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Author: Sharon Zhang

  • Sanders Denounces Manchin for “Intentionally Sabotaging” Democratic Agenda

    After conservative Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) announced his opposition to imperative climate provisions in Democrats’ new reconciliation bill on Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) castigated the West Virginia senator for his role in killing his party’s agenda over the past year.

    In an interview on Sunday on ABC, Sanders said that Manchin never planned on negotiating the reconciliation bill in good faith with Democratic leaders, who have seen Manchin kill nearly every proposal except for prescription drug prices, which could also be limited by the conservative.

    After ABC’s Marsha Raddatz said that Manchin “abruptly pulled the plug” on the climate provisions of the bill, Sanders said, “I disagree. He didn’t abruptly do anything.”

    “If you check the record six months ago, I made it clear that we have people like Manchin and [Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema, to a lesser degree, who are intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want,” Sanders continued. “Nothing new about this. And the problem was that we continued to talk to Manchin like he was serious. He was not.”

    Last week, Manchin said that he would not support a reconciliation bill that included funding for tax incentives to shift to renewable energies, which Democrats had hoped to include in their new bill. This could be Democrats’ last best hope to pass climate legislation to meet a goal of 50 percent emissions reduction from 2005 levels before the decade’s end.

    Sanders pointed out that Manchin’s loyalties largely lie with his deep-pocketed donors and the fossil fuel industry. Manchin is the top recipient of fossil fuel industry contributions in Congress, as the number one recipient of donations from the oil and gas, fossil gas, mining and coal mining industries, according to OpenSecrets.

    “This is a guy who is a major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires,” Sanders said. Manchin’s supposed fears about inflation — which economists have said isn’t a legitimate reason to vote against bills like the Build Back Better Act — is just the “same nonsense” that the coal baron has been spewing for over a year, he went on.

    By opposing popular proposals like Medicare for All, raising taxes on corporations and the rich, and expanding Medicare to cover dental, hearing and vision, Sanders said that Manchin isn’t representing his constituents. Instead, the right-wing senator is working on behalf of billionaires and other deep-pocketed interests.

    “In my humble opinion, Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country — not working families in West Virginia or America,” Sanders said.

    Sanders warned that Manchin’s obstruction endangers the entirety of humanity, and concluded by calling on voters to continue electing progressives into office to combat the outsized power of Manchin and the Republicans he works closely with. “It ain’t Democrats. It isn’t the president. It is the future of the planet,” he said, objecting to the framing that inaction on the climate is a purely political issue. “This is an existential threat to humanity.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC Calls for Congress to Strip Supreme Court of Its Ability to Rule on Abortion

    As stories of the vast amounts of suffering caused by abortion bans are piling up, a group of House Democrats is calling on congressional leaders to support a push to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to rule on abortion — as well as marriage equality, sex and contraception — altogether.

    Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Mondaire Jones (D-New York) and eight others sent a letter to Democratic leaders this week, asking them to lend their support to the idea. They say that the move is crucial — not only to potentially protect abortion rights, but also to protect rights like gay marriage, which the Supreme Court has indicated are next on the chopping block.

    “We write to urge your support for restricting the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction in the areas of abortion, marriage equality, non-procreative intimacy, and contraception,” the lawmakers said. “In doing so, we can ensure that, as Congress takes legislative action to codify each of these fundamental rights, a radical, restless, and newly constituted majority on the Court cannot further undermine the protections we would enact.”

    Though the Supreme Court has already dealt the public a devastating blow in its ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, the letter writers said that Congress has a chance to fight back. Though it’s a long shot, Democrats in Congress are aiming to unite behind a filibuster carveout for the party’s bill to codify Roe; in order to ensure that such a move would be effective, it is necessary for the legislative branch to pre-empt far right attacks on the bill and bar the Supreme Court from being able to overturn it.

    Congress has the authority to limit the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction under Article III of the Constitution, the lawmakers said. Further, these powers have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court itself, including in 2018, when Justice Clarence Thomas affirmed in a decision that Article III should stand in order to preserve checks and balances between the three branches of government.

    “With our basic rights under threat from a rogue Supreme Court, Congress needs to exercise our legal authority to the fullest extent,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “To protect marriage equality, contraception, and more, we need to limit the power of the far-right Court.”

    The House passed the bill to codify Roe earlier this year; in their letter, the lawmakers further called on Congress to pass bills to codify the rights to gay marriage, non-procreative sex and contraceptive access. Justice Clarence Thomas has invited new legal challenges to access to contraception and gay marriage, while homophobic sodomy laws that were passed decades ago still stand in some states, technically banning people from having consensual sex outside of marriage.

    The Senate has blocked the abortion access bill, as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) joined all Republicans to nix it in May. Even if the bill did pass, the lawmakers warned in their letter, the Supreme Court could still overturn it, nullifying hard-fought efforts to protect abortion rights. Considering justices’ extremist ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, this is entirely within the realm of possibility.

    “As we Democrats plan for further legislative action to protect and enshrine abortion rights, as well as the three other fundamental rights called into question in Justice Thomas’ concurring opinion in Dobbs, we urge the exercise of Congress’ constitutional powers under Article III,” the letter reads. “The American people want to see Congress protect their fundamental rights, and the Constitution grants us the powers to do so.”

    Even if Congress isn’t able to pass bills protecting abortion or other rights, stripping the Supreme Court of its power on these issues would still be a strong rebuke of the far right justices. Meanwhile, Democrats are exploring other possibilities to hold the High Court to account.

    In another recent letter, Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) called on the Senate to formally state whether or not Supreme Court justices lied under oath during their confirmation hearings in order to secure their seats. This could provide momentum to calls to remove the justices for lying under oath, which Ocasio-Cortez and others say lays the grounds for impeachment.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Coal Baron Manchin Kills What Could Be Nation’s Last Best Chance on Climate

    In a tyrannical move that will have lasting consequences for everyone alive and their progeny, conservative coal baron Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) told Democratic leaders on Thursday that he will not support a reconciliation package that contains provisions to mitigate the climate crisis.

    This is a major blow to the Democrats — as well as to the planet’s dying species and anyone invested in inhabiting a livable planet — who were hoping to get about $300 billion or more in funding for climate and energy spending aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions with tax incentives for clean energy and electric vehicle expansion. The bill is modeled after last year’s Build Back Better Act, which Manchin also killed after months of stringing Democrats along in negotiations.

    This was likely Democrats’ last chance to pass climate action before the midterm elections, in which early analyses predict that Democrats will lose at least one chamber of Congress. Thanks to Republicans working to nearly outright rig elections and the rapidly waning popularity of President Joe Biden, Democrats could also lose the presidency in 2024. Having a Republican in the White House would essentially ensure that the country doesn’t pass major federal climate bills until at least 2029.

    Unless individual states introduce major climate bills and Biden uses his executive power to make unilateral moves like declaring a climate emergency and halting all new drilling on federal lands — as climate advocates have called for for years — the U.S. is likely to fall far short of its Paris Agreement pledge to cut emissions by half of 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

    As of now, thanks to Manchin, the U.S. is set to meet only about 24 to 35 percent emissions cuts by 2030, researchers found in a report published this week. This would likely also mean that the country won’t meet 100 percent emissions reductions by 2050, which climate experts say is necessary to prevent some of the worst impacts of the climate crisis projected in the decades to come.

    Not meeting these goals would be devastating for people worldwide. The U.S. is consistently one of the highest emitters of carbon, along with China, India and Russia. If the U.S. doesn’t act fast to reach net zero carbon emissions or eliminate fossil fuel usage altogether, the country could even end up increasing the amount of carbon dioxide that it emits every year starting in 2030, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The ramifications of that scenario would be utterly disastrous.

    Climate advocates condemned Manchin’s announcement, warning of the consequences if Democrats don’t whip the senator in line or otherwise work around him.

    “This is nothing short of a death sentence,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, per Common Dreams. “Our democracy is broken when one man who profits from the fossil fuel industry can defy the 81 million Americans who voted for Democrats to stop the climate crisis. It’s clear appealing to corporate obstructionists doesn’t work, and it will cost us a generation of voters.”

    Lawmakers also expressed frustration on Thursday night, and called for lawmakers to double down on forcing climate provisions through Congress, one way or another. “Let me be clear — unless Congress takes bold and necessary action on climate change — a livable future is lost,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts). “Young people have acted bravely and relentlessly in defense of not just our planet, but their very lives. Another world is possible. We must have the courage to deliver it.”

    “Manchin is forcing a deal that would abandon our obligation to act urgently on climate, strengthen social services, and prevent mass suffering,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri). “We must organize inside and outside of Congress — together — to ensure Manchin does not get away with this outrageous, failed leadership.”

    Climate advocates like the Sunrise Movement and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) have laid out a number of actions that Biden can take to tackle the climate crisis.

    They say that Biden could tighten limits on pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane, and issue regulations within a wide swath of agencies like the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — action by a “thousand cuts,” as Whitehouse put it. Biden could also direct the EPA to designate greenhouse gasses as pollutants regulated under the Clean Air Act, which would enable the government to put a national cap on emissions, the Sunrise Movement says.

  • Nearly Half of GOP Congressional PACs’ 2022 Funding Comes From 27 Billionaires

    Over a decade after Citizens United and as the rich grow ever richer, billionaires are rapidly taking over Capitol Hill with political donations — and, as a new report shows, the Republican Party is a major beneficiary of this supposed generosity.

    This election cycle, nearly half of the funding (47 percent) raised by the two major Republican congressional super PACs came from just 27 billionaires, a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness revealed on Wednesday. That’s $89.4 million, straight from the pockets of over two dozen of America’s richest people.

    The vast majority of those billionaires — 86 percent — gleaned their fortunes from Wall Street; in turn, the finance sector benefits the most from GOP tax cuts and corporate handouts. These donors include Rupert Murdoch, founder of Fox News; Charles and Helen Schwab, the former of whom founded finance giant Charles Schwab; Ross Perot Jr., a Texas real estate magnate; and Trevor and Jan Rees-Jones, whose wealth comes from Chief Oil & Gas, which is credited as a pioneer of fracking.

    The report says that these figures still don’t capture the full extent to which billionaires influence politics, as the rich are also able to donate through corporations and organizations without the donations bearing their names.

    Billionaires have been able to accumulate enough money to donate in such huge amounts due to the U.S tax system, which — thanks largely to Republicans but also in part to Democrats — overwhelmingly favors the rich. These tax breaks include measures like the carried interest loophole, which allows the private equity managers and venture capitalists to pay only 20 percent in taxes on their incomes rather than the top income tax rate of 37 percent.

    Over the first two years of the pandemic, the 27 billionaire GOP donors collectively added a towering $82 billion to their wealth of $227 billion — an increase of 57 percent.

    “The nation’s roughly 750 billionaires are increasingly using their personal fortunes and the profits of connected corporations to drown out regular voters’ voices and elect hand-picked candidates who further rig the nation’s economy,” the report says.

    Billionaires have been donating in large amounts to Republicans for years. They gave $240 million in total to Donald Trump, for instance, during his 2016 and 2020 presidential runs. And, because Citizens United v. FEC opened the door for super PACs to spend unlimited amounts on campaigns with very little strings attached, this problem has only worsened over the past decade.

    Another Americans for Tax Fairness report earlier this year found that, since the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling came down in 2010, billionaires have been spending nearly $1 billion more on elections than they were before the decision. As a result, billionaires contributed almost $1 out of every $10 donated in the entire 2020 election cycle, which was the most expensive election cycle ever.

    Democrats have also benefited from billionaire donations, but to a lesser extent, Americans for Tax Fairness found. The Democrats’ Senate and House super PACs have received $26 million from billionaires, or about 17 percent of the $154 million that the groups have raised over the first 16 months of this midterm cycle. Only about a third of the billionaire donors were from Wall Street.

    Still, the Democratic donors also gained a significant amount of money during the first two years of the pandemic — about $88 billion, or a 70 percent increase.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Rebukes Senate for Crafting $50 Billion “Handout” to Microchip Industry

    On the Senate floor on Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) had harsh words for fellow members of Congress who have been crafting a bill to give major microchip companies $52 billion in corporate welfare while ignoring pressing issues that are faced by the middle and lower classes in the U.S.

    “At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, the American people are sick and tired of the unprecedented level of corporate greed that we are seeing right now,” Sanders said. “In other words, we’re looking at two worlds. People on top never did better. The middle class continuing to decline, and the poor living in abysmal conditions.”

    He pointed out that everyday Americans are facing soaring inflation and the worst income inequality in 100 years — while billionaires have gotten $2 trillion richer over the past years and are buying joyrides to space and $500 million yachts. Meanwhile, billionaires and corporations often pay zero dollars in federal taxes.

    Instead of focusing on things like renewing the expanded child tax credit, passing Medicare for All, upping teacher pay, or making higher education affordable, the Senate is focused on corporate handouts, Sanders said.

    “The last poll that I saw had the United States Congress with a 16 percent approval rating, 16 percent. To me, this was shocking — really, quite shocking — because I suspect that the 16 percent who believe that Congress was doing something meaningful really don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

    “So what is Congress doing right now, at a time in which we face so many massive problems?” he continued. “The answer is that, for two months, a 107 member conference committee has been meeting behind closed doors to provide over $50 billion in corporate welfare, with no strings attached, to the highly profitable microchip industry.”

    Sanders pointed out that the bill also includes a $10 billion “bailout” for Jeff Bezos’s space flight company. The Vermont senator has been decrying this funding for months, saying that Bezos is one of the last people who needs an infusion of cash from taxpayers.

    Sanders went on to condemn the glaring hypocrisy of conservatives like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who cry endlessly about the deficit when it comes to helping the American public, but pass massive spending bills for corporations with no questions asked.

    “For all of my colleagues who tell us how deeply, deeply concerned they are about the deficit… ‘Bernie, we don’t have the money to do that! We’ve got a big deficit!’ Well, what about the deficit when it comes to giving $52 billion in corporate welfare to some of the most profitable corporations in America?” he said. “I guess when you’re giving corporate welfare to big and powerful interests, the deficit no longer matters.”

    While Sanders acknowledged that the microchip shortage — which is raising prices and costing workers their jobs, he said — does pose problems for regular Americans, he maintained that handing corporations money with no strings attached isn’t the way to solve it.

    Semiconductor companies have made huge profits over the pandemic and are turning around to pay their executives massive compensation packages and spend tens of billions on stock buybacks — all while shipping manufacturing jobs abroad to exploit workers in poor countries. Instead of focusing on upping production and preserving jobs, the semiconductor industry is shutting down over 780 manufacturing plants in the U.S. and eliminating 150,000 jobs, Sanders said.

    For instance, Intel, one of the companies set to benefit from the bill, made nearly $20 billion in profits last year while giving its CEO Pat Gelsinger nearly $180 million. In the meantime, microchip companies have spent $100 million over the past decade in lobbying and campaign contributions — an investment that has evidently paid back in spades.

    Sanders suggested that Congress should work with microchip companies to address workers’ and taxpayers’ concerns, instead of giving companies handouts. He also said companies should agree not to outsource jobs, union bust, or do stock buybacks.

    As it stands now, with no-strings-attached handouts to corporations, the government is willingly perpetuating “crony capitalism,” he said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren: “Today Would Be a Great Day” to Bind Supreme Court to Code of Ethics

    As Democrats fumble to enact measures to rein in the far right Supreme Court in response to the justices overturning Roe v. Wade, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is reiterating her call to finally bind Supreme Court justices to a code of ethics.

    Supreme Court justices are the only federal judges in the country who don’t have a binding code of ethics; while the justices theoretically follow ethics guidelines, they are not required by law to do so.

    “Today would be a great day to start making Supreme Court justices follow a basic code of ethics,” Warren said on Wednesday. “I’ve got a plan for that – as part of my bill for a judicial ethics overhaul.”

    In May, after a leaked draft opinion showed that the High Court was poised to overturn Roe, Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) introduced a bill that would require justices to adhere to the court’s existing Code of Conduct. The bill would also bar federal judges from trading individual stocks, place restrictions on gifts and privately funded travel that justices could accept, and generally increase transparency standards for the Court.

    Advocates for a binding code of conduct say that it could help to prevent justices from following their political beliefs above the law. They also say that it could increase transparency in cases like Justice Clarence Thomas’s refusal to recuse himself from cases involving his wife and her participation in the attempted overturn of the 2020 election.

    According to Fix the Court, every one of the justices, with the exception of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was just sworn in, has violated the code in some way – whether by ruling on cases in which they have a conflict of interest, leaving assets off of financial disclosure forms or speaking at partisan fundraisers.

    “We can no longer stand by while our judges and justices take advantage of our system to build wealth and power at the expense of our country’s most marginalized. A system without basic ethics is a corrupt system,” Jayapal said in a press release on the bill she and Warren have put forth. “People deserve impartial judges and justices who aren’t beholden to special interests or to their personal agenda. Nobody is above the law. Not even a Supreme Court Justice.”

    Binding the Supreme Court to a code of ethics is a popular idea. In April, before the unpopular and cruel Dobbs v. Jackson decision came down, a Data for Progress poll found that 81 percent of likely voters agree that the Supreme Court should be held to a code of ethics that would require justices to recuse themselves from cases that they may have a personal or financial stake in.

    Another poll taken after the Dobbs decision by Politico/Morning Consult similarly found that a majority of Americans agree that the Supreme Court should be legally bound to an ethics code, and that they also support other reforms like term limits for justices.

    Other lawmakers have suggested other ways to combat the Supreme Court, which is poised to rule on yet more cases that could fundamentally change the country and the rights that are afforded to its people. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Ted Lieu (D-California) are calling for the Senate to formally state whether or not far right Supreme Court justices lied about Roe in order to get confirmed – which Ocasio-Cortez says is an impeachable offense.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Workers Filed More Union Petitions in 8 Months Than in Entirety of FY 2021

    The number of workers petitioning to join a union is skyrocketing as workers wage successful union campaigns across the country at major corporations like Starbucks and Amazon, new data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) shows.

    Between October 1 and June 30 – the first nine months of Fiscal Year 2022 – union petitions filed with the NLRB were up 56 percent over the same period of Fiscal Year 2021. Workers filed 1,240 petitions during the first nine months of FY 2021, whereas during the same period in FY 2022, the NLRB saw 1,935 filings.

    Further, the number of petitions filed between October and the end of May – just eight months into the current fiscal year – exceeded the number of petitions filed in the entirety of FY 2021.

    Unfair labor practice charges, or charges often filed by unions alleging that companies are violating federal labor laws, are also trending upwards. Over the first nine months of this fiscal year, unfair labor practice allegations have increased 14.5 percent over FY 2021, growing from 11,451 to 13,106.

    These findings are similar to data released by the agency earlier this year in April, when the NLRB board reported that petitious to unionize increased by 57 percent and allegations of unfair labor practices increased by 14 percent over the previous year during the first six months of FY 2022.

    In a press release, the NLRB says that the increase in filings is evidence that the NLRB is in dire need of more funding to accommodate the greater demand.

    Owing to years of conservative efforts to oppose labor advocacy and shrink the NLRB, the agency has not seen a budget increase in nearly a decade – meaning that, in real dollars, the agency’s budget has shrunk by 25 percent since FY 2010.

    At the same time, the agency is having to deal with a surge of union activity in the U.S. reaching levels that haven’t been seen for at least a few decades.

    “The increase in cases comes during a period of critical funding and staffing shortages for the Agency. The NLRB has received the same Congressional appropriation of $274.2 million for nine consecutive years as costs have risen,” said NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo in a statement.

    Budget shortages have created understaffing issues at the agency, according to the statement. “Overall Agency staffing levels have dropped 39 percent since FY2002 and field staffing has shrunk by 50 percent,” Abruzzo continued. “We need Congress to help us restore the capacity that we have lost after years of underfunding.”

    President Joe Biden asked Congress in his 2023 budget request to provide the board a 16 percent increase over its current budget for a total of $319 million. Some Democrats in Congress have pushed for a higher increase of at least 34 percent to $368 million. It’s unclear if these budget increases – which are infinitesimally small compared to the massive and growing defense budget – will have enough support in Congress to pass.

    The NLRB has weathered years of attacks from conservatives; for instance, unfair labor practice charges decreased under the Trump administration not because companies were violating the law less, but because unions knew that the Republican-majority board would have rejected the charges. Labor advocates say that increasing the board’s budget is critical to reversing such measures and supporting the burgeoning labor movement.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In a Year, Amazon Disciplined Workers 13,000 Times at Now-Unionized Warehouse

    Over the course of just one year ending at the beginning of the pandemic, Amazon issued thousands of disciplinary notes against workers for what seem like nearly inconsequential mistakes in a warehouse that’s now the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the U.S., new reporting finds.

    Reuters reports that, in the year ending in April 2020, the company issued 13,000 “disciplines” in the Staten Island, New York JFK8 warehouse. This adds up to an average of about 2.5 disciplines for every one of the roughly 5,300 workers employed then at the warehouse, which voted earlier this year to unionize with Amazon Labor Union (ALU).

    The disciplines, which were issued over things like meeting 94 percent of the company’s punishing productivity quotas instead of 100 percent, reveal just how closely Amazon monitors and tracks its workers’ movements – and how quickly the company will threaten its employees with termination if they make small errors just a handful of times.

    Other reasons that the company disciplined workers, according to court documents, are also seemingly trivial. Amazon cited one worker for being off task for six minutes during an overnight shift in New Jersey; another worker for exceeding their break time by four minutes, despite Amazon’s supposed five minute grace period for breaks.

    Meanwhile, in New York City, another worker was issued a violation notice for erring four times in one week in 2019 while picking items for order fulfillment, despite the fact that the same worker picked over 15,800 products correctly during that time.

    The company claims that the majority of the supposed feedback relates to attendance, like when an employee takes a break that exceeds limits. It says that its productivity goals are “fair,” though labor advocates have said that Amazon’s quotas often lead to injury or even death, playing a role in the company’s warehouses being one of the most dangerous places in the industry to work.

    These supposed violations were documented in internal company records that were released as part of the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) legal actions against Amazon, which includes the board’s complaint over former JFK8 employee Gerald Bryson’s termination in 2020. At one point in 2018, Bryson had supposedly made 22 errors while counting thousands of products, and was disciplined by a manager. Five more infractions like this in a year and he would be fired, the disciplinary note said.

    “You’re sitting there worried about whether you’re going to have a job tomorrow because your rate is not where it’s supposed to be,” Bryson told Reuters. “It was horrible.” He was disciplined multiple times over the course of a month, even as he sped up his pace at the behest of management and the work began to wear down his body.

    Bryson was involved with labor organizing efforts in the warehouse at the time and was fired after he helped lead a walkout by JFK8 workers in April 2020. After finding that Amazon illegally fired Bryson, the NLRB ordered the company to reinstate him and pay him lost wages in April.

    In a separate lawsuit concerning the JFK8 warehouse, the NLRB has also been seeking to stop the company’s “flagrant unfair labor practices,” as the board refers to them.

    Other warehouses also saw similar numbers of disciplinary notices in a similar period of time, court papers show. In Robbinsville, New Jersey, the roughly 4,200 workers were issued over 15,000 notices in the year ending in April 2020, or about 3.5 notices per employee. Another warehouse in North Haven, Connecticut, issued more than 5,000 disciplinary notes to its roughly 4,800 employees in the same time period.

  • AOC Calls on Senate to Formally Say If Supreme Court Justices Lied About “Roe”

    Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Ted Lieu (D-California) are calling on Senate leadership to issue a formal statement on whether or not Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade lied during their confirmation hearings – which Ocasio-Cortez has said is an impeachable offense.

    The two lawmakers wrote to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) on Monday calling on the Senate to clarify whether or not Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and potentially others lied about being willing to preserve the precedent set by Roe. They say that it’s not only critical to preventing further human rights from being taken away from the public but also important to send the message to future Supreme Court nominees that lying under oath is not acceptable.

    “We respect the right of individual Justices to have their own views on various constitutional issues,” the lawmakers said. “But we cannot have a system where Justices lie about their views in order to get confirmed. That makes a mockery of the confirmation power, and of the separation of powers.”

    They later said that justices who lie in order to get confirmed “shred the legitimacy” of the High Court, adding that public confidence in the Court is at an all-time low.

    There are at least two recorded instances of justices lying about their willingness to overturn Roe that Lieu and Ocasio-Cortez highlighted as “particularly egregious.”

    During his confirmation in 2017, Gorsuch said: “I would tell you that Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. A good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.” He added that, if a president asked him to overturn Roe, he would have “walked out the door.”

    During Kavanaugh’s confirmation the next year, he said that Roe “is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis. The Supreme Court has recognized the right to abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade case. It has reaffirmed it many times.” He also said that the issue was also settled with 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed abortion rights and was a “precedent on precedent.”

    Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have also lied in their meetings with individual senators on the issue, according to Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia). Collins said that the justices insisted that they would uphold long-standing precedents as members of the Supreme Court.

    These statements are in direct contrast with their majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson in June. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that they believed that both Roe and Casey were an “error that cannot be allowed to stand” and that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.”

    If the Senate issues a statement or resolution, as Lieu and Ocasio-Cortez suggest, it would be a strong rebuke from the chamber that voted to confirm the justices. It could also give fuel to the calls from Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) for Congress to investigate whether or not the justices should be impeached.

    Shortly after the Dobbs decision came down last month, Ocasio-Cortez said that Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett all pledged to uphold precedents during their confirmation hearings. In addition, she said that Justice Clarence Thomas should also be considered for impeachment investigations over potential corruption related to his wife, Ginni Thomas, and her role in organizing the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Finds 83 Percent of Americans Want to Expand Social Security

    Social Security, one of the nation’s oldest welfare programs, is set to start running out of money in about a decade — and Americans want Congress to take action, new polling finds.

    In a poll of about 1,300 likely voters, Data for Progress found that a bipartisan majority of Americans — 84 percent — are “very” or “somewhat” concerned that Social Security won’t be able to pay out full benefits to future generations. Eighty-three percent of voters, also on a bipartisan basis, support raising Social Security benefits in order to match current cost of living standards, and to ensure that everyone who has paid into the program will be able to access its full benefits when they’re of retirement age.

    Plans to expand Social Security by taxing the rich are also popular. When asked about lawmakers’ bills that would raise taxes for Americans making more than $400,000 a year in order to pay for expansions of the program, 76 percent of respondents, including 83 percent of Democrats and 73 percent of independents and Republicans, said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support the proposal.

    One such bill is the Social Security Expansion Act, introduced by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) last month. The bill would increase Social Security payments by $2,400 a year, and would fully fund the program for the next 75 years, until 2096.

    It would also create more parity in the tax system, as it would eliminate the cap for Social Security payments for people making over $250,000. Currently, the income cap for Social Security taxes is $147,000, meaning that people making more than that stop paying into the program by the time they’ve made that amount of income in the year; for instance, people making a salary of $1 million stop paying into the program by February each year.

    Thanks in part to Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes, the program is set to be insolvent by 2033, meaning that it will have to start paying out only 75 percent of the benefits, which are already low. Though GOP lawmakers likely wouldn’t say it out loud, due to the program’s popularity, right-wingers have been working behind closed doors and in think tanks for years to slash Social Security, often with the goal of privatization.

    This is an unpopular idea, however. Data for Progress found that 68 percent of likely voters oppose privatizing the program, including 75 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of Republicans. Economists also agree that privatizing Social Security would be harmful and lead to yet more poverty — and that what’s truly needed to ensure that the seniors and disabled people who are most in need have the funds they need to survive is a large expansion of the program.

    Meanwhile, when presented with the statement that Democrats are trying to expand the program and the GOP is trying to end it, 55 percent of voters say they would vote for a generic Democrat running for Congress, with 22 percent of self-identified Republicans agreeing as such.

    As it is, Social Security is failing to provide enough funding for many seniors to live off of, as Sanders pointed out in a Senate Banking Committee hearing in June. Over half of seniors are living on incomes of less than $25,000 a year, while many of those same seniors don’t have any retirement savings.

    “Our job, in my view, is not to cut Social Security, is not to raise the retirement age, as many of my Republican colleagues would have us do,” Sanders said at the time. “Our job is to expand Social Security so that everyone in America can retire with the dignity that he or she deserves and that every person in this country with a disability can retire with the security they need.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren, Sanders Slam Banks for Inaction Against Millions of Scams Using Zelle

    Senate Democrats sent letters to big banks on Friday, demanding that the corporations answer for their roles in allowing millions of Americans to be defrauded through scams involving Zelle, a money transfer network whose parent company is owned by seven large banks in the U.S.

    Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Senate Banking Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), and four others said that the banks aren’t doing enough to prevent scams that use Zelle, which The New York Times deemed in an investigation earlier this year as a “favorite of fraudsters.”

    “It is imperative that the banks that created, own, and offer the service do more to protect consumers from the fraud and scams that are being perpetrated through the platform,” the lawmakers said in letters to Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

    The service is popular due to its ability to immediately transfer money between bank accounts — but is easy to exploit, the lawmakers say, due to the fact that users have no way to cancel a transaction after they’ve made it.

    Still, even people who have lost money to scammers on the service are met with a stony response from their banks. Reports have found that Wells Fargo and other banks have said that transactions done under a false premise aren’t fraudulent because the victim of the scam authorized the payment, leaving consumers short potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars. Instead, Zelle qualifies “fraud” as anything not authorized by the user — a definition that excludes scams or frauds.

    In at least one case, The New York Times reported earlier this year, victims who didn’t even authorize the purchase themselves had lost money due to Zelle-related fraud. One victim, Bruce Barth, lost $2,500 in Zelle transactions when someone stole his phone in 2020 while he was hospitalized for COVID-19.

    Lawmakers say that a lack of oversight and shedding of responsibility from the banks has led to widespread fraud on the platform. “The distinction [Early Warning Services, Zelle’s parent company] draws between fraud (transactions not authorized by the account owner) and scams (transactions authorized by the account owner, but induced through deception) ignores how consumers actually suffer financial loss on Zelle,” the senators wrote.

    According to the lawmakers, about 18 million Americans fell victim to scams that used Zelle or other instant transfer services in 2020. And, of the $490 billion that was sent through Zelle in 2021, Americans lost an estimated $440 million due to defraudment through transactions on Zelle.

    “While several banks have made the argument that they should not be held responsible for such scams, we believe that you need to do more to protect your customers,” the Democrats concluded. “Given the sheer numbers of consumers using online payments services such as Zelle and the amount of money at risk, the absence of protective measures is unacceptable.”

  • Pressley Urges Biden to Declare Public Health Emergency Over “Roe” Overturn

    In response to President Joe Biden’s claim that his administration is “look[ing] at” whether or not to declare a public health emergency over abortion rights, progressive lawmakers are urging him to follow through on the declaration that could free up resources to fight abortion bans.

    Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday that the declaration is “something I’m asking the medical people in the administration to look at whether I have the authority to do that and what impact that would have.” He said that the strongest action that Democrats could take is to pass a bill that recently failed in the Senate that would codify Roe v. Wade.

    The president offered words of encouragement for pro-abortion protesters who have risen up in droves — including outside of the White House over the weekend — in response to the far right Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. “Keep protesting. Keep making your point. It’s critically important,” he said.

    Responding to news that Biden is considering the declaration, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) wrote, “Good. Now declare it,” on Twitter.

    “Every minute we wait, we risk losing someone we love,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri). SCOTUS’ decision to overturn Roe could be a death sentence for our most marginalized communities who already face racism and barriers to health care. [The president] must declare a public health emergency to save lives.”

    Pressley and Bush have previously advocated for Biden to declare an emergency to protect abortion access. In a letter sent last month, Pressley led 19 other Black women in Congress in urging Biden to “use every tool at your disposal to protect fundamental reproductive rights and abortion access across this country.” The lawmakers said that conservatives’ abortion bans would especially harm Black people, who already face higher pregnancy death rates than their white counterparts.

    Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) have also asked for an emergency declaration in order to protect reproductive rights.

    A public health emergency declaration would free up funds and government agency resources in order to respond to the crisis. Advocates say that the declaration is crucial so that the government has the authority and the resources to respond to an uptick in demand for reproductive health services.

    It seems unlikely that the Biden administration will actually take this step, however. Reporters found last week that top Biden administration officials had already considered declaring a public health emergency after the Supreme Court decision last month and decided against it.

    The director of the White House Gender Policy Council, Jennifer Klein, told reporters on Friday that it’s still a possibility, but that the declaration wouldn’t be that effective in responding to the problem.

    Meanwhile, Biden has been facing criticism from Democrats and the left for his administration’s inaction on abortion rights so far.

    Last week, the president signed an executive order that directs the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to research ways to expand abortion rights, like widening access to abortion medication and contraceptives and expanding its family planning services. While it includes some critical provisions like addressing data privacy concerns, abortion advocates said, it’s nowhere near enough to protect the people who will suffer due to the far right’s abortion bans.

    Meanwhile, pro-abortion advocates lambasted the White House last week when White House communications director Kate Bedingfield criticized left-wing protesters who have been demonstrating against bans. “Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have been consistently out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” she said.

    But progressives argue that it is Biden and mainstream Democrats who have been blocking action on abortion rights. After all, just two months ago, Biden had refused to endorse filibuster abolition or reform in order to codify Roe, and only changed his mind after the Supreme Court decision came down — after people had already been affected by state trigger laws that immediately implemented bans.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Newsom Announces California Is Going to Start Making Its Own Low-Cost Insulin

    Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Thursday that California is going to begin making its own insulin, in an effort to expand access and ensure that the people who need the drug can still afford it.

    “California is going to make its own insulin. Nothing, nothing epitomizes market failures more than the cost of insulin,” Newsom said in his announcement, adding that some patients have to spend $300 to $500 per vial, which typically only last a patient about 30 days.

    The state will allocate $100 million to produce the drug “at a cheaper price, close to at cost, and to make it available to all,” he said. Half of the money will go toward opening and staffing a manufacturing facility in the state and the other will cover costs of developing the product. Newsom has also been working on plans to potentially lower prices of other prescription drugs in the state.

    “In California, we know people should not go into debt to receive life-saving medication,” Newsom said. The governor’s office says that the plan will cut the cost of insulin in half, if not more.

    People in the U.S. pay more for insulin than people in any other wealthy country — often paying between 5 to 10 times more than what people in other countries do, research has found. With such high costs for common types of insulin, some people with diabetes have been organizing caravans to travel to Canada in order to obtain the medication for a fraction of the cost.

    A recent survey by CharityRx found that a whopping four out of five patients have taken on credit card debt in order to afford insulin, taking on an average of $9,000 per patient. Additionally, 83 percent of respondents said they’ve feared not being able to pay for basic necessities like clothes, food and rent due to the cost of their insulin.

    The high costs of insulin have had dangerous consequences. Yale University researchers found that one in four diabetes patients who visited the Yale Diabetes Center in 2017 said that they were skipping or skimping on doses of insulin because of the cost of the drug — which led to poorer health outcomes for those patients. Further, about a third of these patients didn’t discuss their underuse of the drug, which could have caused additional health problems.

    CharityRx’s findings were even more drastic. The survey found that 38 percent of respondents said that they have had to stay at the hospital for more than a day due to problems caused by insulin rationing, while 33 percent said that rationing has caused them to get sick with other health issues.

    Likely partially a result of high insulin prices, diabetes is a leading cause of death in the U.S. In both 2020 and 2021, over 100,000 Americans died due to diabetes, and the illness was the seventh highest cause of death in 2019. Meanwhile, the average price of insulin increased 11 percent every year between 2001 and 2011, research has found, making the condition the most costly chronic condition in the U.S., according to American Action Forum; in the U.S., one in four dollars spent on health care is spent on people with diabetes.

    Democrats in Congress have been pushing to lower the cost of insulin. In March, the House passed a bill that would place a cap on prices of insulin to $35 a month or 25 percent of insurance plans’ prices, whichever is lower.

    Over the past year, Democrats have also been working on plans to lower drug prices in general. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) released a plan this week that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices for the most expensive drugs, though the plan excludes the insulin price cap, unlike the drug price negotiation plan introduced by House Democrats last year.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Introduce Bills to Protect Abortion Travelers, Contraception Access

    House Democrats have introduced two bills that would take action to protect access to reproductive health care as the far right assaults abortion rights and, potentially, contraception access for millions of people across the U.S.

    Representatives Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) and Marilyn Strickland (D-Washington) introduced a bill on Thursday safeguarding people’s right to travel across state lines in order to obtain an abortion. The bill would prohibit people from attempting to use state law to restrict or impede an abortion seeker traveling across state lines, a person aiding them in their travel, or a health care provider performing the medical procedure.

    Far right politicians in states like Texas are in the process of drafting legislation to ban people from traveling for abortion care. The Biden administration has vowed to fight such laws, saying that they impede upon people’s right to freely travel across the U.S., but the Democrats’ bill would give the federal government an explicit directive to bring civil action against people found in violation of the law. It would also give people who were harmed in the violation of the law the ability to obtain relief through legal actions.

    “Lawmakers in several states, including my home state of Texas, are now threatening to interfere with the constitutional right of Americans to travel freely and voluntarily within the United States for the purpose of obtaining abortion care. These efforts violate the fundamental rights guaranteed to all citizens,” Fletcher said in a statement. “These efforts to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights must be stopped, and Congress has the power and the responsibility to do so.”

    Also on Thursday, Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Mike Thompson (D-California) introduced a bill that would codify the right to contraception into law. The bill would ban states from restricting access to contraceptives in any way, and would allow the Department of Justice to bring civil action against those found in violation of the law. It would protect access to a wide range of contraceptives, including IUDs, condoms and emergency medication like Plan B.

    “When it comes to our reproductive freedom, it is clear that this right-wing, extremist Supreme Court will not stop at stripping us of our right to safe and legal abortion,” Jayapal said in a statement. “It is incumbent on us to ensure that our right to reproductive health care remains protected.”

    When the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson, overturning the federal right to abortion access, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Court should also soon examine the right to gay marriage and access to contraception, as protected under Obergefell v. Hodges and Griswold v. Connecticut, respectively.

    In an explicitly Christofascist move, Republicans are already looking to ban contraception, falsely and cruelly claiming that methods of contraception are equivalent to abortifacients. While access to both contraception and abortifacients is crucial to a safe and just health care system, contraceptives are very much not abortifacients, as they all work to preempt conception in some way.

    A new executive order by President Joe Biden will help protect birth control access and the right to seek an out-of-state abortion, and convene pro bono legal resources to defend abortion seekers and providers. While this executive order may provide legal cover for people while Biden is president, codifying congressional Democrats’ bills into law would provide a more permanent solution that would be harder to overturn if a Republican were to win the presidency in 2024.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Corporations and Trade Associations Gave Nearly $2M to Election Objectors in May

    This May, as House lawmakers probed and exposed the Republican Party’s deep ties to the January 6 Capitol attack, corporations and industry groups were busy shelling out millions of dollars to Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election, a new report reveals.

    Fortune 500 companies and trade associations gave over $1.9 million to election objectors in just one month, Accountable.US found in a report released Thursday. Donations came from corporations like Boeing, Exxon, Anthem, Lockheed Martin, and a long list of other companies, many of which gave tens of thousands of dollars to the group of lawmakers. This brings the total amount of donations to election objectors between the attack last year and May to over $18 million.

    Nine companies and trade groups, including Kraft, Metlife and State Farm, made donations to election objectors in May for the first time since the attack, the report found, totaling $40,500. Kraft and State Farm had both made pledges to stop donating to election objectors or stop federal political donations altogether after the attack.

    Another analysis done last month by Accountable.US found that corporate groups have given at least $825,653 to people who have been subpoenaed or requested for interviews by the committee since January 6, 2021, including politicians like Representatives Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who have refused to comply with subpoenas.

    Accountable.US President Kyle Herrig condemned the companies for aiding the lawmakers who wanted to delegitimize the votes of tens of millions of Americans.

    “The more the January 6th Committee details how close we came to losing our democracy, the more corporations owe an explanation to their customers as to why they keep funding those in Congress who’ve refused to comply with the Committee’s requests, begged for pardons, and tried to finish what the insurrectionists started by voting to throw out the 2020 election results,” Herrig said.

    “Companies that claim to support democracy yet fail to align their political spending with their stated values need to make it clear to the public that they value something much more — holding political influence over lawmakers no matter how dangerous their views,” he continued.

    About 250 companies had pledged to stop giving to the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn the election in the wake of January 6, but the majority of these companies have broken those pledges less than 18 months later — showing that, for many, these pledges were a mere publicity stunt. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), only 85 companies had held to those pledges as of May.

    The generous donations made in May came as the January 6 committee was revealing that many members of the Republican Party had deep ties to the attack and Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election.

    In late May, the committee revealed that at least one Republican, Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Georgia), had given a tour of the Capitol building the day before the attack, despite his claims that he didn’t do so. The committee later released video evidence that one of the people on the tour was making threats against prominent Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

    Last month, the committee also unveiled several bombshells showing Republican politicians’ involvement in the attack, including the names of several Republicans who asked for pardons for their roles in the effort to overturn the election, like Representatives Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia).

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Poll Reveals Gov. Greg Abbott’s Lead Over Beto O’Rourke May Be Shrinking

    Following the deadliest school shooting in Texas’s history, new polling finds that far right Gov. Greg Abbott’s unfavorability rating is higher than it’s ever been, while his lead over Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke may be shrinking.

    As new findings from University of Texas/Texas Politics Project show, Abbott’s favorability was at 44 percent as of June, with another 44 percent of those polled saying that they view the governor unfavorably. This is the highest the latter has ever been, according to surveys conducted by the pollster ranging back to 2012, when Abbott was Texas’s attorney general.

    The survey was taken directly after the devastating massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in which 21 people, including 19 children, were killed.

    Abbott’s job approval ratings, meanwhile, have dipped back into the negatives, the poll finds. Forty six percent of those surveyed said they don’t approve of Abbott, while 43 said they approve. While Abbott has had net positive approval ratings for much of his time as governor, voters’ disapproval of his performance has been rising over the past year or so.

    This could spell good news for O’Rourke, who’s running to unseat the extremist right-wing governor this fall. While the latest poll found that Abbott still has a lead over O’Rourke of 6 points among registered voters, this is smaller than the 9-point lead that Abbott had in April, according to the pollster.

    The Texas Tribune reports that Texas Politics Project Director Jim Henson says that the scrutiny over Abbott’s response to the Uvalde shooting may have impacted the poll results. The poll found that only 36 percent of voters approve of how Abbott has handled gun violence, while 45 percent say they disapprove, with 38 percent saying they strongly disapprove.

    Texas voters also increasingly believe that the state is headed in the wrong direction, at 59 percent, the highest proportion of voters since 2009. Only 31 percent said that they believe the state is going in the right direction, a major drop from roughly 40 percent in surveys done in October, February and April.

    Texas has weak gun laws, as Republicans have worked to increase gun access in the state over the past years. The Uvalde shooter obtained the AR-style rifle and over 1,600 rounds of ammunition legally, just days before the shooting.

    Abbott has faced widespread criticism over his response to Uvalde and other shootings that have happened in the state under his rule, after which he and his party either stall and do nothing or pass laws making it easier to access guns. The day after the Uvalde shooting, Abbott said that the shooting was “horrible,” but added that “it could have been worse.”

    “The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do,” Abbott said at the time, referring to the police officers who waited 77 minutes before confronting the shooter as he was massacring children, and who later lied about their lax efforts to stop the shooter. “They showed amazing courage.”

    O’Rourke confronted Abbott at the governor’s news conference shortly after the shooting. “You are doing nothing,” O’Rourke said as Republican officials yelled at him and he was escorted out of the room. “You are offering up nothing. You said this was not predictable. This was totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Want to Extend Medicare Solvency by Closing Trump-Era Tax Loophole

    In their negotiations over the next budget reconciliation bill with conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Senate Democrats are working on two provisions that could help balance the budget for Medicare and close a major Donald Trump-era tax loophole.

    On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) released a plan to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices for the most expensive drugs and cap out-of-pocket costs for recipients at $2,000 a year. It would also place a cap on the amount that drug companies can raise prices annually. The plan reportedly has the support of all 50 Senate Democrats, and is pending review from the Senate parliamentarian.

    The new drug price proposal is slightly narrower than last year’s proposal, which also included a plan to cap the cost of insulin at $35. Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) had hoped to get a major expansion of Medicare, including allowing it to negotiate prices for a wider range of drugs and expanding it to cover dental, hearing and vision, but the plan was watered down thanks to pharmaceutical industry-funded Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona).

    Democrats passed a bill introducing the same price cap on insulin earlier this year, but the legislation has stalled in the Senate. Senate Republicans are likely uniformly opposed to the current drug price plan, which Democrats plan to include in a roughly $1 trillion reconciliation bill that can be passed in the Senate through a simple majority vote.

    Democratic aides also say, according to the Associated Press, that Senate Democrats are planning to extend the solvency of Medicare. They’re hoping to raise $203 billion to fund the service until 2031. The program is currently set to start running out of funding in 2028.

    They’re aiming to extend Medicare’s solvency by closing a tax loophole created by Republicans in 2017 that has allowed wealthy executives to dodge hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, in taxes — including Medicare taxes. The current proposal would make it so that people with incomes higher than $400,000 a year and couples with incomes higher than $500,000 a year would have to pay a 3.8 percent tax on earnings from pass-through businesses, or businesses that pass all of their income onto owners and investors.

    Proposals to lower drug prices and expand Medicare are incredibly popular among the electorate. Polling done by Data for Progress last year found that about 83 percent of likely voters support expanding Medicare to include dental, hearing and vision. Other polling, conducted by CBS, found that 88 percent of people support lowering prescription drug prices.

    The popularity of the plans could be due to exceptionally high drug prices in the U.S. Last year, a Government Accountability Office report found that, among 20 name brand prescriptions, prices were about four times higher in the U.S. than they were in places like Australia and France, and about 2.5 times higher than in Canada. Meanwhile, the amount the pharmaceutical industry gained in sales from the U.S. was nearly double that of the rest of the world combined in 2020.

    The fact that Democrats are drafting the two Medicare provisions is a sign that Manchin may be in favor of the plans, though the lawmaker played a major role in watering down and ultimately killing the party’s reconciliation bill last year. Democrats are hoping the new proposal may also include provisions to address the climate crisis, with as much as $300 billion in clean energy tax incentives.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Slams McConnell for Saying Labor Shortage Is Due to the Stimulus Checks

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) is facing widespread criticism for his recent assertion that the so-called labor shortage in the U.S. is the result of the stimulus checks that were sent out over a year ago.

    At an event in Kentucky on Tuesday, McConnell said that the $3,400 in direct aid sent out to American taxpayers over the past two years has been holding people back from working — a misleading statement in several respects, especially considering the fact that unemployment is currently quite low, with some states documenting record low unemployment over the past few months.

    “You’ve got a whole lot of people sitting on the sidelines because, frankly, they’re flush for the moment,” McConnell said, according to Insider. “What we’ve got to hope is once they run out of money, they’ll start concluding it’s better to work than not to work.”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) condemned McConnell’s statement on Twitter on Wednesday. “Mitch McConnell’s blaming Americans for not wanting to work. It’s absurdly out of touch,” she said. “More workers have jobs now than pre-COVID. Investing in affordable child care would help parents return to work, but Republicans refuse to support actual solutions.”

    Indeed, it is absurd to suggest that the checks, which were aimed at combating COVID-related financial and employment problems, could be a lifeline for struggling families years after they were sent out.

    Although the stimulus checks and expanded child tax credit did help decrease financial hardship and poverty immediately after they were sent out, the effects of the aid only lasted so long. As of last month — 14 months after the last stimulus checks were approved and six months after the last expanded child tax benefits were sent out — 39 percent of Americans said that it’s difficult to afford regular expenses like bills or rent. That’s up nearly 50 percent from last spring, according to an analysis by The Lever.

    For years now, McConnell and other Republicans have been moaning that the stimulus payments suppress employment. But analyses of the financial aid programs that Congress implemented for the pandemic show that these claims are simply not true.

    In fact, the extra financial aid may have helped people get back into the job market earlier than they would have, as the money helped people afford to pay for child care, as well as expensive measures that make it easier to get a job, like education, certifications, relocation, and more. Last year, economists found that employment recovery slowed down in states that prematurely ended the early COVID-era expanded unemployment insurance checks, in comparison to states that continued giving the checks out.

    In reality, the reason that McConnell and the GOP have complained about the stimulus checks and other federal aid is likely because their ideology hinges upon opposing measures that reduce poverty. For decades now, they have parroted lies that reducing the welfare state will help the economy, while quietly helping out wealthy donors and corporations at every turn.

    McConnell’s implication that there is a labor shortage is also misleading. Employers have been moaning about a lack of people willing to work — a myth that circulated last year and which was likely created by conservative think tanks and corporate lobbyists.

    But workers have said, through surveys and labor activism, that a major factor preventing them from getting or keeping work is that employers aren’t paying nearly enough to survive in the current economy. Data has backed up these claims; when accounting for inflation, workers actually got a pay cut across the board last year.

  • Progressives Call for Reform, Say Supreme Court Has “Destroyed Its Legitimacy”

    Progressives in the House are calling for Congress to pass significant reforms to the Supreme Court after far right justices handed down a deluge of extremist decisions that threaten a wide range of rights and could jeopardize American democracy itself.

    In a statement on Tuesday, Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) said that lawmakers have an “obligation to respond” to right-wing Supreme Court justices in the wake of decisions in cases like Dobbs v. Jackson, which overhauled abortion rights in the country.

    The statement raises alarm over a number of decisions that the Supreme Court has made in just the past few months, some of which overturned centuries-old precedents. The Supreme Court ruled last month in Egbert v. Boule, for instance, that federal law enforcement officers essentially have immunity in cases in which they violate constitutional amendments in the 100-mile border zone. In April, the Supreme Court decided in an eight to one decision that Puerto Ricans do not have the right to the same disability benefits that mainland U.S. residents do.

    Jayapal criticized the Court over its decisions to protect public school employees’ ability to compel students to join them in prayer on school property and bar people on death row who received ineffectual legal defense from presenting new evidence to show their innocence.

    She also listed recent rulings to protect police from being sued if they don’t read a person their Miranda rights, threaten tribal sovereignty by allowing states to prosecute crimes on Native American land, allow the CIA to block information about their torture methods from being released, and much more.

    “The list of precedents nullified and democratic institutions and principles this Supreme Court gutted or fully overturned this term is horrifying,” Jayapal said. The lawmaker warned that the Court’s tirade isn’t done; the Supreme Court is set to hear a case that could allow politicians to draw gerrymandered maps, and Justice Clarence Thomas has said that gay marriage and contraception access may be next on the chopping block.

    “These extreme decisions are the result of a decades-long project to stack the bench with adherents to a right-wing agenda and overrule precedent and the will of the American people. The majority has made clear it has no concern for ethics,” Jayapal said, pointing out that several Supreme Court justices allegedly lied during their confirmation proceedings about whether or not they’d uphold landmark precedents like Roe v. Wade.

    The lawmaker concluded by calling for Congress to pass several bills. First would be the Judiciary Act, which would add four seats to the Supreme Court to combat the GOP’s court packing. Second, she named the Supreme Court Ethics Recusal and Transparency Act, which would bind the Supreme Court to a code of ethics and place transparency standards on dark money and lobbying interests. And finally, she called for the passage of the Judicial Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act in order to force justices to justify decisions on whether or not to recuse themselves from cases and ban justices from trading individual stocks.

    “We do not have to simply accept the devastation of these rulings,” Jayapal said. “We must hold these rogue justices to account.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trader Joe’s Workers Will Vote on Forming Company’s First Union This Month

    Trader Joe’s workers in Massachusetts recently announced that they’ve gotten an official union election date — a vote that could produce the company’s first-ever union.

    The in-person election for the workers in Hadley, Massachusetts, is scheduled for July 27 and 28, Trader Joe’s United announced. This means that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has certified that at least 30 percent of workers have signed union cards — though workers say that they have the support of over half of the about 81-person unit, which is enough to win the election.

    “We are thrilled to finally have an election date, and we can’t wait to see the final vote count,” Trader Joe’s United organizer Tony Falco said in a press release.

    Like Amazon Labor Union, which produced Amazon’s first-ever union, the Trader Joe’s employees are seeking to form an independent union, with no affiliation to established labor unions. Although Trader Joe’s said in a statement that the union is “[Service Employees International Union]-backed,” per the Daily Hampshire Gazette, union leaders have said that the company’s claim is false.

    Amazon Labor Union’s strategy of forming a union from scratch has shaken up traditional labor organizers’ views of how to achieve major wins within the labor movement. Trader Joe’s United may see similar success, as a fresh generation of labor organizers are repeatedly notching wins at a time when union membership is declining and some established unions, like the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), are spending less on organizing.

    Indeed, there is already evidence that the Trader Joe’s Union may be spreading across the country. Workers at a Trader Joe’s in Minneapolis filed to form a union last week. The location is the second in Trader Joe’s United’s campaign to file for unionization.

    Workers at Trader Joe’s have complaints about their workplaces that are similar to those of unionizing workers at places like Apple, Starbucks and REI. While the company has painted itself as a progressive organization that prioritizes the wants and needs of its employees, workers say that their relationship with management has been steadily eroding as the company reduces their benefits and pay and increasingly views the workers as disposable. This sentiment especially increased during the pandemic, workers say.

    “Over time, Trader Joe’s has slashed benefits, retirement benefits in particular,” Minneapolis Trader Joe’s worker Sarah Beth Ryther told More Perfect Union. Ten years ago, the company offered a 15 percent guaranteed retirement contribution, but that benefit has been slashed to zero — what the company calls a “discretionary contribution” — which Ryther said “leav[es] employees with absolutely no idea how much they’re going to be receiving.”

    Workers in both Hadley and Minneapolis say that the company has been harshly retaliating against pro-union workers. The union has filed several unfair labor practice charges against the company over the Hadley unionization effort, saying that the company sent a worker home for wearing a union pin and has barred workers from discussing their wages.

    Meanwhile, workers in Minneapolis say that the company recently fired a pro-union employee who had worked for the company for 13 years, claiming that the employee had a “negative impact” on other workers.

    The campaign comes as workers at other companies are winning unions in spite of harsh union-busting tactics. Last week, REI workers in Berkeley, California, officially kicked off their union campaign and created a petition asking REI to recognize their union. Though the California workers are seeking to join a different union, the petition filing comes on the heels of a successful union drive in New York, where REI workers voted to form a union in March.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Petition Calling for Clarence Thomas’s Impeachment Reaches 1 Million Signatures

    A petition calling for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be impeached has reached over 1 million signatures in the wake of numerous extremist right-wing Court decisions and an ethics scandal over Thomas’s familial ties to the January 6 Capitol attack.

    The petition, posted on MoveOn, had nearly 1,078,000 signatures as of Monday morning, nearing its goal of 1.1 million total signers. It calls for Thomas to be impeached and removed from the Court over his decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, his threats to go after rights to gay marriage and contraception, and his failure to recuse himself from cases involving the far right’s attempted coup, which his wife Ginni Thomas had a hand in organizing.

    “Thomas’ failure to recuse himself warrants immediate investigation and heightened alarm. And it’s only the latest in a long history of conflicts of interest in the service of a right-wing agenda and mixing his powerful role with his conservative political activism,” the petition reads. “He has shown he cannot be an impartial justice and is more concerned with covering up his wife’s coup attempts than the health of the Supreme Court. He must resign — or Congress must immediately investigate and impeach.”

    The petition has been amassing signatures quickly; as of last Wednesday, the petition had only about 455,000 signatures. There is no legal mandate to act on the petition, but it is a show of the public’s dissatisfaction with the extremist Supreme Court.

    Impeaching a Supreme Court justice is similar to the process to impeaching presidents. The House would vote on impeachment, and the Senate would hold a trial to decide whether or not to remove the justice. Only one justice has ever been impeached — Justice Samuel Chase in 1805 — but the Senate voted to acquit.

    Current circumstances surrounding the Supreme Court are unprecedented, however. The court’s far right justices have been on a rampage over the past two weeks, overturning decisions with, in at least one case, hundreds of years of precedent, and yanking rights away from the public at an extraordinary pace. The justices, with Thomas in concurrence, have ruled to overturn Roe, limit the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gasses, and threaten Native American sovereignty by allowing states to prosecute crimes on tribal lands, among other rulings.

    In March, Thomas was the only justice to vote against the release of presidential records related to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, which former President Donald Trump had attempted to block. Thomas’s dissenting vote was widely condemned as being the result of a conflict of interest, as evidence shows that his wife had leveraged her proximity to Republican officials to campaign to overturn the 2020 election.

    Some lawmakers have been calling for Supreme Court justices to be impeached in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said last week that Thomas should be impeached for his refusal to recuse himself from the January 6 records case and his nearly decade-long failure to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars of income to his wife from the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation.

    Ocasio-Cortez has also called for Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett to be impeached for lying under oath after lawmakers recorded testimony showing that the far right justices lied about not wanting to overturn landmark precedents like Roe during their confirmation hearings. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) has also asked for impeachment investigations for the justices.

    Allowing these lies to pass without consequence is “particularly dangerous” because “it sends a blaring signal to all future nominees that they can now lie to duly elected members of the United States Senate in order to secure Supreme Court confirmations,” Ocasio-Cortez said on NBC last week.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Capitol Police Arrest 181 Protesters Waging Sit-In for Abortion Rights in DC

    Capitol Police arrested 181 pro-abortion demonstrators in Washington, D.C. on Thursday as they waged a sit-in to protest the Supreme Court’s recent overturn of Roe v. Wade.

    During the protest by Center for Popular Democracy Action, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Working Families Party – joined by prominent figures like Rep. Judy Chu (D-California) – demonstrators blocked a street near the Supreme Court, demanding that lawmakers take action to protect abortion seekers across the country.

    Capitol Police began arresting people around noon on Thursday after surrounding them as the protesters marched to the Supreme Court building, calling for mass civil disobedience and vowing not to back down until abortion rights were restored. Chu, one of the original sponsors of the Democrats’ bill to codify Roe, was among the people arrested, as well as the progressive pastor and activist Rev. William Barber II.

    Police said that the reason for the arrests was that the protesters were blocking an intersection, though videos posted on social media show that police closely surrounded protesters as they marched, before the arrests began. Meanwhile, uprisings waged by hundreds of thousands of people over the past week have been met with police violence, including the use of tear gas, which is an abortifacient.

    Journalist Chuck Modi documented on Twitter that police were kettling protesters, an anti-protest tactic often used by police to trap protesters in which they surround protesters and confine them to a certain area like an alleyway or a bridge.

    Modi noted that Capitol Police officers treated the abortion protesters with far more hostility than they did the January 6 attackers – an armed mob with a stated intent of killing political figures and staging a coup backed by the then-president of the United States. D.C. police said that they only arrested about a dozen people out of a mob of thousands of far right militants on the day of the January 6 attack.

    Progressive advocates noted that the difference in the police response, while infuriating, was no surprise. “It’s not a coincidence that violent fascists were treated with kid gloves and folks protesting non-violently for abortion are arrested,” said anti-capitalist activist Joshua Potash. “Cops view one group as their friends and the other as an enemy.”

    Barber, who said he was held in police custody for over three hours, condemned the police for the arrests. “There is something deeply immoral when you would be willing to use your power, not to provide people living wages, not to provide people voting rights, but to take away a woman’s power over her body,” he said. (Trans men and nonbinary people are also affected by the Roe overturn, and the trans community has seen a wave of attacks on their bodily autonomy even outside of the abortion ruling.)

    Abortion advocates have been calling on lawmakers to take immediate action to protect abortion rights and prevent what researchers say will be a sharp uptick in death rates of pregnant people. President Joe Biden called for creating a carveout in the Senate filibuster in order to pass Democrats’ abortion bill, but the pledge means little in the face of recalcitrant conservative Democrats Senators Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona) and Joe Manchin (West Virginia), who were quick to shoot down Biden’s call.

    Progressives say that, even if it were possible, creating a filibuster carveout would be wholly insufficient to meet the demands of this moment as the Supreme Court guts Americans’ rights at a rapid clip. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) have called for far right Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe to be investigated and potentially impeached, while other lawmakers have called for expanding the Supreme Court to combat Republican court packing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “We Are Witnessing a Judicial Coup in Process”

    As the Supreme Court prepares to hear a case that could fundamentally change how elections are run in the U.S., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) is sounding the alarm about extremist justices’ apparent intentions to stage a “judicial coup.”

    On Thursday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Moore v. Harper, a case in which right-wing plaintiffs argue that the North Carolina Supreme Court did not have the jurisdiction to strike down gerrymandered maps that gave the GOP undue advantage in state elections. If the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiff, it could completely undermine the democratic process and empower politicians to draw gerrymandered election maps nearly unilaterally.

    In response to news of the Moore case, Ocasio-Cortez said that it is time for political leaders to take decisive actions to stop the far right Supreme Court from further eroding Americans’ rights.

    “We are witnessing a judicial coup in process,” she wrote. “If the President and Congress do not restrain the Court now, the Court is signaling they will come for the Presidential election next. All our leaders – regardless of party — must recognize this Constitutional crisis for what it is.”

    “At this point we should be well beyond partisanship,” continued Ocasio-Cortez. “Members of Congress have sworn an oath to the Constitution. It is our duty to check the Court’s gross overreach of power in violating people’s inalienable rights and seizing for itself the powers of Congress and the President.”

    In the wake of the most consequential and extremist SCOTUS term in modern history, Ocasio-Cortez has continually called for Democratic leaders to fight back against extremist Supreme Court justices with actions that meet the severity of decisions like the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

    Just in the past eight days, the Supreme Court has ruled to: (1) limit the enforcement of Americans’ Miranda rights; (2) shoot down a New York law that restricted the ability to carry concealed guns in public; (3) wrench bodily autonomy from millions of Americans who can get pregnant; (4) allow public school employees to lead students in prayer; and (5) severely limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to regulate greenhouse gasses.

    With the Moore case on the docket and extremist justices demonstrating their willingness to overturn long-held Court precedents, the Supreme Court’s next session starting in October is shaping up to be equally severe. Right-wing politicians have begun fantasizing about which rights they can target next since Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision to overturn Roe that gay marriage and contraception should also be reconsidered in the wake of the decision on abortion rights.

    In response to these rulings, Ocasio-Cortez has called for Supreme Court justices to be impeached. Lawmakers have accused at least three justices of lying in their confirmation proceedings; Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett all said that they would be willing to uphold precedents like Roe. Lawmakers say those three justices essentially lied under oath in order to secure their spot on the Supreme Court. Ocasio-Cortez has also called for Thomas to be impeached over his wife Ginni Thomas’s ties to the January 6 attempted coup.

    “Catastrophic,” the New York progressive said in response to the Court’s EPA decision. “A filibuster carveout is not enough. We need to reform or do away with the whole thing, for the sake of the planet.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Majority of Americans Say It’s Time to Place Term Limits on the Supreme Court

    A new poll taken in the wake of the Supreme Court’s extremist decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and destabilize abortion rights across the country shows that a large portion of the American public think that it’s time to take action to rein in and reform the Court.

    The Politico/Morning Consult poll was taken directly after the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling was handed down on Friday, and found that 62 percent of Americans support placing term limits on justices, while only 23 percent oppose the idea. The survey also found strong support for binding Supreme Court justices to a code of ethics (69 percent) and supposedly “balancing” the Court with an equal number of Democratic, Republican and independent judges (53 percent).

    Critically, the poll also found that there appears to be growing support among the public for adding seats to the Supreme Court, a measure that Democrats and progressives have been calling for in order to combat Republican court packing.

    The poll found that a plurality of Americans support expanding the Supreme Court, with 45 percent in support of the idea and 38 percent in opposition. This is a far higher number than the mere 26 percent of voters who backed the idea in a Morning Consult poll conducted in April 2021.

    That there is a plurality of support for the idea is also surprising considering that the idea was largely unknown to the public just a handful of years ago. Notably, the last time the number of seats on the Court was changed was in 1869, about 80 years after the Court was convened for the first time. This shift in opinion signals that the public is prepared to support transformative actions in response to the extremist decisions that the Supreme Court has been handing down.

    Lawmakers have been calling for an expansion of the Court in response to the Dobbs ruling and other recent rulings, as well as potentially upcoming rulings that could overturn rights like gay marriage and contraception access.

    Democrats introduced a bill last year that would add four seats to the Supreme Court, with the hope of installing a new Democratic majority on the Court. President Joe Biden opposes this idea, which has frustrated progressives, especially because Republicans have bent and changed rules for years in order to pack the Supreme Court with the current slate of extremists.

    In May, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would require Supreme Court justices to be bound to a code of ethics, as the High Court is the only court in the country that’s not bound to ethics rules. Democrats have also introduced bills to create a non-renewable 18-year term limit for Supreme Court justices, an idea supported by Supreme Court watchdogs.

    None of these measures have gone anywhere in Congress, but progressives have suggested another potential action for Democrats hoping to stop the erosion of human rights in the U.S.: impeaching Supreme Court justices who allegedly lied in their confirmation hearings.

    On Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) called for Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett to be impeached, on the basis that all three previously pledged in their confirmation or in private meetings that they would uphold landmark precedents previously set by the Court, according to lawmakers. She also called for Justice Clarence Thomas to be impeached over his wife’s ties to conservative organizations and the January 6 attack.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Justice Thomas Wants to Make It Easier for People to Sue Media Outlets for Libel

    Justice Clarence Thomas wrote on Monday that he believes the Supreme Court should revisit a decades-old precedent on libel laws, signaling his willingness to overturn yet more landmark cases and potentially open up media outlets to attacks.

    On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear Coral Ridge Ministries Media v. Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), in which the Christian advocacy group sued for defamation over its designation as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the SPLC. As a result, Coral Ridge was excluded from a donation program run by Amazon. The group first sued the SPLC in 2017 and the case has been dismissed by two lower courts.

    The case challenged a precedent established in 1964 via The New York Times v. Sullivan, stating that a public figure must prove “actual malice” in libel charges they’re waging against another party. It protects a wide range of media outlets from lawsuits and is hailed by legal experts as vital to protecting free speech and freedom of the press.

    Thomas dissented from the Court’s opinion, arguing that Coral Ridge’s case has merit. “Coral Ridge maintained that although it ‘opposes homosexual conduct’ based on its religious beliefs, it is in no sense a ‘hate group,’” he wrote, reiterating the group’s argument.

    “This case is one of many showing how New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity,’” he continued. “SPLC’s ‘hate group’ designation lumped Coral Ridge’s Christian ministry with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis.”

    Thomas has called for overturning the “actual malice” standard before. In 2019 and 2021, he wrote opinions in other defamation cases brought before the Court. At least one other justice agrees that the Supreme Court should reconsider NYT v. Sullivan; Neil Gorsuch has also called for the Court to reconsider the precedent.

    “Large numbers of newspapers and periodicals have failed,” Gorsuch wrote in 2021, dissenting to the Court’s decision not to take up a libel case in which a former prime minister of Albania’s son alleged that a book falsely connected him to an arms deal. “Network news has lost most of its viewers. With their fall has come the rise of 24-hour cable news and online media platforms that ‘monetize anything that garners clicks.’”

    The right has pushed for a weakening of constitutional protections for media outlets and figures for years; during his first years in office, former President Donald Trump took issue with a book, written by reporter Bob Woodward, that painted a less-than-flattering picture of the president. In a tweet in 2017, he said that it was a “shame” that “someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost.”

    Then, in 2020, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit claiming that the New York Times had defamed him in an op-ed connecting the Trump campaign with Russian officials who the op-ed said worked to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. The case was ultimately dismissed.

    Legal experts have raised concern about right-wing justices’ willingness to overturn NYT v. Sullivan. The past few years have seen an increase in political figures and corporate interests bringing libel lawsuits against their opponents, perhaps as attempts to silence them, as experts on media law George Freeman and Lee Levine wrote in The Washington Post in March.

    “In our experience, these cases are not typically intended to secure compensation for actual injury to reputation,” they wrote. “Instead, they are intended to punish the media for speaking truth to power and to dissuade it from doing so in the future. And many of these cases are funded not by the allegedly aggrieved plaintiff, but by wealthy individuals and institutions with ideological or political axes to grind and scores to settle.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Warren Says US Is Just Two Anti-Filibuster Democrats Away From Codifying “Roe”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is calling on voters to elect just two more lawmakers to join Senate Democrats this fall, in order to secure enough votes for filibuster reform or abolition with the goal of enshrining federal abortion protections into law.

    In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Warren said that while there are number of actions that lawmakers can take right now to expand and protect abortion access, one of the widest-reaching actions that voters can take is to elect lawmakers to overcome conservative Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-Arizona) opposition to filibuster reform in the Senate.

    The Senate needs just “two more senators on the Democratic side, two senators who are willing to protect access to abortion and get rid of the filibuster so that we can pass it,” Warren said. “And yes, John Fetterman, I’m looking at you in Pennsylvania. Mandela Barnes, I’m looking at you in Wisconsin.”

    “We bring them in, then we’ve got the votes, and we can protect every woman no matter where she lives,” she said. (Trans people also benefit from abortion access and are arguably at even greater risk than cis women are due to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade overturn.)

    Fetterman and Barnes, top Democrats in their races to flip two Senate seats blue this fall, have both stated that they support ending the use of the filibuster. Both candidates also support codifying federal abortion rights into law in order to combat the far right’s attacks and bans on the procedure.

    Manchin and Sinema are the only two lawmakers in the Senate Democratic caucus who are outspoken in their opposition to filibuster reform, while Manchin is the only Senate Democrat to vote with Republicans last month to shoot down his party’s bill to protect abortion rights on the federal level.

    Other lawmakers, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), have called for filibuster abolition to expand and protect abortion access. President Joe Biden, however, has declined to support filibuster abolition for abortion rights and has come out against Supreme Court expansion, frustrating Democrats and progressives.

    Aside from moves like impeaching the Supreme Court’s far right justices and replacing them with Democrats to undo the Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision; expanding the Supreme Court for the same reason; or somehow nullifying laws in states that have already banned abortion since Friday, passing pro-abortion legislation is one of the only options that Democrats have left to protect abortion rights federally, as Roe did.

    Until the election, Warren says that President Joe Biden could use his executive power to expand abortion access, taking moves like opening reproductive health clinics on federal land, declaring a public health emergency over abortion bans and opening up federal funds for people seeking abortions in states they don’t reside in. Biden has taken some limited steps to protect abortion access, but hasn’t mobilized the all-of-government response that some lawmakers are calling for.

    In an op-ed written with Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) published over the weekend, Warren and Smith also called on readers to donate to abortion funds.

    Warren harshly criticized the far right extremists who sit on the Supreme Court on Sunday, calling for an expansion of the Supreme Court to combat the far right’s undue, well-financed influence on the Court.

    “This Court has lost legitimacy,” Warren said. “They have burned whatever legitimacy they may still have had after their gun decision, after their voting decision, after their union decision — they just took the last of it and set a torch to it with the Roe v. Wade decision.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Crisis of Our Democracy”: AOC Calls for Supreme Court Justices to Be Impeached

    In an interview on Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) called for three far right Supreme Court justices to be impeached, on the basis that their votes to overturn Roe v. Wade violated pledges they made under oath in their confirmation hearings.

    As Ocasio-Cortez raised on NBC’s Meet the Press, Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) have suggested that Justices Brett Kavanugh and Neil Gorsuch lied in their confirmation hearings and in personal meetings with the senators about whether or not they would consider overturning Supreme Court precedents while serving as justices. Justice Amy Coney Barrett also pledged during her confirmation that she would uphold precedents.

    “If we allow Supreme Court nominees to lie under oath and secure lifetime appointments to the highest court of the land…. there must be consequences for such a deeply destabilizing action and hostile takeover of our democratic institutions,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “What makes it particularly dangerous is that it sends a blaring signal to all future nominees that they can now lie to duly elected members of the United States Senate in order to secure Supreme Court confirmations.”

    She continued to say that she believes that the justices should be impeached and that lying under oath is an “impeachable offense.”

    Justice Clarence Thomas should also be impeached for recent controversies concerning his wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, Ocasio-Cortez said. “I believe that violating federal law in not disclosing income from political organizations, as Clarence Thomas did years ago, is also potentially an impeachable offense. I believe that not recusing from cases that one clearly has family members involved in, with very deep violations of conflict of interest, are also impeachable offenses.”

    Only 15 federal judges have ever been impeached in U.S. history, none of whom were Supreme Court justices. Impeachment of judges is similar to the impeachment process for presidents; the House would vote on whether or not to pass articles of impeachment and the Senate would vote on conviction. If lawmakers like Manchin and Collins fail to hold the justices accountable, Ocasio-Cortez said, the death of federal abortion rights will also be a stain on their legacies.

    But it would likely be impossible to get any of the far right Supreme Court justices removed without a Democratic supermajority in the Senate — and even then, with conservatives like Manchin in the chamber, it would be an uphill battle.

    However, the current circumstances require an equally extreme response from Democrats, Ocasio-Cortez argued. “What we need to do is show the American people that when they give the Democratic Party power and when they actually do vote for us, that we will be using and we are willing to use the power that they do give us in order to merit increased expansions in our majority.”

    She said that there are a number of actions that President Joe Biden can take even without congressional approval, like exploring opening reproductive care clinics on federal lands in states that have banned abortion or directing agencies to expand access to abortion pills.

    The lawmaker pulled no punches over the weekend in her criticisms of mainstream Democrats’ calls to vote in response to the Roe overturn. The Democratic Party needs to step up in this moment and realize that it’s bigger than just abortion rights, she said.

    “This is not just a crisis of Roe. This is a crisis of our democracy. The Supreme Court has dramatically overreached its authority,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “This is a crisis of legitimacy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 20 Black Congresswomen Urge Biden to Declare Abortion Rights Health Emergency

    A group of Black women in Congress are urging President Joe Biden to take urgent action to protect abortion rights, as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and seizes abortion access from millions of people across the country.

    Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) led 20 lawmakers in sending a letter to Biden on Thursday, asking him “to use every tool at your disposal” to protect reproductive rights, including “declaring a public health and national emergency” to combat attacks on abortion access. The letter was signed by progressives like Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and was first reported by USA Today.

    Friday’s decision “will obliterate legal abortion rights across the nation and exacerbate multiple public health crises disproportionately impacting Black communities,” the lawmakers wote. “The effects of this decision on the lives and health of Black women and pregnant people will be devastating and require an urgent and whole-of-government response.”

    Anti-abortion movements have been rooted in anti-Black racism and hatred throughout their long history. The lawmakers noted in their letter that Black communities are especially vulnerable to maternal health problems; research has found that Black people are over three times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy and three times more likely to get an abortion than white people.

    Roughly 26 states will either certainly or are likely to quickly ban abortions now that Roe is gone, which will have devastating effects on public health, especially among the most vulnerable communities. With a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, only Congress or the Biden administration can act to protect abortion rights on the federal level — and Congress has already failed to pass its abortion rights bill thanks to conservatives in the Senate.

    Meanwhile, far right politicians are already gearing up to pass a nationwide abortion ban in the case that they continue to consolidate their power in Congress or the White House.

    As a result of the Roe overturn, mental health and economic crises will also be exacerbated. In a country that already perpetuates the highest incarceration rates in the world, criminalization will see yet another uptick, compounding socioeconomic issues that disproportionately affect Black people.

    “These unprecedented and calculated attacks on our bodily autonomy are a direct affront to the lives and freedom of Black women,” the letter reads. “In the midst of a Black maternal mortality crisis already robbing us of the lives of Black women three to four times the rate of white women, restricting access to abortion care will disproportionately endanger the lives of Black women and pregnant people.”

    The lawmakers said that declaring an emergency over the abortion rights crisis will give the administration flexibility over unilateral pro-abortion actions.

    Senate Democrats have also highlighted steps that Biden can take to protect abortion rights, including directing the federal government to create a national plan to retake abortion rights from the hands of white christofascists in the Supreme Court, Congress and state legislatures. They argue that Biden has “unique power” over the federal government to organize a response.

    Though Biden has criticized the Supreme Court for ending Roe, activists say that he hasn’t done enough to protect abortion rights. His administration had claimed that it was waiting for the Roe decision to come out before announcing an action plan, but activists contend that Biden could have acted before the consequential decision came down to explore every option possible to protect abortion rights.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Supreme Court Overturns “Roe,” Opening Door to Abortion Bans Across the Country

    Extremist right-wing Supreme Court justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday, the result of the far right’s decades-long disinformation and funding campaign to restrict bodily autonomy and the right to an abortion in the U.S.

    The Court ruled 6 to 3 to overturn 50 years of precedent set by Roe, the landmark 1973 ruling that established abortion protections across the country. This decision will have wide-reaching and devastating consequences for the nation’s 330 million people. At least 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion now that Roe is gone, and health experts have said that many people will die as a result.

    Conservative Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett ruled as the majority. Chief Justice John Roberts filed a concurring judgment with the majority. Dissenting from the opinion were Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

    The decision, written by Justice Alito, is riddled with anti-abortion talking points, including the viewpoint that, because the Constitution doesn’t directly discuss abortion, it is not a protected right.

    “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” Alito wrote.

    This story is breaking and will be updated.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Calls to Expand Supreme Court Grow After Justices Strike Down New York Gun Law

    Progressive and Democratic lawmakers are reviving calls to expand the Supreme Court after the court’s far right justices ruled on Thursday to strike down a New York law that requires people to have a “proper cause” to obtain a license to carry a gun in public.

    The decision, handed down by the court’s six-Republican majority, will have far-reaching consequences affecting not just New York, but other states that may be seeking to curtail gun violence with similar laws. The ruling was met with swift condemnation from gun safety advocates, who said that the decision will only serve to worsen gun violence in places where gun safety laws have lowered gun death rates.

    The decision comes on the heels of horrific mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas; Buffalo, New York; and more. Lawmakers and gun control advocates said that the ruling is a perfect example of why Congress should pass legislation to add more seats to the Supreme Court — seats that would be filled by Democratic President Joe Biden in order to overrule the extremist right-wing conservatives on the High Court.

    “This decision is dangerous. It will upend gun safety laws around the country when the American people are looking for more protection from gun violence, not less,” wrote the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We must pass gun safety legislation. We must expand the Supreme Court.”

    The Senate passed a law this week that would take steps toward federal gun safety regulations, like closing the so-called boyfriend loophole and creating stricter background check requirements for gun sellers and buyers under the age of 21. While the bill contains what are likely the only gun restrictions that could pass Congress under the filibuster, gun safety activists have said that the law is inadequate to address the gun violence epidemic in the U.S.

    Some progressive groups have praised Thursday’s ruling because the New York law was “arbitrarily and discriminatorily applied” to nonwhite groups, the Legal Aid Society said. However, the High Court’s reasoning for overturning the law was likely unrelated to the racial discrimination or carceral rates perpetrated by its enforcement. Rather, conservative lawmakers, empowered by what they see as a win, have used the decision to call for gun violence against the left.

    Democratic lawmakers in the House also called for Supreme Court expansion on Thursday in reaction to the gun safety ruling; the ruling to limit Fifth Amendment Miranda rights; an upcoming decision on federal agencies’ ability to regulate air pollution; and, of course, the expected decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

    “Miranda. Gun control. Voting rights. Abortion care. Clean air and water,” wrote Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). “SCOTUS repeatedly fails to protect our rights, autonomy, and safety, and it shows no signs of stopping. There’s only one way to course correct its extremism before it’s too late — we must expand the Court.”

    “Today, the far-right Court has gone out of its way to expand the Second Amendment and undermine public safety, while shrinking the Fifth Amendment and taking away Miranda rights,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts). Markey introduced legislation to add four seats to the Supreme Court last year. “We cannot allow this overtly political Court to stand in the way of our safety. Expand the Court.” Fellow sponsor of the bill Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York) joined in, saying that the Court is “packed with far-right, radical ideologues.”

    While lawmakers have called for Supreme Court expansion for over a year now, conservative Democrats are opposed to the idea, even though the number of justices in the Supreme Court is completely arbitrary and the nine-justice limit has been exploited by Republican lawmakers and presidents elected with only a minority of the popular vote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.