade band of Democrats known as the Independent Democratic Conference. The IDC allied itself in the state Capitol in Albany with Republicans, while Cuomo fended off insurgent Democrats’ efforts to unseat Republican senators and reclaim the chamber. The GOP’s control of the upper chamber marginalized the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, creating an obstacle that could be cited for the failure to enact the party’s agenda.

The state Assembly, meanwhile, was run by Speaker Carl Heastie, a Cuomo ally. Cuomo, Heastie, and the GOP Senate leader were known as the “three men in a room” who made all the decisions that mattered. And of those three, Cuomo was by far the most powerful, particularly through the control over the budget New York law gives the governor. Cinching his total control was his reputation for ruthless revenge against anybody who tested his power. Because challenging Cuomo had such a small chance of success and such a high cost, few tried.

Over the years, challenging Cuomo was left to the Working Families Party, which began electing progressives throughout the state. But their alliance with organized labor, and Cuomo’s control of the same, kept them inside the fold, relatively speaking, even as they gave rise to a generation of operatives and politicians who positioned themselves considerably to Cuomo’s left.

The election of Trump in 2016 stunned Democratic voters across the country out of their stupor, and, when they came to, they looked upon the scene in New York and were appalled at what was before them. Thousands of voters researched their elected officials and learned to their surprise that the Democrat they had voted for was in fact openly aligned with Republicans. With Trump in the White House, that could no longer stand.

The WFP, which ran a multi-year campaign against the IDC, backed Cynthia Nixon in a 2018 primary challenge to Cuomo, and Cuomo repaid them by forcing organized labor to pull its support from the party and subsequently trying to destroy it legislatively. Nixon made the IDC a centerpiece of her campaign, and the newly energized Democrats fielded primary challengers to its members. In a feat that would have been inconceivable in the previous cycle, progressive Democrats smashed the IDC out of existence and reclaimed the Senate, giving Democrats unified control and stripping Cuomo of excuses. That made Andrea Stewart-Cousins the Democratic Senate leader, taking power after Cuomo spent years thwarting her rise.

The new legislature enacted a sweeping set of progressive reforms and Cuomo signed them, even while his spokesperson lambasted Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou and State Senators Alessandra Biaggi and Jessica Ramos as “fucking idiots.”

That same cycle, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ousted the head of the Queens machine, Rep. Joe Crowley. Julia Salazar defeated a longtime state senator in Brooklyn, foreshadowing the 2020 cycle, when the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America smashed their way through Cuomo’s allies, winning nearly every Assembly and Senate seat they contested.

“Each one of us who ran primaries against Democrats made it clear that our fealty was not to party registration but to principle and that means that we are always ready and willing to hold people in power accountable, regardless of whether they’re a Democrat or Republican,” said Assembly Member Zohran Kwame Mamdani, recalling that Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi had called the DSA anti-austerity platform “garbage” that nobody would fall for during the campaign. Azzopardi is the same spokesperson who attacked Niou, Biaggi, and Ramos.

“Before 2018, state politics took place out of the public eye, with repeated scandals and ongoing absurdities like Cuomo’s support for the IDC going unchecked and unchallenged by the legislature and media,” said Assembly Member Phara Souffrant Forrest. “By organizing, the left is shining a light on Albany, and it is no longer possible to ignore the toxicity that exists within it.”

Asked why the scandals were playing differently for Cuomo this time, Niou put it simply. “We are different,” she said. “There are more women in Albany now. More people of color. We are a different body. We don’t play by their rules.”

In the Bronx and Westchester, Jamaal Bowman took on 16-term incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel. Heastie, the Assembly speaker, had long said he was unconcerned about threats from his left, arguing that voters in his district in the Bronx were moderate and appreciated his approach and his work with Cuomo. He watched on primary day as Bowman crushed Engel in a landslide. More importantly for the politics of the state Assembly, Heastie’s assembly district was inside Engel’s congressional district, and Bowman beat Engel handily on Heastie’s own territory. (An assembly member who asked not to be named said that Heastie seems to have been unmoved by Bowman’s win in his backyard: “It makes sense [that Heastie would feel political pressure], but I don’t think it’s what he’s felt. He hasn’t displayed any change since then.”)

“It is no coincidence that WFP champions are now leading the call in Albany for the Governor to resign,” said New York Working Families Party State Director Sochie Nnaemeka in a statement, “from the IDC challengers who unseated Cuomo’s long-time allies, to a new generation of Congressional leaders including Mondaire Jones and Jamaal Bowman, to our growing coalition of progressive State Senate and Assembly insurgents.”

The new lawmakers owed nothing to Cuomo and also created space for progressives in the legislature who’d been uncomfortable with Cuomo to start speaking out. Niou had served as Assembly Member Ron Kim’s chief of staff, and Kim, with progressive support, survived a primary challenge from the right by a local police officer. Empowered and emboldened, he became a leading critic of Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic. “After Cuomo goes down for sexual harassment, I’ll still be here to hold him accountable for 15,000 deaths,” Kim posted on Friday.

“It’s a combination of many things,” Kim told The Intercept. “New progressives winning elections, young women elected officials pushing back, and people finally seeing the impact of his abuse of power.”

Kim said that the newly elected members of the legislature gave him confidence in his fight with Cuomo, but he also drew strength from “the hundreds of families who lost loved ones in nursing homes, families who I had direct interaction [with] over the last ten months.”

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Only the Democratic Party can put together a $1.9 trillion relief package and manage to get on the wrong side of public opinion for being too cheap. Yet that’s where we’ve arrived after two months of debating the party’s stimulus, with centrist Democrats chipping away at the benefit structure by phasing out individual checks at a faster rate and pushing to shrink unemployment benefits as well as shorten the length of time extra benefits are paid out.

That’s on top of the political mess created by Democrats who continued promising $2,000 checks even after the first $600 had gone out to people in December and January. That left people believing what they were told: that another $2,000 was on its way.

The disappointment was unnecessary, created by Democrats placing their own artificial constraints on the bill and then negotiating among themselves within those constraints. They did it on unemployment too, with the Senate lowering the bonus pandemic benefit from $400 down to $300 in return for extending those benefits by a month and making the first $10,200 in unemployment tax-free.

But that disappointment may be blunted by other elements of the legislation that have gotten much less attention. Democrats haven’t been messaging about what’s in much of the bill, and Republicans have instead focused their ire on the estate of the late Dr. Seuss and on Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, who now live under the single brand name of Potato Head. (Mr. and Mrs. Head, contrary to Republican hysteria, have in fact retained their respective genders. Only the umbrella brand name was tweaked.)

As a result, more than $1 trillion from the rest of the package is going largely under the radar.

The fluke in how the current policy was crafted — in fits and starts, spanning two administrations, two special elections, and a Senate takeover — gave an unlikely boost to the left wing of the party when it came to the checks. For the past year, Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., have been arguing that adults and their children and other dependents should be getting the same amount of relief money. In the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed last March, adult dependents were cut out entirely, and while adults got $1,200, dependents got $500. That meant a family of four banked a check for $3,400.

When Sanders and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., successfully argued for the inclusion of $600 checks into the December relief package, the figure was small enough that Sanders was able to win the argument to equalize adults and dependents. Everybody would get a flat $600, meaning that a family of four would get $2,400. But then-President Donald Trump, having sat out the negotiations, signaled that he would veto the package unless the figure was bumped to $2,000 and an assault on Big Tech was added to the bill.

In the House, congressional progressives, led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., quickly introduced an amendment to meet Trump’s $2,000, increasing the payments to $1,400. The current legislation, which adopted the amendment, kept the formula the same, equalizing payments between adults and children. That means if the new bill is enacted, a family of four would be on the receiving end of a one-time check worth $5,600.

The money doesn’t stop there. A new child tax credit, which would be implemented for just one year but which Democrats aim to extend, offers $3,600 for every child under 6 and $3,000 for every non-adult child above that age. The aim is to have the IRS send out a check each month to families making less than $150,000. (So that family of four above, if both kids are under 6, would get $600 each month if the IRS can administer the system effectively. If the kids are older, it would be $500 each month.)

The bill also includes billions in new subsidies for health care coverage, going to both Affordable Care Act plans and COBRA; a bailout of the child care industry; $50 billion for broadband upgrades; and billions toward full vaccination.

In the House, progressive Democrats are still fighting over the tightened eligibility for relief checks and resisting efforts to limit unemployment benefits, but so far there’s been no serious threat to block the package without the final set of demands being met. And Sanders himself is sending signals that he’s comfortable with where it’s headed: Asked Thursday about President Joe Biden’s tightened eligibility requirements for relief checks, he told CNN, “I think the main point is that we are doing something that is reasonably consistent with what we have done in the past.”

Ahead of the effort to pass a stimulus in 2009, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told President Barack Obama that there was “no fucking way” anything with a “T” could get through Congress. This package is nearly three times the size of the one Obama pushed through. For more on what’s in it, listen to this week’s episode of Deconstructed.

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On Wednesday night, the House of Representatives passed a sweeping package of voting rights and campaign finance reform that, if enacted, would reshape the structure of American politics, expanding the franchise and diminishing the power of wealthy interests. The bill passed not long before midnight by a margin of 220-210, with every Republican voting no, joined by one Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act, creates a national system of automatic voter registration, which is expected to bring millions of new voters to the ballot box, and cracks down on voter suppression tactics. Crucially, it mandates nonpartisan redistricting commissions in order to outlaw gerrymandering. Without passage of the legislation, Republicans are well positioned to retake the House of Representatives in 2022 without persuading a single voter to switch parties or turning out new voters, but simply by gerrymandering in the wake of the Trump administration’s rigged census. For that background and the legislation, listen to our February episode of Deconstructed, which focused on the For the People Act, and read Jon Schwarz’s essay on its importance.

The bill tackles the influence of the superrich on politics by creating a “Freedom From Influence Fund.” For every contribution up to $200 received by a candidate in a primary or general election campaign, the fund matches by six times, turning that $200 into $1,200. The contribution is not eligible for a match, however, if the donor gave more than $1,000 to the candidate, an effort to make sure members of Congress are funded by regular people rather than the rich. No taxpayer money is involved: The matching money is to be funded by a surcharge levied on top of fines doled out to those convicted of white-collar financial crimes. The logic is straightforward: Those abusing the democratic system should pay to fix it.

The bill has strong support among Democrats in the Senate, support that is only growing stronger as Republicans unleash a wave of voter suppression laws — particularly in Arizona and Georgia, where Democrats will be defending new gains in the upcoming midterms. While Republicans across the country support the legislation, their elected representatives in Congress are dead set against it. That means passage requires busting or evading the filibuster. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, an advocate of drastically reforming the filibuster to return the Senate to a majority-run institution, said that the idea of a democracy reform exception to the filibuster has been discussed if it appears that full repeal is not in the cards. For more on the filibuster’s prognosis, listen to interviews with Merkley and authors Adam Jentleson and Jacob Hacker.

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In 2003, Letitia “Tish” James shook the New York Democratic political establishment, becoming the first City Council candidate to win office solely as a nominee of the Working Families Party. James spent the next 15 years as an outspoken, independent-minded progressive and a leading voice for the city’s social movements. In 2013, despite being vastly outspent, she won a tight race for New York City public advocate, a stepping stone to mayor.

Her close alliance with the city’s grassroots was considered by political observers to be both a benefit and an obstacle. She had people behind her, but she didn’t have money — and moving to the next level required lots of it.

When New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was forced to resign amid a #MeToo scandal in 2018, James was quickly discussed as a potential successor. But could she raise the funds?

That’s where Andrew Cuomo came in. The state’s governor, who was seeking his third term, was in the midst of a long-running feud with the organization that was so intimately linked with James’s rise, the WFP. Under pressure from Cuomo, local unions had left the party, taking their clout and financing with them. In April 2018, the WFP came for the king, endorsing activist and actor Cynthia Nixon for the Democratic primary over Cuomo, who vowed to destroy the organization. Cuomo had long treated figures in New York politics — his playground — like kids to be bullied. He turned his attention to James.

In May, Cuomo made James an excruciating offer: He would endorse her and open his donor network to her, but it would come at a price. Not only would she have to endorse him, she would have to publicly refuse the support of the WFP. Ripped from the pages of a cliched mafia screenplay, James would have to prove her loyalty by executing her longtime ally.

Cuomo made James an excruciating offer: He would endorse her and open his donor network to her, but it would come at a price.

James was left with two bad options: Accepting Cuomo’s offer was the most likely route to winning the election, but it would come with accusations that she had traded in her trademark independence and social justice values. Rejecting it could cost her the election and make Cuomo into a fatal enemy.

James took the deal. The WFP endorsed her anyway, against her public will, while jointly endorsing Zephyr Teachout. The bulk of their spending went toward opposing the most right-leaning candidate, Sean Patrick Maloney, who represents a congressional district upstate.

In the fictional version of these parables, a deal with the devil always ends the same way: The devil always gets his due. But New York politics is not a parable. The story’s new plot twist conforms more closely to a Disney version: Cuomo is getting his due of a different kind, with scrutiny over his failed coronavirus response and an investigation into sexual harassment claims. His fate now rests with Tish James.

The election long since over, James owes Cuomo nothing. And, in fact, nobody could blame her for appreciating the opportunity to demonstrate — to him as much as to her detractors — that she was never for sale and that she’s just as independent as she’s always been. In late January, she released a damning report on the state’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes, setting off Cuomo’s descent.

Teachout, her progressive opponent in the primary, said she has been impressed by James’s tenure, including her willingness to take on both Big Tech and the governor. “It’s no secret that I was worried about James’ close connection to Cuomo, because being willing to take on the Governor is part of the job, and the key moment in Cuomo’s unraveling was when she published the nursing home report,” Teachout told The Intercept. “[Assembly Member] Ron Kim and others had been yelling about it since the beginning, and [journalist David] Sirota has followed it closely, but Cuomo trusted that none of the big figures in New York politics would say a word, because the usual rule in Albany is that no one publicly crosses Cuomo in a big way. That report changed the entire dynamic, and she proved her independence in a way that really matters to all New Yorkers, and especially those in nursing homes, with family in nursing homes, those who died.”

New York Working Families Party State Director Sochie Nnaemeka also praised James’s response. “What New Yorkers are seeing is the fearless Tish we know and love, who stands up to bullies, whether they’re Amazon or Trump, the NRA or Cuomo,” Nnaemeka said. “In this moment of crisis, she brought crucial information to light around the Governor’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes — which precipitated massive calls for accountability.”

Implications that she had sold out her integrity for Cuomo’s backing rankled James from the beginning. “What’s so interesting and kind of comical is that prior to this vacancy no one ever questioned my independence — nobody,” James told the Albany Times Union editorial board in 2018 in response to the backlash. “All the groups, all the advocacy groups, all the Indivisible [groups], all the True Blue, all the activists: ‘We want Tish James. We want her voice, her moral suasion.’”

Yet as soon as she accepted Cuomo’s endorsement, all that changed, she said, snapping her fingers. “Just like that, my independence is questioned. So it’s somewhat disheartening after 20 years of public service, 20 years of exercising independence,” she said. “Gov. Cuomo did have a fundraiser for me. Do you know how much it netted? $70,000.”

Cuomo, who built his base of power on fear, is now seeing it crumble beneath him.

Cuomo, who built his base of power on fear, is now seeing it crumble beneath him as his rivals reevaluate just how much ability he has to make good on past threats. Two weeks after James’s damning nursing home report, State Assembly Member Ron Kim reported that a top Cuomo aide had confessed to undercounting deaths in such facilities, adding that Cuomo called to threaten and berate him for his public opposition to the governor’s handling of the pandemic. Kim’s claim and Cuomo’s weakened stature opened space for a public airing of Cuomo’s harassment of women on his staff. In the wake of the sexual harassment claims, James fought for jurisdiction and has pledged a thorough, independent review.

Cuomo’s fall from grace is the consequence of those twin scandals. The first is related to his handling of nursing home Covid-19 cases. Early in the pandemic, he ordered nursing homes to take patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus back from the hospitals. The facilities were not equipped to successfully quarantine those patients, and thousands died. Cuomo also immunized nursing homes against liability for negligence in handling the situation.

Just how many died has become another thread of the scandal, as his administration recently admitted to underreporting deaths. Prosecutors are exploring whether laws were broken.

Two of Cuomo’s own former aides kicked off the second scandal. Lindsey Boylan said that he made a series of inappropriate comments and kissed her without consent in his office in 2018; she left the administration soon after.

Charlotte Bennett said that Cuomo asked probing and inappropriate questions about her sex life, including whether she dates older men. She reported the harassment at the time and took a position that would allow her more distance from him, before eventually leaving state government last fall.

A third woman, Anna Ruch, said that he put his hand on her bare lower back at a wedding in the fall of 2019. After she removed it, she said, he put his hands on her face and asked if he could kiss her, a moment memorialized in a photo that captures her mortified expression.

Cuomo initially sought to punt the matter to a crony, then suggested pairing James with a judge he had appointed to multiple positions. Under pressure, he conceded to an independent investigation. “It took the governor 24 hours and significant backlash to allow for a truly independent investigation. These are not the actions of someone who simply feels misunderstood; they are the actions of an individual who wields his power to avoid justice,” Bennett responded.

That independent investigation will now be overseen by none other than Tish James. That’s not exactly what he bargained for.

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This week, Milwaukee Bucks senior vice president Alex Lasry announced a 2022 run for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, a seat currently held by Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. Lasry, son of private equity billionaire and major Democratic Party donor Marc Lasry, is the second Democratic candidate to jump in the race.

Lasry’s father owns the Bucks, and the 33-year-old Lasry said recently that his relocation to Wisconsin to work for the basketball team had come with the pleasant surprise that the state turns out to have many of the same cultural amenities as the cities on the coasts he had previously called home.

“I didn’t know much about Milwaukee; I knew the Brewers, I knew the Packers were in Wisconsin,” he said in a conversation with the Jewish Museum Milwaukee this past summer.

Lasry said that his first brief trip to Wisconsin involved canvassing for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2008, but he never made it to Milwaukee until his father came to meet former Wisconsin Sen. Herb Kohl — of the Kohl’s department stores chain — about buying the Bucks. The deal was consummated in 2014, keeping the Bucks in Milwaukee, and the younger Lasry began working for the team in August 2014.

“I had been to Wisconsin one other time,” he continued. “I went to Oshkosh to help volunteer for Hillary in the primary in ’08 with my sister. That was it. My first time to Milwaukee was when we came to meet with Senator Kohl about possibly purchasing the team.”

Lasry describes Milwaukee as a hidden gem, whose virtues he wants to share with the larger world. “After I came here, you kind of quickly realized that people just don’t talk enough about Milwaukee,” he said. “It was kind of this really nicely kept secret in the Midwest. And I think it was just kind of our hope that we would be able to help be a part of showing everyone what I was able to see about Milwaukee.”

Alex Lasry’s career opportunities have consistently been connected to his father’s businesses or political giving. Though he doesn’t note it in his bio, Lasry began as an intern at Goldman Sachs during college, while Lasry’s father was a major Goldman Sachs client. Marc Lasry was a bundler for Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign, gathering $500,000 for his reelection, and he led a Wall Street effort to restore relations with the White House after the president mildly criticized the financial sector. His son then scored an internship in the White House in the Office of Public Engagement, run by senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, who was one of the White House’s key links to the CEO class. The White House gig was his first job out of college, and he rose through the ranks of the office. From there, he returned to Goldman Sachs as an analyst in their government affairs department.

More recently, Alex Lasry helped lead the effort to bring the Democratic National Convention to Milwaukee in 2020 as finance chair of the city’s host committee. Lasry was also in the news this month for getting his Covid-19 vaccine, though the state’s 69-year-old governor has yet to get his.

“I came in with, kind of, just trying to keep an open mind about the city,” Lasry told the museum audience last July. “The only places I had lived in prior were New York, Philly, and D.C. — so kind of bigger East Coast cities. And when I came here, I think what most surprised me about Milwaukee is the fact that Milwaukee has all the same things as any city, especially any big city, has,” he continued.

“And I think when you think about smaller Midwestern cities, you don’t think of them as, ‘OK, they should be able to go pound-for-pound with a city like Chicago.’ Everyone’s always like, Chicago’s like the New York of the Midwest. And what I kind of learned was, Milwaukee has everything. It’s got a great local art scene, it’s got a great local food scene, two major sports teams that are killing everyone else — Packers if you want to include them, and you’ve got three. You’ve got a great bar scene, great universities. It just kind of had everything that you would want.”

Thad Nation, spokesperson for Lasry’s campaign, commented, “Alex has consistently stated that Milwaukee is a top tier city that the whole world needs to see. That’s why he led the effort to bring the 2020 DNC Convention, because he wanted to showcase Milwaukee and Wisconsin to the world. If you get outside the beltway and talk to Wisconsinites, they will all tell you he has continuously worked to uplift everything Wisconsin has to offer. That is exactly why he is raising his family here and will continue to be Wisconsin’s biggest advocate.”

Lasry announced his Senate candidacy in a video, touting endorsements from top local officials including Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and Common Council President Cavalier Johnson. “We’ve been able to use progressive values to build a strong and profitable business,” he said in the video. He goes on to commit to supporting a $15 minimum wage and the PRO Act, a labor rights bill, adding that he believes corporations should “earn their tax cut” by raising wages.

So far, Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson is the only other Democrat to officially enter the August 9, 2022, primary, running as an unapologetic progressive. Speculation has also focused on Democratic state party chair Ben Wikler, a progressive activist, and Mandela Barnes, the state’s progressive lieutenant governor.

Ron Johnson, a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, has not yet announced whether he will run for reelection. A Lasry-Johnson race would be a competition over which candidate benefited more from family privilege. Johnson’s wealth is linked to his father-in-law’s company. Johnson funded his first race with $9 million out of his pocket, but the company then paid Johnson “deferred compensation” of $10 million.

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Senior Senate Democrats recently launched a rearguard attempt to regain power they’d lost in December but were repelled by new members of the Senate in an overlooked but potentially consequential internal caucus battle.

In December, Chris Murphy, the junior Democratic senator from Connecticut, pushed for and won a change to caucus rules that would strip power from the chairs of the most important committees. (Caucus rules can be amended by a majority vote of the caucus.) Then in January, senior Democrats attempted to delay the implementation of Murphy’s rules change and were unsuccessful. Multiple Senate sources, who spoke anonymously to be candid about internal politics, told The Intercept that the discussion was contentious.

Murphy’s success is part of a larger shift in power toward more recently elected Democrats in the caucus, reflecting the rise of members less yoked to the mythology of the Senate as a haven of deliberation and bipartisanship. New members of the party drove partial reform of the filibuster in 2013 and are now pushing to go further, arguing that Republicans are not and won’t ever be willing to be reasonable negotiating partners and that the filibuster should be completely eliminated.

Under the previous Democratic caucus rules, committee gavels were doled out by seniority, and those chairs then had first dibs on the most prized subcommittees as well — meaning that senior members could control the flow of legislation through the committee from beginning to end, or could chair a key policy committee, while also chairing the appropriations subcommittee that funded that policy area, giving them additional influence.

In December, Murphy and his colleagues argued that the double-dip of power was too much and proposed a rule that committee chairs couldn’t have their pick of select subcommittees until everyone else in the caucus had a shot. Senior members pushed back, led by Sens. Patrick Leahy, elected in Vermont in 1974 and serving as chair of the Appropriations Committee; Patty Murray, elected in Washington in 1992 and serving as chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee as well as holding a leadership position; Tom Carper, elected in Delaware in 2000 and serving as chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works; and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, elected in 1996 and serving as chair of the Armed Services Committee.

In addition to their prime committee gavels, Murray and Reed also serve on the Appropriations Committee and would have been in line for powerful subcommittee spots. Carper also serves on the Finance Committee and Homeland Security Committee.

Despite the high-powered pushback, the caucus voted to approve Murphy’s change. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., meanwhile, pushed a rules change that would limit the time a chair could serve to a six-year term, according to sources in the meeting. That effort was defeated, considered by enough of the caucus to be too strict a limitation on seniority rights. (Republican Senate chairs have term limits, though Democrats do not.)

But senior members of the party continued to fight the change, bringing it to another vote in late January at a caucus meeting and arguing for a two-year delay in implementing the new rule. Sens. Jon Tester of Montana (elected in 2006), Martin Heinrich (2012) of New Mexico, and Chris Van Hollen (2016) of Maryland, along with Murphy (2012), all argued against delay.

Passions were high on both sides, said one person on the call. Again, the caucus sided with Murphy and the newer members of the Senate.

The votes were cast by secret ballot, but senators were told by leadership that the tally was “decisively” in favor of moving forward immediately with Murphy’s reform — a Senate version of the Confucian proverb that no one deserves a second bowl of rice until everyone has had a first.

The rules change and the effort behind it have a variety of implications beyond the shuffling of gavels.

The rules change and the effort behind it have a variety of implications beyond the shuffling of gavels. On the internal politics front, it suggests that Murphy’s cache among his colleagues is rising. The change also empowers newer members of the caucus but does so at the expense of the chairs of powerful committees, which in turn increases the relative power of the party’s leadership — inching forward the steady evolution of the upper chamber from one that originally had no Senate majority leader to one in which the position was ceremonial, to an institution with a powerful leader who can guide the chamber’s agenda.

Until 1925, the Senate operated without the position of majority leader. The chamber was instead run by “old bulls” who climbed the ranks of committees by virtue of how long they’d been in the Senate. Legendary senators like Henry Clay, W-Ky., Daniel Webster, W-Mass., and Stephen Douglas, D-Ill., enacted their will through coalitions, their control of key committees and voting blocs and, in the case of Douglas, obscene amounts of bribery.

Through much of the New Deal, Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, D-Ky., was considered a foot soldier for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, earning the moniker “Dear Alben.” When Sen. Richard Russell, D-Ga., wielded vast power over the chamber, he did so without ever seeking the post of majority leader. Texas Democrat Lyndon Johnson became majority leader in 1955 with little opposition, as the position was considered largely ceremonial. He used what tools it did have to shape the post into a powerful perch, beginning the trajectory that continues today. That trend has combined with the sorting of the parties along ideological lines in a way that is new to American politics, and the resulting partisan behavior has further entrenched the power of the majority leader.

The relative increase of the leader’s authority, compared to the committee chairs’, resulting from Murphy’s rule is marginal, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., remained neutral in the fight, allowing the caucus to sort it out, sources involved in the debate said.

Murphy, Tester, Heinrich, and Van Hollen all serve on the Appropriations Committee, and the new rule moves them closer to chairing key subcommittees there. Tester, given his seniority, was already in line for a subcommittee gavel, but Leahy, Reed, and Murray will be nudged aside on subcommittees where they were in line to take over, respectively: State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies; and Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies. Murray’s subcommittee gavel combined with her Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee post gave her a particularly consolidated position.

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In a bid for reconciliation, United Arab Emirates Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba has invited Rep. Ro Khanna, the leading House opponent of the war in Yemen, onto the ambassador’s official podcast. The invitation follows a public dispute over whether Otaiba raised his voice at Khanna during a meeting over Khanna’s opposition to the conflict.

Khanna’s claim and Otaiba’s denial were both reported first by The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed.

“Over thirteen years in Washington, and even longer in public service, I have raised many issues with many people — but I have never once raised my voice,” Otaiba wrote to Khanna. “Making my point directly and calmly is more my style. And that’s how I remember all of our meetings. Let’s prove the point that two passionate advocates can have another direct and calm discussion about serious issues.”

Khanna responded to Otaiba’s public invitation with a precondition, suggesting that if the ambassador would use his influence to free a prominent Yemeni journalist held by forces aligned with the UAE, the California representative would appear on his show. “Right now, it would not be appropriate for me to appear on your podcast while a well-known journalist is detained with the support of your government,” Khanna wrote, referring to Adel Al-Hasani, whose detention was reported last week by HuffPost. Al-Hasani’s attorney said that UAE-backed forces have tortured the journalist while in detention.

“Al-Hasani’s release [would] highlight the pivotal role the UAE can play in building bridges between disparate groups in the Middle East and the US, and how both of our nations can help bring an end to the war in Yemen,” Khanna wrote.

The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, has been at war with Houthi forces in Yemen since 2015. That year, 45 Emirate soldiers were killed in a missile strike on a UAE base, a devastating blow for a nation not accustomed to its own citizens dying in international conflicts. The nation declared three days of mourning. In 2019, the UAE announced it was removing most of its troops from the conflict, but it has continued to help finance the war.

Khanna, the lead author of a war powers resolution to force the United States to end support for the war, told The Intercept that, during a meeting over the effort, Otaiba had become agitated.

“I’ve never had an ambassador of another country come to my office and literally yell at me, but that’s what I had with the ambassador to UAE,” Khanna said.

“I was just taken away,” Khanna said. “It led me to think that there’s a real arrogance, a real sense of entitlement, a sense that he thought himself so powerful that he could act that way. And I’ve never really seen that before.”

As his first foreign policy announcement, President Joe Biden declared an end to U.S. support for the war, but specified it would cease support for Saudi-led “offensive operations.” Khanna said he is not yet reintroducing his war powers resolution, giving the Biden administration and regional forces an opportunity to demonstrate that they are indeed ending the conflict.

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Democrats risk throwing away a Senate Georgia race in two years if they go back on their promise to deliver direct aid after campaigning on the issue, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said on Thursday afternoon.

The Democratic closing argument in the pivotal Georgia Senate runoffs, which elected Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, was that they would approve $2,000 of direct aid blocked by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., if they took control of the Senate. But Democrats are now floating the idea that millions of people promised those checks should not actually get them, arguing that the relief should be more narrowly targeted to those who earned less than $50,000 on their latest tax returns. President Joe Biden has since confirmed that he’s open to the move.

“We need to target that money so folks making $300,000 don’t get any windfall,” Biden said Friday.  “But if you’re a family that’s a two-wage earner, each of the parents — one making 30 grand, one making 40 or 50 — maybe that’s a little more than well, yeah, they need the money, and they’re going to get it. And here’s what I won’t do. I’m not cutting the size of the checks. They’re going to be $1,400 period.”

Biden “floated this trial balloon about changing the targeted audience for the direct payments,” Merkley said in an interview for The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed. “I would advise him, if he were to ask me, that is not the place to compromise, that if you want to see us lose a Senate race in Georgia in two years, then modify the promise made — break the promise made during the Georgia runoff.”

The first chunk of the stimulus checks, $600 that went out in late December and early January, was targeted to individuals who earned $75,000 or less or married couples filing jointly who earned up to $150,000 on their 2019 tax returns, with the payment gradually tapering off for those earning more.

The new proposal would begin the tapering at $50,000 instead, cutting off potentially half of those who got the first piece of the $2,000. Restricting the payments would mean that millions of people promised the aid if Democrats won would be left stiffed.

Some compromises around the edges of the $1.9 trillion stimulus are fine, Merkley said, but breaking such a high-profile promise would be a unique betrayal. “There’s a lot in that bill where you could argue a little more here or a little less there, but I think when you have made that a central point of a key election and narrowly won that election, we all, together, better deliver on that promise.”

At a rally in Atlanta ahead of runoffs, Biden directly connected the elections to the forthcoming aid. “By electing Jon and the Rev. [Warnock], you can make an immediate difference in your own lives and the lives of the people all across this country, because their election will put an end to the block in Washington on that $2,000 stimulus check, that money that will go out the door immediately,” Biden said. “If you send Sen. [David] Perdue and [Kelly] Loeffler back to Washington, those checks will never get there. It’s just that simple. The power is literally in your hands.”

He was passionate about the stakes. “The debate over $2,000 isn’t some abstract debate in Washington. It’s about real lives. Your lives. The lives of good, hardworking Americans, and if you’re like millions of Americans all across this country, you need the money, you need the help, and you need it now. Look, Georgia: There’s no one in America with more power to make that happen than you, the citizens of Atlanta, the citizens of Georgia,” he said.

It made for a powerful moment — and could make for an even more powerful campaign ad against Sen. Raphael Warnock when he runs for reelection to a full term in 2022, a race that has effectively already started. (Warnock won a special election to fill out the term of Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. That term runs through 2022.)

The direct aid is part of a stimulus package now being moved through the Senate budget reconciliation process. The package also includes aid to state and local governments, money for vaccine distribution, expanded unemployment benefits, and subsidies for health care coverage.

On Thursday, the Senate held a series of nonbinding votes on amendments to the budget resolution. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who has been a lead advocate of tightening eligibility for the aid, filed a vague amendment that passed with an overwhelming majority.

The amendment does the political work Manchin wants it to do, putting Democrats on record against giving handouts to the wealthy, but it doesn’t get specific. It allows the chair of the Senate Budget Committee to “revise the allocations … relating to targeting economic impact payments to Americans who are suffering from the effects of COVID-19, including provisions to ensure upper-income taxpayers are not eligible, by the amounts provided in such legislation for those purposes.” The amendment stipulates that the committee chair, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has the discretion to decrease, but not increase, the scope of who gets the payments.

Sanders voted yes on Manchin’s amendment but specified that he does not support lowering the threshold. The legislation will first be written by the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Merkley’s home state colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., before being sent to the Budget Committee. If the Finance Committee sends Sanders a bill dictating a lower threshold, his hands would be partially tied (though not entirely, as the chair retains discretion in spite of the nonbinding amendments).

The political problem for Democrats who want to go cheap on the payments is compounded by the way the $2,000 is being paid out.

The political problem for Democrats who want to go cheap on the payments is compounded by the way the $2,000 is being paid out. In December, Congress approved $600 in aid, though former President Donald Trump threatened to veto it, saying it should be $2,000 instead. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., quickly filed an amendment to add $1,400 to the already approved $600 payments, and it was passed by the House. McConnell, then the Senate majority leader, blocked the amendment, in a blunder that likely cost him control of the upper chamber.

In Georgia, Democrats ran on the promise of getting that $2,000 check out the door immediately if they won both Senate races. But even after the $600 check had been sent out, Democrats continued to refer to a $2,000 check, leading some progressives in Congress to argue that Biden should now approve a full $2,000, for a total of $2,600.

From a political standpoint, if tens of millions of people get $1,400 checks, Democrats are still well-positioned to benefit from having delivered on Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment. But if tens of millions who got $600 from Trump get stiffed by Biden on the remainder — while watching millions of others get their checks — the damage could be severe enough to cost Democrats the Senate.

Democrats control 50 Senate seats, with Vice President Kamala Harris acting as the tie breaker, meaning they can’t afford to lose any to retain control of the chamber. Out of nearly 4.5 million votes cast in the Georgia runoff, Warnock won by just 93,272.

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On Wednesday, Sen. Joe Manchin appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to talk about the state of negotiations over President Joe Biden’s Covid relief package. The network posted the video with a misleading headline: “Sen. Manchin calls for bipartisanship on Covid relief plan.”

The headline isn’t technically inaccurate. Manchin did profess a desire for Republicans to have an opportunity to shape the coming legislation, saying that he would oppose efforts to abolish the filibuster. “I’ve been in the minority when they’re jammed. It’s not the way this place is supposed to work,” he said.

But the real message Manchin delivered was a different one. He had recently spoken to Biden about the path forward, he said, and Biden was quite clear. “He basically said, ‘I don’t want to go down the path we went down in two-oh-nine when we negotiated for eight months and still didn’t have a product and had to do what we’re doing now.’ I said, ‘Fine, Mr. President, I’m happy to start this process.’”

The process he was referring to is budget reconciliation, the parliamentary avenue through which specific kinds of legislation can travel with a simple majority vote, avoiding the filibuster. And the reasoning behind it — that we can’t make the same mistake as in 2009 — marks a startling departure from the Democratic Party’s long-running inability to learn from failure. Such a take on that year’s Democratic legislative strategy would have found broad support among the most progressive elements of the party in years past, but to see it endorsed by Manchin and Biden effectively makes the assessment unanimous from left to right — arguably the most united the party has been since it was founded.

The 2009-10 term was so traumatizing to Democrats who lived through it that many, including Biden in his conversation with Manchin, have collapsed the staggering varieties of Republican obstruction of a broad range Democratic priorities — from the stimulus to Obamacare to judicial nominations to Wall Street reform — into one dark memory of an experience never to be repeated.

The 2016 presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders ushered in a new generation to Democratic politics, many of whom experienced the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure to respond to it adequately, but weren’t following the day-to-day congressional drama that produced it.

Those new to politics may be lucky enough to not even know the name Max Baucus. For those who lived through that year(-plus) on Capitol Hill, his apparition is enough to spike blood pressure to dangerous levels.

Democrats entered the 2009 congressional term with 58 members of their Senate caucus, tantalizingly — and, it would turn out, debilitatingly — close to the 60 needed to end a GOP filibuster. On April 28, 2009, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic Party. That meant 59.

Al Franken had defeated incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in Minnesota, but was not sworn in right away; Republicans cleverly litigated the election, dragging the recount out for months, knowing that each day Franken was kept from the upper chamber was worth the price of the legal costs. On July 7, 2009, Franken finally became a senator, giving the party 60.

But Sen. Ted Kennedy died six weeks later. On Feb. 4, 2010, Scott Brown was sworn in as a Republican from Massachusetts, ending the party’s super majority.

To see budget reconciliation endorsed by Manchin and Biden effectively makes the assessment unanimous from left to right.

The first order of business in 2009, as it is in 2021, was a stimulus package to get the economy, losing jobs by the millions, back on its feet. Obama, in his new memoir, “A Promised Land,” describes the pivotal meeting during the transition in which the wings were clipped off of it. Incoming White House economic adviser Christina Romer suggested a stimulus in the trillion-dollar range.

“There’s no fucking way,” Obama recalls Emanuel saying, suggesting something in the $700 billion range instead.

From then on, insider politics drove the number that Democrats would push for. In early February, Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson said that he expected the final package to be below $800 billion, claiming that as “an economic matter” it ought not to be too robust. “For me it’s not symbolism, it’s an economic matter. At some point it’s just too big,” he said. I asked him if he felt that $800 billion was the point at which economists believed it was too large. “It’s whatever gets 60 votes, 61 votes,” he said, smiling, acknowledging that economics had nothing to do with it.

Emanuel’s prognostication had become self-fulfilling and Nelson, along with the few Republicans willing to negotiate, knew they held the cards. Budget reconciliation was available to Democrats, but they had chosen not to use it.

In talks with Sens. Specter, Olympia Snowe, and Susan Collins, the proposal was whittled down, with Collins arbitrarily insisting no funds for school construction or upgrades be included. So that was cut. The resulting $787 billion package was woefully short, leaving unemployment hovering at 10 percent by November 2010.

Obama had known two years earlier that if the economy was still struggling, his party would pay the price — yet his team had come up short. Leaving that transition meeting, David Axelrod, a close adviser, told him, “It’s going to be one hell of a midterm,” shaking his head.

Obama writes in his memoir: “This time I said nothing, admiring his occasional, almost endearing ability to state the obvious.”

In the end, Specter, still a Republican, joined Snowe and Collins in voting for the rescue package on the Senate floor in February. It came at the cost of pairing it down severely, and extending the pain of the recession. Though the economy eventually began growing slowly, millions were left out of work, and voters threw Democrats out of the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. The recovery plodded along. “Ten years it took, because it wasn’t deep enough and strong enough,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told Rachel Maddow in a recent interview. “Ten years. We’re not going to make that mistake with COVID.”

In the same interview, Schumer blasted his party’s approach to the Affordable Care Act. “Look at 200[9], where we spent a year and a half trying to get something good done, ACA, Obamacare, and we didn’t do all the other things that had to be done. We will not repeat that mistake,” he said. “We will not repeat that mistake.”

Schumer today after leaving the White House: "There's agreement — universal agreement — we must go big, bold ….

"A picture of Franklin Roosevelt was hovering over all of us and we're very much aware of that. It was alluded to a whole bunch of times." https://t.co/90lfIeTH3m

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 3, 2021

Max Baucus, a Democrat from Montana, was chair of the Senate Finance Committee in 2009, which, given its role in revenue policy, took the lead in drafting the Affordable Care Act. Baucus’s longtime lieutenant, Jim Messina, meanwhile, had gone to the White House as Rahm Emanuel’s deputy chief of staff. As Messina sat down to cut deals with the major stakeholders in the health care industry — Big Pharma, hospitals, medical device makers, and insurance companies — Baucus zeroed in on what he considered to be the three most likely Republicans to back what would eventually be known as Obamacare: Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Olympia Snowe of Wyoming. In the spring, together with Democrats Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, they formed the so-called Gang of Six — a half-dozen Finance Committee members who met regularly to negotiate the bill, collectively representing a population of less than 10 million. Along with much of the rest of the congressional press corps, I spent countless hours standing outside the meeting room they commandeered in the Hart Senate Office Building, collecting tidbits on their crawling backroom talks.

Let’s pause to consider what’s become of these lead Obamacare architects since. Messina became a political and corporate consultant, working for the Tories in the U.K. as part of the team that advised former Prime Minister David Cameron to put Brexit up for a vote, because it would surely lose (what could go wrong?). From there, he helped run the “Yes” campaign for the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi on a referendum on a major parliamentary reorganization. He lost in a landslide and, like Cameron, Renzi resigned. Messina was then hired by new U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May’s re-election campaign, another disaster. “Jim Messina is perhaps the world’s most successful political and corporate advisor,” reads Messina’s bio at The Messina Group, declining to mention his role blowing up the United Kingdom.

Baucus, meanwhile, did not run for re-election in 2014 and was named ambassador to China by Obama. In one of the most startling jaunts through the revolving door in world history, he followed that by joining the board of the Chinese behemoth Alibaba.

But back to the Hart hallway. With each passing day, Baucus, Snowe, and others would emerge to talk about the genuine progress they were making and their hope for a light at the end of the tunnel. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and White House advisers had warned Obama they weren’t serious, and were just stalling for time. “But we decided it was best to let Baucus’s process play itself out,” Obama writes in his memoir. “During an Oval Office meeting, though, I made a point of warning him not to let Grassley string him along.”

“Trust me, Mr. President,” Obama recalls Baucus saying. “Chuck [Grassley] and I have already discussed it. We’re going to have this thing done by July.”

By July, the House had indeed passed health care reform through each of its relevant committees. But the Hart meetings dragged on. “Now matter how hard we pressed, though, we couldn’t get Baucus to complete his work,” Obama writes.

So what was the hold up? Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had been instructing his soldiers to drag out the talks as long as possible in hopes of killing the whole thing and bringing Obama down with it. “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him,” said Oklahoma Sen. Jim DeMint in July, who went on to lead the Heritage Foundation.

Obama called Baucus to the White House in late July. “Time’s up, Max,” Obama says he told him. “You’ve given it your best shot. Grassley’s gone. He just hasn’t broken the news to you yet.”

“I respectfully disagree, Mr. President,” Baucus said. “I know Chuck. I think we’re this close to getting him,” he added, holding his finger and thumb an inch apart, asking to give him through the summer recess to keep working.

Mitch McConnell had been instructing his soldiers to drag out Obamacare talks as long as possible in hopes of killing the whole thing.

“A part of me wanted to get up, grab Baucus by the shoulders, and shake him till he came to his senses,” Obama writes. “I decided that this wouldn’t work.” Obama gave him until mid-September.

So lawmakers went home. At an Iowa town hall, Grassley, still an active member of the Gang of Six, trashed it, giving credence to the burgeoning conspiracy theory that government-run “death panels” were part of the bill. “You have every right to fear,” he said at the town hall, adding that we “should not have a government run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”

Obama called both Baucus and Grassley into the Oval Office. Grassley, Obama recalled, listed five objections to the bill. “Let me ask you a question, Chuck,” Obama said. “If Max took every one of your latest suggestions, could you support the bill?”

“Well…” said Grassley.

“Are there any changes — any at all — that would get us your vote?”

Obama describes an awkward silence before “Grassley looked up and met my gaze.”

“I guess not, Mr. President,” Grassley said.

In September, now several weeks past Obama’s deadline, Enzi, another charter member of the Gang, told an angry Wyoming town hall he was only in the talks in order to stall it. “If I hadn’t been involved in this process as long as I have and to the depth as I have, you would already have national health care,” he said.

Finally, in mid-October, after three weeks of public hearings and amendments, the whittled-down bill came up for a vote in the Finance Committee. Snowe voted for it, giving Obama and Baucus the bipartisan victory they had been searching for. When it finally came to the floor, on December 24, she voted no, along with every other Senate Republican. McConnell had gotten her back in line.

Then came Brown’s win on January 19, 2010, and Democrats ended up finishing the legislation using the reconciliation process. Obama signed it into law on March 23, 2010. So that the bill would appear to cost less federal money in its ten-year Congressional Budget Office analysis, however, most of the benefits were delayed. So, on the one hand, voters were warned the bill would kill grandma and that it would mean long wait times and rationed care, and they were frustrated by more than a year of dysfunction. And on the other hand, they had nothing to balance the ledger, feeling none of the upside for several years. Republicans immediately went to the Supreme Court in an effort to have it declared unconstitutional.

For some reason, Democrats would rather try a different route this time around. On“Morning Joe,” Manchin suggested a lawmaking process so reasonable that, for Senate Democrats, it’s downright radical. “If they wanna be reasonable and they wanna participate, then we work with them,” said Manchin of his GOP colleagues. “Let’s see if they have an amendment, a reasonable amendment. If they have something zeroed” — fully stripped from the package — “it gets no votes. Then the Democrats vote, and we move on.”

A legislative body debating an issue, voting, and allowing that vote to determine the outcome: It’s so crazy it just might work.

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As the fight over the direction of the Biden administration’s antitrust policy intensifies, a new figure has entered the fray, scrambling the calculus: Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland. The battle so far has largely been fought out between lobbyists for Big Tech and their allies on the one hand and skeptics of monopoly power on the other.

But according to three sources familiar with the discussions, Garland is hoping to install as the head of the Department of Justice antitrust division a longtime aide who served under him during the Clinton administration and who later was the attorney charged with shepherding his ill-fated Supreme Court nomination. That lawyer, Susan Davies, however, would be a controversial pick for another professional connection of hers: Facebook. The sources for this story are unable to speak on the record for fear of angering the Biden administration, which has not authorized those involved in the discussions to speak publicly.

In 2012, Davies represented Facebook in a lawsuit brought by an advertiser, Sambreel Holdings LLC, that was effectively kicked off Facebook’s platform after the tech giant lured away all its clients and banned users from downloading it. In December, the Federal Trade Commission launched an antitrust suit against Facebook, looking to break it into its component parts and ban it from the type of anti-competitive behavior Davies defended as its counsel.

The Justice Department is also suing Google, a case filed just ahead of the Facebook prosecution. The outcome of those twin antitrust efforts will be a major hinge point not just in technology policy but in the power of the government to take on consolidated power centers that are distorting markets across industries. To have the head of the antitrust division recused from one of those cases would create an odd state of play. The rest of Davies’s client roster, meanwhile, is equally worrying to opponents of concentrated power, as she has spent most of the last decade working on behalf of major mergers, fending off antitrust enforcement, and, as her law firm bio puts it, “frequently interact[ed] with regulators and policy makers on behalf of corporate clients.” The ascension of Davies and the intervention of Garland comes at the expense of Renata Hesse, another leading candidate for the top position at the antitrust division.

Garland is a charter member of the Washington legal establishment and is looking to populate the Justice Department with lawyers who’ve beaten similar paths: from the Ivy League to a Supreme Court clerkship to corporate work to government work and back. That’s likely to produce smart and well-qualified candidates and in some areas of the Justice Department could serve the government well enough. But when it comes to antitrust enforcement, the framework in place during the Obama years proved to be insufficient to the task of slowing or reversing consolidation across sectors. Simply installing talented members of the legal establishment will lead to the same failures without a serious rethinking of antitrust policy.

Davies first worked under Garland in the Clinton administration’s Justice Department, where Garland served as a deputy assistant attorney general. Garland was nominated to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton, and Davies left for a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, followed by a stretch at the corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP, before returning to the Clinton-era DOJ as a top lawyer in the antitrust division.

From there, she became general counsel and chief intellectual property counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where then-Sen. Joe Biden was a former chair and remained a high-ranking figure. When the Obama administration took over, Davies was put in charge of selecting and vetting federal judicial nominees, a process that resulted in a remarkable tilt toward corporate attorneys. One study found that just 4 percent of President Barack Obama’s picks came from a public-interest background. In 2011, she again left for the private sector, becoming a partner at the right-leaning firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP — at one point home to Robert Bork, a conservative legal scholar and rejected Supreme Court nominee; Kenneth Starr, best known for his role as independent counsel during Clinton’s impeachment and who has now joined President Donald Trump’s impeachment team; conservative Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; John Bolton, a former national security adviser for Trump; Alex Azar, Trump’s secretary of health and human services; and Trump’s Attorney General William Barr — where she defended giant companies against antitrust enforcement, shepherding some of the largest mergers of the past decade and playing a major role in the consolidation crisis that Biden’s antitrust division will be tasked with unwinding.

“Competition policy, properly understood, is more than just beefing up antitrust enforcement. It also entails policing anti-competitive conduct outside of an antitrust courtroom.”

Anti-monopoly reformers are still hoping that Jonathan Kanter, a plaintiff’s lawyer who assisted in the cases against Facebook and Google, can get a shot at the position. He’s being talked about seriously enough that Big Tech and its allies have begun working in opposition to his appointment, sources familiar with the planning but unable to speak due to the likelihood of professional reprisal said.

One dark horse may be Jon Sallet, another Obama-era antitrust division veteran who later worked as a top counsel to former Federal Communications Commission Chair Tom Wheeler. Though a former telecom lobbyist, Wheeler did complete groundbreaking net neutrality regulation, and Sallet helped navigate that terrain. Afterward Sallet joined a think tank and wrote a short paper titled “Louis Brandeis: A Man for This Season.” Brandeis is something of a patron saint for the nascent anti-monopoly movement, and in this paper, Sallet calls for decisive, Brandeisian action to take on monopoly power.

Several sources working on the nominations described Sallet as a “Janet Yellen figure” who would make almost everyone in the fight somewhat happy despite his connections to some of the disappointing antitrust policies of the past.

At any rate, Sallet doesn’t carry the baggage that someone who worked directly for Big Tech might. Hal Singer, managing director at Econ One, a litigation consulting firm, noted that Biden’s team would have to police monopoly power across the economy, and someone coming out of the tech world may be unwilling to subject a prior employer to that. “Competition policy, properly understood, is more than just beefing up antitrust enforcement. It also entails policing anti-competitive conduct outside of an antitrust courtroom,” Singer said. “President Biden’s picks must not only have expertise in the field but the experience to understand this critical distinction and the willingness to break from the past.”

Lina Khan photographed at her home in Larchmont, N.Y., on July 7, 2017.

Photo: An Rong Xu for the Washington Post via Getty Images

Meanwhile, even as a Facebook lawyer could take over the antitrust division, one of Facebook’s biggest critics could get a major job of her own. The American Prospect and The Intercept can confirm that Columbia law professor Lina Khan, a prominent Big Tech critic who helped author a scathing House Antitrust Subcommittee report on the tech platforms, is the leading candidate to replace Rohit Chopra as a commissioner at the FTC. Chopra has been named Biden’s nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Capitol Forum, a subscription-based investigative news outlet, first reported the possibility of Khan replacing Chopra.

Though Khan hasn’t held a high-ranking position in the executive branch, she’s been at the top of the field for a while. Before Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, Khan was poised to head up Clinton’s transition team for the antitrust division. She also was a legal fellow at the FTC in Chopra’s office in 2018, and before that she was a summer associate when Chopra served at the CFPB. For the past year-plus, Khan has been a primary force behind the House Antitrust Subcommittee’s investigation into Big Tech.

The FTC shares jurisdiction over merger policy with the antitrust division of the Justice Department; each agency takes on mergers in different sectors. The FTC also has a substantial consumer protection portfolio and can write rules under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act that would prohibit certain anti-competitive practices, like worker noncompete agreements that ban employees from taking a job with a competing firm in the same industry.

Putting Khan in this role would maintain the anti-monopoly beachhead that reformers achieved at the commission with Chopra’s ascendancy as a commissioner in 2018. Despite being in one of two Democratic slots on a majority-Republican commission, Chopra was able to use the position to articulate a different strategy at the agency and even win substantive victories, pulling forward what has for decades been a moribund enforcer of antitrust and consumer protection laws. Keeping that energy up with Khan, a visionary legal mind in the field, would cement that mindset in place. Even if Khan somehow doesn’t get the job, the other potential names, including Khan’s Columbia colleague Tim Wu (who coined the term “net neutrality”) and the Open Markets Institute’s Sally Hubbard, would carry forward the banner of strict antitrust enforcement.

There are not one but two open seats for Democrats on the FTC, however. The fear from some reformers is that the Biden administration would offset the “antitrust seat” at the FTC with a pro-business counterpart. In an effort to preempt that, some Democrats are stressing the need for a “consumer protection seat” to pair with the antitrust seat to best tackle the FTC’s dual mandate.

There are several names out there, should Biden go that route. Alvaro Bedoya worked for former Sen. Al Franken on privacy issues; he now directs the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University. Privacy is a key issue at the FTC. Nicol Turner Lee, who covers a similar set of issues for the Brookings Institution, including algorithmic bias and racial equity, has also been mentioned.

On the flip side, a couple of the names that have been thrown out for the remaining FTC slot are more aligned with big business. For example, Travis LeBlanc, a former FCC enforcement bureau chief who’s now a corporate defense attorney with the firm Cooley LLP, could be in the running, though he also may be tapped for an FCC position.

The working assumption is that Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, the former aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and current FTC commissioner who was made the acting chair by the Biden administration, would continue in the chair’s role. The only reason that would change is if Terrell McSweeny, a top Biden adviser and former FTC commissioner, would want the chair. However, the rumored White House “antitrust czar” position is said to have been designed to give McSweeny a landing spot in the administration, should she decide to take it. Slaughter has already begun filling out senior staff at the agency; none of those positions require Senate confirmation.

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