Author: Sharon Zhang

August 10, 2021

While Complaining About “Woke Politics,” Hawley Offers Critical Race Theory Ban

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) is attempting to take conservatives’ latest culture war topics, ranging from spurious to dangerous, to Congress, announcing a number of amendments to the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that he plans to introduce as the Senate takes up debate on the resolution.

Hawley unveiled his planned amendments on Monday that were reflective of a far right extremist agenda. He includes proposals like barring critical race theory in federal diversity training, prohibiting the federal government from establishing universal pre-kindergarten, which Democrats have proposed, and restricting funding from schools taking steps to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Other amendments would promote “patriotic education” to “teach students to love America,” pull U.S. funding from the World Trade Organization and, ghoulishly, bar health care workers from providing gender affirming care for transgender people.

The amendments, covering a wide swath of topics that many Republicans have taken up in state governments, are a show of the priorities on the right to endanger adults’ and children’s mental and physical health while indoctrinating children through barring the teaching of topics related to race and equity. They have little to do with the Democrats’ reconciliation bill, which is aimed at addressing the climate crisis, strengthening the safety net for Americans and expanding Medicare coverage.

The proposals are especially ironic as Republicans have complained for months that the bipartisan bill is “not really an infrastructure bill,” as Hawley claimed last week. “This is a woke politics bill that is being paid for with hundreds of billions of dollars in pork-barrel spending,” he said, complaining, too, about the deficit that Republicans had a huge hand in creating.

What Hawley was complaining about was a single line in the bill, which said that a program expanding broadband access for disadvantaged people couldn’t discriminate based on race, gender identity, sexual orientation, or otherwise. He implied that trans people shouldn’t be a protected class and went on to extrapolate that the infrastructure bill, which has already been watered down massively by Republicans, was a “far-left” bill with proposals that aren’t related to infrastructure.

Besides the fact that the infrastructure bill is a far cry from what progressives and even Joe Biden himself have proposed, Hawley’s view of issues he thinks are politicized in the infrastructure bill is dwarfed by his own budget reconciliation amendments.

Assuming that they were morally equal, proposing that all people should have an equal opportunity to access broadband assistance from the federal government is a much less consequential idea than disincentivizing schools from preventing the spread of COVID-19 — and that’s just one of his proposals.

But, while the goal of equal access within one part of the infrastructure bill is arguably a noble cause, Hawley’s proposals have the potential to be incredibly destructive. Right now, as schools reopen and children under 12 still can’t be vaccinated, children account for 15 percent of COVID cases in the U.S., a recent report has found. And adopting a law barring trans people from accessing health care, for instance, would have monumentally detrimental consequences for trans people and their families and is a direct attack on the LGBTQ community’s health.

Further, Hawley’s amendments have less to do with the reconciliation package than the clauses in the bipartisan bill he says aren’t related to infrastructure. While he complained about climate provisions in the infrastructure bill — of which there are very few — many of his proposals have almost nothing to do with the budget reconciliation process. Climate, as advocates have pointed out time and again, has everything to do with infrastructure, while promoting a “patriotic education” has nothing to do with the federal budget.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 10, 2021

Andrew Cuomo Resigns as Governor of New York Amid Sexual Harassment Scandal

This story is developing and will be updated.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that he would be resigning in a webcast on Tuesday morning amid a months-long sexual harassment scandal in which multiple women have accused him of exhibiting inappropriate and alarming behavior spanning years of his time in power.

“This is one of the most challenging times for government in a generation. Government really needs to function today,” said Cuomo. “Wasting energy on distractions is the last thing that state government should be doing. And I cannot be the cause of that.”

“I think that, given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing. And, therefore, that’s what I’ll do,” Cuomo continued. His resignation will take effect in 14 days, he said.

The governor’s resignation comes as nearly a dozen women employees and former staffers have accused Cuomo of sexual harassment and assault, in some cases groping and kissing women without their consent. Despite the growing pile of accusations, however, Cuomo has resisted calls to resign for months and denied the women’s accounts of his behavior.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 10, 2021

New Warren Bill Proposes Taxing Real Company Profits, Not What’s Reported to IRS

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) introduced a bill Tuesday that would create a tax on corporate profits that she says could help raise hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for the government.

The bill, called the Real Corporate Profits Tax Act of 2021, would levy a 7 cent tax on every dollar of profit above $100 million that corporations report to their shareholders, otherwise known as their book income. It’s the same proposal that Warren had introduced during her presidential campaign in 2019.

The tax proposal is aimed at ensuring that corporations pay taxes on their income even if they’re able to avoid taxes elsewhere. Levying the tax on their book income as opposed to the income that they report to the government could help capture taxable income that a company may otherwise try to obscure from the government.

“Companies cannot be allowed to continue reporting billions in profits to shareholders and then turn around and pay nothing in taxes to the IRS. The American people know that’s wrong. People in Congress know that’s wrong. The President of the United States knows that’s wrong,” Warren said in a statement.

“The Real Corporate Profits Tax Act would end corporate double dealing and ensure they pay their fair share so that we can raise essential revenue needed to invest in families and our economy,” the senator continued. According to a press release on the bill, it would raise nearly $700 billion in revenue over the next decade.

Warren introduced the bill alongside Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia). It’s been cosponsored by Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island). The lawmakers hope for the bill to be incorporated into the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package as a revenue raiser.

President Joe Biden had unveiled a similar tax proposal in the spring to levy a 15 percent tax on book income for a select few of the largest corporations in the U.S. to help pay for his infrastructure package. Nearly all of Biden’s tax proposals on corporations and the wealthy were cut from bipartisan negotiations on the package, however.

The lawmakers point out that corporations are often able to get away with paying little to no corporate income tax because of the many loopholes in the tax code and the very low statutory corporate tax rate. It enables corporations to paint a rosy picture about their profits to their shareholders, while at the same time withholding that information from the government.

In 2018, for instance, Amazon didn’t pay any federal income tax at all. According to an Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy report, a large swath of the nation’s largest corporations in fact were able to avoid paying taxes in at least one year between 2008 and 2015 — and that was back when the statutory corporate tax rate was 14 percent higher than it currently is after Republicans slashed the rate in 2017 under President Trump.

“Our tax code allows profitable companies to pay little or no tax because there are two sets of rules for reporting profits. When reporting to shareholders and potential investors, companies follow established financial accounting procedures to record their profits on their financial statements,” a fact sheet on the bill explains.

“When filing their tax returns, however, companies are able to exploit a host of loopholes, deductions, and exemptions to drive down their tax liability,” the fact sheet continues. “As a result, corporate giants that report billions in ‘book income’ on their financial statements – and tout these numbers in order to drive up their stock prices and CEO bonuses – can end up paying no income tax to the IRS.”

By creating a minimum tax on corporate book income, the lawmakers hope to create more airtight tax rules that could stop companies from skirting income taxes. The bill would apply to about 1,300 public companies and a host of other private companies, they estimate.

“In 1965, corporations paid roughly 4 percent of the nation’s GDP in state and federal income tax. Today, that rate is only 1 percent,” King said in a statement. “This massive decline has contributed to the nation’s rising debt and threatened basic public sector services Americans rely upon.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 9, 2021

After a Decade of Activism, $15 Wage Becoming New Average in Some Industries

New data show that, as wages have risen across much of the economy, the average pay for restaurant and supermarket workers has risen above $15 an hour for the first time, reports The Washington Post. The milestone marks a win for both workers and, potentially, the Fight for $15 movement.

Employers struggling to fill low-wage positions as businesses reopened over the past year have blamed their problem on a so-called worker shortage. But in reality, economists say, it’s more likely that there was a wage shortage as workers were unwilling to do a job that is more dangerous during the pandemic for the same wage as before COVID-19 was raging through the country.

Now, it seems, employers are responding, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by The Washington Post. Eighty percent of U.S. workers make at least $15 an hour now. “Job sites and recruiting firms say many job seekers won’t even consider jobs that pay less than $15 anymore,” write Andrew Van Dam and Heather Long for the Post. “For years, low-paid workers fought to make at least that much. Now it has effectively become the new baseline.”

Indeed, the Fight for $15 movement has been ongoing for nearly a decade — ever since fast food workers began protesting for higher wages in 2012. The new milestone represents a win on the wage front for low-wage workers who find themselves in a position to exercise larger control over the wages they can demand as the pandemic continues.

As Bloomberg noted on Monday, “For the first time in decades, the American worker is finally in command when it comes time to talk money.” Companies like Kroger and Under Armour are raising wages, the publication points out, to attract more workers. CVS, Target, and others are raising their wages to a minimum of $15 an hour.

When large corporations raise wages, smaller businesses often follow, research has found. And, since wages rarely decrease once they rise, these changes are likely to remain permanent.

It’s important to note that the $15 an hour wage isn’t the minimum wage but rather the average wage now for restaurant and supermarket workers, which means many workers in these industries still make less than that. But it’s still indicative of the way that the job market is shifting, experts say.

“It wouldn’t be fair to call $15 an hour the new minimum, but I think it’s a guiding star wage. It’s a baseline wage that folks compare offers to,” Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed Hiring Labs, told The Washington Post.

With many service workers making less than $15 an hour, however, advocates say it’s still important for the federal minimum wage to be raised. The current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and it hasn’t been raised in 12 years.

A recent attempt in Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour spearheaded by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) was rejected earlier this year, leaving the future of the proposal uncertain. But even $15 an hour can be difficult to live off of, especially for families.

As the $15 an hour wage goal has grown outdated over the past decade, progressive advocates have also pointed out that wages should actually be much higher. If the minimum wage grew at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses over the past decades, it would be $44 an hour, they point out. If the minimum wage grew at the same rate as productivity, it would be $24 an hour.

Wages are also not rising equally for all groups of workers. Data from last month show that, while wages are on the rise, they’re rising at a slower rate for Black men and Latinas than they are for other groups.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 9, 2021

Sanders Unveils Final $3.5T Reconciliation Package Alongside Infrastructure Bill

Senate Democrats have unveiled their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill with provisions like paid leave, expanding Medicare coverage and proposals to tackle the climate crisis in the U.S. The Democrats plan on passing the bill alongside the bipartisan infrastructure package that’s currently being debated in the Senate.

The reconciliation bill, spearheaded largely by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), contains many of the provisions that were carved out of the infrastructure package that President Joe Biden had originally proposed in the spring. That includes traditional infrastructure provisions, such as funding for affordable housing upgrades and transportation.

Included are proposals to support the “human infrastructure” in the country that were in Biden’s American Families Plan and which were cut out of the bipartisan agreement completely. The bill also includes a proposal for federal paid family and medical leave, funding to make two years of community college tuition free and a proposal for universal pre-kindergarten.

Democrats included several provisions in the bill to address the climate crisis — crucial items that would not be able to pass the 60-vote Senate filibuster as it currently stands. The infrastructure bill, as climate advocates have pointed out, is Biden’s and Democrats’ last best chance to pass legislation that can achieve the president’s goal of reducing 2005 emissions levels 50 percent by 2030.

Investments in electrifying the federal vehicle fleet and buildings included in the bill go toward that goal. Proposals that climate advocates have long said are necessary for combating the climate crisis, such as the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps and funding for climate justice programs have been included in the bill.

Inclusion of the climate proposals was a crucial aspect of this reconciliation package as Republicans, and some conservative Democrats, are still determined to uphold climate denial, fighting against provisions to combat the climate crisis in the infrastructure bill and elsewhere. If climate proposals fail to pass through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires a simple majority vote to pass legislation, their chances of passing the Senate are extremely low without filibuster abolition.

The much-vaunted health care proposals that Democratic party members have been fighting for in recent months are also part of the reconciliation bill. Democrats aim to reduce the Medicare eligibility age and expand Medicare to cover dental, vision and hearing. The exact age for Medicare eligibility is yet to be made public, but Democrats have previously mentioned lowering it to 60 or 55 from the current threshold of 65.

Progressives have lauded the $3.5 trillion package as consequential, touting its provisions to help families and the working class while taking on climate change.

“The $3.5 trillion Budget Resolution that I am introducing today will allow the Senate to move forward on a reconciliation bill that will be the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s,” said Sanders in a statement. “It will also put the U.S. in a global leadership position to combat climate change and make our planet healthy and habitable for future generations.”

Sanders also emphasized that the bill would help level the playing field between wealthy people and the middle and lower classes, with funding to both help enforce existing tax laws for the wealthy and achieve “tax fairness” — as a memo accompanying the bill puts it.

Though some lawmakers have hailed the bill, it’s still considered a compromise by and large by progressives. As Ana Malinow pointed out for Truthout, lowering the Medicare eligibility age slightly is a far cry from Medicare for All. “The proposal [to lower the eligibility age to 60] is even weaker than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016, when she offered to lower the age to 50 or 55 even without the presence of a global pandemic,” Malinow wrote.

As Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) said on Twitter, progressives had originally wanted $10 trillion, so the bill is already a compromise for the left plank of the party.

“We wanted $10 trillion. But still, this is a badly needed investment, which is why more than 60 percent of Americans support the legislation,” Bowman said. “This is a crisis, so here’s my message to the Senate: #NotOnePennyLess, because $3.5 trillion was already the compromise. The American people want it. In fact, it’s not too late to get that number higher.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 6, 2021

Pelosi Opposed Student Loan Cancellation After Billionaire Ally’s Memo

A memo uncovered by The Intercept shows that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) opposed supporting a push for President Joe Biden to cancel student loan debt after billionaire donors, with whom she has close ties, urged her to do so.

Last week, Pelosi announced her opposition to a popular progressive proposal to cancel student loan debt, which advocates say could provide major relief to millions of borrowers and provide a huge boost to the COVID-burdened economy.

“People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Pelosi said, adding that, though she believes Congress should be in charge of the proposal, she also thinks student debt relief is unfair.

That opinion, which puts her at odds with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and surprised congressional insiders, comes after a powerful billionaire couple circulated a memo saying that the president does not have the power to cancel student debt.

“Recently, there has been heightened fervor around Senators [Elizabeth] Warren and Schumer’s proposal that President-elect Joe Biden could cancel student debt ‘with the pen as opposed to legislation.’ Unfortunately, that cannot happen,” the November memo from Democratic megadonors Steven and Mary Swig read.

Indeed, Schumer and Warren have been lobbying Biden to follow up on campaign promises and cancel student debt, which they say the president could do with an executive order. Despite Pelosi’s statement, many advocates and legal experts say that Biden has the authority to cancel student debt, and that time is of the essence to free up nearly $2 trillion worth of debt for borrowers to inject into the economy.

Pelosi’s view aligns more with the Swigs’ memo than the views of her congressional colleagues, who have cited legal avenues for the president to cancel student debt. But this may be due to the fact that Pelosi evidently maintains a close relationship with the billionaire donors, who have previously lobbied her directly on issues, The Intercept reports.

Pelosi not only keeps political ties to the Swigs, but also financial and professional ones as well. For years the couple has given her the maximum amount allowed under campaign finance law. Steven Swig has served as her campaign treasurer in reelection campaigns since 2012, and their niece worked for Pelosi between 2018 and March of this year.

The Swigs hold huge sway within Democratic circles, according to The Intercept, donating millions of dollars to the Democratic Party over the years. But they’re described by political insiders as “an often well-meaning couple who have donated to worthy causes but are rendered almost comically out of touch by their extraordinary wealth,” write The Intercept’s Ryan Grim and Ken Klippenstein. They didn’t even know until recent years, for instance, that people even had student loans.

Pelosi’s staff has denied that the Swig memo had influenced her view on the issue — the memo, after all, was supportive of the idea of canceling student debt in general, even if it says that Biden lacks the authority. However, student debt advocates are skeptical that Pelosi wasn’t influenced by the Swigs, especially since the House speaker’s statement shocked many on Capitol Hill.

“The only reason she was for it [legislatively] was because Steve and Mary asked her to,” one student loan debt advocate who is familiar with discussions between the Swigs and Pelosi told The Intercept.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 6, 2021

Republicans Balk at Infrastructure Adding to Deficit After Opposing Pay Fors

As amendments to the bipartisan infrastructure bill were being debated in the Senate, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Thursday that only about half of the $550 billion in new spending proposed by the bill will be paid for and the rest will add to the deficit.

The CBO announced that the bill would add about $256 billion to the deficit over the next ten years despite the fact that the bipartisan group working on the bill had promised the entire bill would be paid for.

Republicans have warned for weeks that they may not support the bill if it wasn’t fully funded. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said in June that might not support a bill that added to the deficit. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told The Hill on Thursday that, despite the good provisions in the bill, he believes half of the “pay-fors” in the bill are “fake.”

Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) has evidently been warning his colleagues for weeks that the bill would likely not be fully covered. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and Portman circulated a statement saying that the CBO score may not be fully accurate and that the bill would still be fully funded, in an attempt to assuage concerns for now.

Still, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tennessee) is hesitant after the CBO report, falling in step with McConnell’s announcement in June that GOP lawmakers wouldn’t vote for a bill that added to the deficit. A spokesperson for Hagerty told Politico that the senator “cannot in good conscience agree to expedite a process immediately after the CBO confirmed that the bill would add over a quarter of a trillion dollars to the deficit.”

Senators, mostly Republicans, introduced a flurry of amendments on Thursday evening but Hagerty’s opposition held up a vote to end debate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has rescheduled the vote for Saturday. The bill must receive at least 60 votes to advance, thanks to the Senate filibuster.

Though Republican opposition to adding to the deficit — and thus potential opposition to the entire infrastructure bill — is unsurprising, it comes after months of negotiations in which the GOP has rejected a wide swath of Democratic proposals that could have prevented any deficit issues at all.

President Joe Biden had originally proposed a modest tax increase on corporations and wealthy people to pay for his $4 trillion package. Republicans categorically rejected this proposal, not wanting to undo Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Instead, they offered to pay for the bill with user fees, a proposal that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) pointed out was really a tax on the middle and lower classes.

Republicans also rejected a proposal to enforce existing tax law on the rich. This pay-for would fund the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after rich tax dodgers — many who often donate handsomely to the Republican Party. The IRS funding proposal in the bipartisan bill would have raised an estimated $100 billion over 10 years.

The GOP, then, has created its own catch-22 on the infrastructure bill. They won’t agree to a bill that would add to the deficit, but they also won’t agree to any of the pay-fors that would cover additional spending. It’s unclear if Hagerty or other Republicans could be swayed to support the bill — but as Republicans have been delaying the bill for months, Democrats and progressives are growing more impatient.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 5, 2021

Tlaib & Raskin Demand Answers From DHS About Rampant Racism Among Michigan CBP

Following a report suggesting that Border Patrol agents at the northern border of the U.S. are likely engaging in racist discrimination against citizens and immmigrants of Latin American origin or descent, Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) have sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas demanding more information on the alleged practice.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan found from analyzing 13,000 Border Patrol apprehension records between 2012 and 2019 earlier this year that the state’s Border Patrol agents disproportionately detain immigrants from Latin America.

“Border Patrol engages in blatant racial profiling,” wrote ACLU of Michigan, detailing how agents use “complexion codes” to describe people they apprehend. The organization found that 85 percent of noncitizens detained by Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), were from Latin America, while more than 70 percent of people arrested crossing the border illegally in the North are actually from Canada or a European country.

CBP also “routinely spend their time and resources targeting people of Latin American origin who are long-term Michigan residents,” most often detaining people for completely nonimmigration related activities, the ACLU of Michigan writes. In nearly a fifth of the arrests, ACLU found, agents used people speaking Spanish as a reason for arresting them.

Tlaib and Raskin said in their letter that they are “deeply troubled” by the allegations in the report.

“We write to request a briefing and information on efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to respond to serious allegations of discrimination and misuse of taxpayer resources by Border Patrol agents on Michigan’s border with Canada, spanning multiple administrations,” wrote Tlaib and Raskin in their letter sent Wednesday.

“DHS must provide a full explanation of exactly how it is addressing the problems laid bare by the ACLU,” they said. The lawmakers demand information on how CBP is responding to the issues laid out in the report and request records on the agency’s activities in the area.

“An explosive ACLU report reveals that Custom and Border Patrol agents in Michigan overwhelmingly stop and detain people of Latin American origin,” wrote Raskin on Twitter. “[Rep. Rashida Tlaib] and I are demanding answers.”

CBP has long perpetuated racism across the country and within its ranks. A 2019 report by ProPublica found that border agents participate in a secret Facebook group in which they share vile and vulgar memes and “jokes,” often offensive and racist, with each other, signalling the culture of CBP itself.

After the agency vowed to act on the hateful posts, it did little to actually enact change among its rank and file. The House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which launched an investigation into the agency, says that CBP officials have rebuffed their efforts, refusing to comply with lawmakers and obstructing the effort.

The lawmakers indeed point out that it’s not just Michigan where border agents are participating in racist discrimination.

“As is the case in Michigan, CBP enforcement actions in other states within the border zone appear to be largely unrelated to disrupting attempts to illegally enter the country,” they wrote. “For example, a study of transportation stops in Rochester, New York, found that less than 1% of stops were made upon entry into the country and that 76% of detainees had been present in the United States for more than one year.”

The reports line up with the experience of Black CBP officers who sued the agency in July claiming that they were forced to discriminate against nonwhite people at the behest of their white supervisors.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 5, 2021

Real Estate Groups Have So Far Poured Millions Into Stopping Eviction Moratorium

While the eviction moratorium set in place for the pandemic likely saved millions of renters from being evicted and potentially experiencing homelessness, the real estate industry was focused on its profits — and was willing to spend millions of dollars to protect their profit margins.

A new report from OpenSecrets finds that, over the past year and a half, the real estate industry has spent over $100 million on lobbying. Though financial disclosures don’t specify the purpose of the lobbying funds, the efforts were likely in large part to get the eviction moratorium overturned or not renewed.

After a stunning protest led by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri), and at the urging of other progressive lawmakers, President Joe Biden announced this week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be implementing a new eviction moratorium for two months. Bush and other advocates had protested against the Biden administration and Congress allowing the moratorium to end at the end of July.

“On Friday night, I came to the Capitol with my chair. I refused to accept that Congress could leave for vacation while 11 million people faced eviction,” tweeted Bush on Tuesday, after Biden announced the extension. “For 5 days, we’ve been out here, demanding that our government acts to save lives. Today, our movement moved mountains.”

The real estate industry has been pushing for over a year to overturn the eviction moratorium, filing lawsuits and donating to GOP lawmakers to help their cause. The National Association of Realtors spent $84 million on lobbying in 2020 — more than it ever has in one year — according to OpenSecrets.

All the while, real estate groups have been complaining of how much the moratorium was costing them, even though top financial and real estate firms have reported high or stable earnings in the first quarter of 2021.

While real estate agents worried about their profits, housing advocates warned that, if the eviction moratorium was to end, millions of people could be affected. Many of these renters would also be at risk of experiencing homelessness.

In a court case filed by an Alabama real estate group earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the CDC’s moratorium could stay in place, but only until the end of July. The new eviction moratorium is written differently from the previous order and made to specifically address areas that are being hit hard by COVID and the Delta variant of the virus. As a result, it’s estimated to cover about 90 percent of the U.S. population.

The new wording circumvents the Supreme Court’s previous ruling, but is already facing a new challenge in court. Just one day after Biden announced the new moratorium, state real estate associations, with the backing of the National Association of Realtors, filed another lawsuit claiming that the ruling is an overstep by the CDC.

They claim in the lawsuit that the agency, in implementing a policy that could help keep millions of families housed and protected from the virus, “caved to political pressure.” They do not acknowledge that the new moratorium is written to be more specific to the pandemic.

Democratic leadership, meanwhile, have praised the new moratorium order and have thanked Bush for her work in influencing the White House.

“Cori Bush gets huge credit,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). “One person who changed things for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of people.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
August 5, 2021

Biden to Set Goal for Half of All Vehicle Sales to Be Electric by 2030

President Joe Biden is launching a push on Thursday to curb vehicle emissions and set a benchmark for the U.S. to begin phasing out gas vehicles.

Biden is expected to sign an executive order setting a goal for half of all vehicles sold in the United States to be electric by 2030, which will likely play a key role in helping the U.S. meet Biden’s climate goals. He is also expected to reinstate and tighten tailpipe emission standards set under President Barack Obama (but rolled back by Trump) to cut greenhouse gas emissions and ramp up vehicle efficiency.

The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., making up 29 percent of emissions in 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Without swift vehicle electrification, climate goals set by the administration like cutting emissions to 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2030 will be hard to reach, experts say,

Still, Biden’s announced goal for vehicle electrification will be difficult to achieve, logistically and politically. “There’s a battle on every front. There’s a battle in Congress. There’s a battle in the courts. There’s a battle against time,” Jody Freeman, Harvard Law School environmental and energy law director, told The Washington Post.

Indeed, as this summer’s climate events have demonstrated, time is of the essence on climate legislation. And with climate measures being carved out of the infrastructure plan, there are few options left for legislators who want to curb the climate crisis to do so.

In the latest and possibly final version of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure funding ended up being cut by nearly 96 percent of Biden’s original proposal. Vehicle manufacturers have said that their compliance with Biden’s order hinges on funding and support for building more charging stations from Congress.

The latest bipartisan bill calls for only $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, half of the $15 that was allocated for charging stations in the June bipartisan framework. Car manufacturers like Ford, General Motors and Honda have signalled their support for Biden’s electrification goals. But the American manufacturers and United Auto Workers will only take the pledge to make 40 to 50 percent of their new car sales electric if the bipartisan bill passes with the $7.5 billion in EV charging funding.

Biden will also reinstate vehicle mileage standards rolled back by Donald Trump. Starting with 2023 car models, Biden will propose higher mileage standards in hopes of cutting emissions by 3.7 percent a year, mirroring a California vehicle emissions reduction plan. In 2025, the emissions cuts will ramp up by a 5 percent increase annually, and possibly more after that, the Associated Press reports.

Climate and environment groups have shared mixed views on Biden’s plans.

“This proposal is headed in a better direction, but the Biden administration can and should be more ambitious,” Environment America Carbon Campaign Director Morgan Folger said in a statement. “Over 5 years ago, the Obama-Biden administration took the strongest federal action to reduce global warming pollution in history, only to be stalled out by the automakers reneging on their promise…. We can’t turn back the clock 5 years, so we have to go even faster to zero out pollution from our cars and trucks and solve this climate crisis.”

Simon Mui, deputy director for clean vehicles and fuels at the Natural Resources Defense Council, praised the administration for taking action but told The Washington Post, “This proposal delivers less carbon pollution reductions than the Obama-era standards and includes unfortunate loopholes that undercut progress.”

Climate advocates have also recently taken umbrage with Biden for making major compromises on climate despite early promises for ambitious emissions reductions. “Today, the prospect of serious action on the scale needed to address the climate emergency, and the image of the Biden administration as being committed to climate action, are both in shambles,” wrote Basav Sen for Truthout.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 30, 2021

Omar Unveils Guaranteed Income Bill to Send American Adults $1,200 a Month

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) plans to introduce a bill that would create a guaranteed income program that would send $1,200 a month to most Americans. The bill, she argues, could be a major step toward ending poverty in the U.S.

The SUPPORT Act would send $1,200 a month to U.S. adults making up to $75,000 a year, or a head of household making up to $112,500 a year, with supplemental income for children, according to HuffPost. The bill would phase out payments at higher income brackets.

The bill strives to include groups that are traditionally left out of government aid like the recent COVID stimulus checks. Undocumented immigrants who file taxes with an ITIN would be included. People without banking accounts or people experiencing homelessness could also access payments through a banking system run by the United States Postal Service.

The SUPPORT Act has been cosponsored by Reps. Cori Bush (D-Missouri), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Dwight Evans (D-Pennsylvania) and Jamaal Bowman (D-New York). It faces long odds in Congress.

“Poverty is a choice. For too long we have prioritized endless growth while millions are homeless, hungry or without healthcare,” Omar said in a statement, per HuffPost. “We as a nation have the ability to make sure everyone has their basic needs like food, housing and healthcare met.”

The state of poverty and debt in the U.S. is dire. The gap between the highest and lowest earners is growing, while people working on the dismally low federal minimum wage are struggling to meet their needs. Tax cuts for the rich, meanwhile, have allowed the rich to avoid paying income tax altogether some years, creating a stark contrast between the wealthy and the poor.

A study by the Federal Reserve published in 2019 found that almost 40 percent of Americans didn’t have $400 in savings, leaving them vulnerable if unexpected expenses were to arise.

Omar argues that her bill could help reverse poverty in the U.S., pointing to the stimulus checks sent out earlier this year and last. Indeed, a recent study of the effects of the COVID stimulus bill passed earlier this year found that poverty dropped to the lowest level on record in the U.S. The largest contributor to the reduction in poverty is from the stimulus checks — a similar program to what Omar is proposing.

Not only did the checks reduce poverty, they also helped families stay afloat through the pandemic. Half of Americans used the $1,400 checks sent by the government earlier this year to pay debts. Many others used the checks to pay off bills, relieving a burden from families while the country was, and still is, being crushed by COVID-19.

Universal basic income has been tried before in the U.S. Recently, Stockton, California, experimented with the idea, giving randomly selected members of the public $500 a month with no strings attached for two years. The cash stipends benefitted or increased participant’s financial stability and career prospects. It also helped better the participant’s overall well-being.

Similar programs have had success in other countries. Countries like Finland and South Korea have had similar results from guaranteed income programs, which freed up participants to pursue goals like starting a business or attending school.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 30, 2021

Exxon-Influenced Senators Carved Climate Out of Infrastructure Almost Entirely

The final negotiations over the infrastructure bill have ground funding down to a paltry $550 billion, from what began as a $2.25 trillion proposal from President Joe Biden.

The bipartisan group of senators overseeing the negotiations cut about $29 billion in new spending from the previous draft, eliminating $20 billion of what little climate spending was left in the bill, E&E News reported.

Compared to the previous draft of the bill announced in June, the latest and final draft of the bill removes $10 billion from public transit spending and $5 billion from electric school bus funding. It also effectively cut electric vehicle charging infrastructure in half from the previous draft from $15 billion to $7.5 billion.

The cuts are yet another instance of drastic reductions that the bipartisan group has repeatedly made to climate provisions from Biden’s original proposal. Electric vehicle funding fell by nearly 96 percent from the first proposal of $174 billion, and transportation funding in general took a $263 billion cut.

The bipartisan group, along with Biden, touted the bill as a success. “This deal signals to the world that our democracy can function, deliver, and do big things,” Biden said in a statement.

But, so far, the infrastructure negotiations have done more to frustrate Democratic lawmakers and progressive movements than to give them something to celebrate. Progressives have been saying for months that they wouldn’t support a bill that didn’t sufficiently address the climate crisis, adopting the mantra “no climate, no deal.”

The sharp cuts to climate provisions in the bipartisan deal are a sharp contrast from the $10 trillion climate, justice and infrastructure bill that progressives had introduced earlier this year, called the THRIVE Act. The bill aims to reduce emission while boosting justice initiatives over the next decade, and climate advocates have lauded it as one of the only proposals in Washington that comes close to matching the scale of the climate crisis.

Though the THRIVE Act has little chance of passing, all hope isn’t lost for climate-focused progressives. Democrats were hoping to tack on climate and other provisions cut from the negotiations onto a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that they could pass through a simple majority vote as long as all Democratic senators were on board.

However, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-Arizona) recently announced opposition to that plan, throwing progressive support for watered-down reconciliation and infrastructure bills into question.

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) highlighted the enormous sacrifices of bipartisanship.

What was gained: “Bipartisanship”

What was lost: pic.twitter.com/QxjDXiHb1s

— Jamaal Bowman (@JamaalBowmanNY) July 30, 2021

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) pointed out that the motivation of the bipartisan group to cut climate provisions from the bill might have come directly from fossil fuel lobbyists. “Exxon lobbyists bragged about how much influence they had in this deal,” she said on Twitter. “This is what that influence looks like,” she said, sharing the E&E News report on the climate provisions being cut.

Indeed, an explosive June report from Greenpeace found that Exxon, continuing decades-long practices of fighting climate policy, was “working hard behind the scenes to eliminate the proposed funding” for Biden’s climate policies.

The lobbyists had also targeted a number of the conservative Republicans and Democrats in the bipartisan group, including Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), Sinema, John Tester (D-Montana), Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia).

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 29, 2021

Just Two Days Before It Expires, Biden Announces Eviction Moratorium Will End

Just before the federal eviction moratorium is set to end on Saturday, President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he will allow it to expire despite calls from housing advocates to extend it.

The White House said that Biden wanted to extend the moratorium, citing concerns over the Delta variant of COVID-19. The Supreme Court wouldn’t allow the moratorium to continue, the White House argued. The Supreme Court ruled last month that it would not strike down the moratorium but let it remain in place until the end of July when it was set to expire.

Biden has called on Congress, instead, to act. “In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the President calls on Congress to extend the eviction moratorium to protect such vulnerable renters and their families without delay,” the White House wrote in a statement.

The White House and other legislators in Washington have been under pressure from the real estate industry to end the moratorium. A report this week by Accountable.US found that real estate groups have been lobbying Congress and the White House, even pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the pockets of politicians like Senators Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania), who have both advocated against the moratorium.

The lobbying against the moratorium has occurred despite the fact that many large financial and real estate firms have reported stable or high earnings in the first quarter of 2021, the report found, indicating that lifting the moratorium isn’t financially necessary for the groups.

Instead, as housing advocates have pointed out, the ending of the moratorium is likely to create havoc for renters across the U.S. By the White House’s own count, the eviction moratorium, set in place to protect renters during the pandemic, has prevented 1.55 million evictions. Though, with the Census Bureau finding that 8 million people have reported falling behind on rent during the pandemic, the number could be much higher.

Housing researchers and advocates have been warning of a coming wave of evictions when the moratorium ends. Even with the moratorium, landlords in some states were filing for evictions — and those that were filed were disproportionately located in communities of color, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.

Reporters and advocates questioned why the White House’s announcement came only two days before the moratorium is set to end. “Hard to understate how late this came, especially given public pressure around [Emergency Rental Assistance] spending and the delta variant,” wrote The Washington Post’s Rachel Leah Siegel on Twitter. “White House says the Supreme Court made clear the moratorium couldn’t be extended. But that is not news, and now they’re looking to Congress right before July 31.”

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein said, despite the fact that the Biden administration claimed the president wanted the moratorium to continue, Stein hasn’t found evidence of that in his reporting on the White House. “After weeks of silence, the White House is now saying — just 3 days before the eviction moratorium expires — that they want Congress to extend it but can’t themselves,” said Stein on Twitter. “My reporting suggests no senior officials in the WH were pushing for an extension even before the court ruling” in June.

As advocates pointed out, the pandemic is also surging harder than it was in June when the Supreme Court passed down its decision. Cases were hitting a low point in June in the U.S., but, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) own guidance shows, the virus is again spreading through communities. Case counts are 146 percent of what they were two weeks ago as of Thursday, according to The New York Times. High case counts, experts say, are largely due to the highly transmissible Delta variant.

Politicians and political figures have called for the moratorium to be extended. “I urge the Biden Administration to extend the CDC’s eviction moratorium. It is reckless not to extend the deadline when rental assistance funds have not gone out fast enough to protect people. Eviction filings have already spiked in anticipation of the moratorium being lifted,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter.

“Poverty is a policy choice. We chose to prevent it during the pandemic and it worked,” said Julián Castro, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary under Barack Obama, referring to a recent study finding that the COVID stimulus is expected to fuel a record reduction in poverty in the U.S. “We can’t let up now. We must extend the moratorium on evictions and keep people from being kicked out of their homes.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 29, 2021

GOP’s Kinzinger Tells CNN “Nobody Actually Believes the Election Was Stolen”

Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election was once a fringe idea. It was thought up by Trump and his team to throw the election into chaos and, he hoped, keep Trump in power, no matter the election results.

Republicans in Congress didn’t have to follow suit, but they did and have been repeating the lies about the election for months. Even after their lives were put in danger on January 6 by an angry mob of Trump hooligans, 147 of them voted to overturn the election results. Republicans at the state level, meanwhile, have now passed 30 laws to restrict voting based on the lies about “voter fraud.”

This is all despite the fact that, evidently, Republican lawmakers don’t even believe in the Big Lie. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) said on CNN on Wednesday that nearly all of his colleagues in Congress don’t actually believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election — but they repeat the lie anyway.

“Save one or two maybe out here, nobody — and I think it’s very important to repeat — nobody actually believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump, but a lot of them are happy to go out and say it was,” Kinzinger told Wolf Blitzer.

Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the House committee to investigate January 6, also said that Republican colleagues are quietly supportive of his work on the committee. “There is a lot of people, you know, that come up and say it. And it’s not any of them that go on TV and spout the Big Lie and then say it. It’s the ones that stay more quiet that I think appreciate the stand,” he said. “But it’s a lot.”

Most observers would have a hard time believing that Republicans who don’t stand behind the Big Lie are actually the silent majority in Congress. GOP members have been repeating the lie for months and have even convinced their voter base that the election was stolen, even if they claim in private that they don’t believe it themselves. They had even voted to oust the other Republican on the January 6 committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), from party leadership back in May for not repeating Trump’s lie.

Kinzinger and Cheney aren’t angels. They are, as William Pitt recently wrote for Truthout, “hardcore House Republicans” that count as moderates only because they reject the Big Lie — a very low bar. “At first blush, the inclusion of Cheney and Kinzinger would seem to represent a giant step back” because of their heinous views on LGBTQ rights, health care and the forever wars in the Middle East, Pitt wrote.

But the party as a whole has become so extreme that the two seem like middle-of-the-road legislators. The drama stirred by the party over the January 6 committee did even more to exaggerate that stance.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) had raised a stink over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) rejection of his picks, Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Indiana), from the January 6 committee. He called the process a “sham” and said that the Republican Party would not take part, making it seem as though the entire caucus was opposed to the process.

As Kinzinger has said, however, this is clearly not the case. Though many Trump-allied Republicans downplay the attack today, it would appear that many of them are still alarmed about the severity of the attack, even if they won’t admit it.

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia), for instance, has referred to the attack as a “normal tourist visit,” a comparison that he still stands by today. But photos from the day show him and fellow lawmakers barricading the door of the House chamber, suggesting that even he believed it was anything but normal six months ago.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), who had told the Trump mob to “start taking down names and kicking ass” before they attacked the Capitol, recently admitted to Slate that he was warned of the risks of the day and wore body armor to protect himself. Still, he thinks that the January 6 committee isn’t necessary and the conservative attack to reinstate Trump as president despite the will of over 81 million voters would be somehow more politicized than it already has been because of the hearings.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 29, 2021

Progressives Reject Watered Down Reconciliation Bill in Rebuttal to Sinema

After Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) threw a bomb into the Democrats’ plan to pass a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, progressives are fighting back, saying that they won’t accept a bill that doesn’t include and sufficiently address their priorities.

“Progressives have been clear from the beginning: a small and narrow bipartisan infrastructure bill does not have a path forward in the House of Representatives unless it has a reconciliation package, with our priorities, alongside it,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus leader Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) in a statement on Wednesday.

Sinema said on Wednesday that she doesn’t support a $3.5 trillion bill and said she’d work in the coming months to negotiate the bill. But Democrats had wanted to pass the reconciliation bill in tandem with the bipartisan infrastructure bill before the Senate went into recess in early August, so Sinema’s opposition to the $3.5 trillion proposal as it’s written throws the Democrats’ plan for a loop.

The Arizona senator said that she would vote to adopt the budget resolution, which is the first step to getting the reconciliation bill passed. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who has led the reconciliation bill effort, said Wednesday that the Senate has the required 50 votes needed to adopt the resolution.

There’s no guarantee, however, that the bill will pass the whole chamber from there as it is — and, with House progressives standing against watering down the bill, there’s no guarantee it will pass at all if Sinema is successful in shrinking it. The potential blocking of the reconciliation package also means that the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed a cloture vote Wednesday night, might be in jeopardy as well.

“The votes of Congressional Progressive Caucus members are not guaranteed on any bipartisan package until we examine the details, and until the reconciliation bill is agreed to and passed with our priorities sufficiently funded,” Jayapal said. “The investments we identified months ago are long-standing Democratic priorities, including affordable housing, Medicare expansion, strengthening the care economy, climate action, and a roadmap to citizenship.”

The reconciliation bill in its current form contains proposals to address all of these things. Sanders has said that though the bill is a step down from the $6 trillion figure he had originally proposed, the $3.5 trillion bill still contains everything he wants, just for a shorter period of time. Indeed, $3.5 trillion was already a compromise for progressives, many of whom stood behind a $10 trillion infrastructure and climate bill earlier this year.

Members of Congress like Representatives Mondaire Jones (D-New York) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) expressed frustration and threatened to pull their support for the bills on Wednesday. “Without a reconciliation package that meets this moment, I’m a no on this bipartisan deal,” Jones said on Twitter.

Ocasio-Cortez issued a scathing statement responding to Sinema’s announcement, saying “Good luck tanking your own party’s investment on childcare, climate action, and infrastructure while presuming you’ll survive a 3 vote House margin.”

Ocasio-Cortez also pointed out that the bipartisan infrastructure agreement was formed by all white senators. “A lot of times, ‘bipartisan agreements’ are just as defined by who people in power agree to exclude than include,” she wrote.

This isn’t the first time progressives have made threats to pull their support for the infrastructure and reconciliation bills. They have been emphasizing for months that they would not support a bill without provisions to address the climate crisis, for instance. They have said that, not only is now perhaps the only time President Joe Biden will get to massively cut emissions, but it’s also an opportunity to demonstrate to potential midterm voters that Democrats deserve to keep their majority in Congress.

But the White House is evidently celebrating the bipartisan infrastructure bill anyway, despite the fact that it’s only about a quarter of the size of Biden’s original proposal and excludes vital provisions on climate and raising taxes on wealthy people and corporations to fund the bill.

While Biden took a victory lap touting the infrastructure bill Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called the items cut out of the infrastructure bill “shiny objects.” But as even just the past weeks have demonstrated, action on climate is anything but trivial, which is why Democrats and progressives have been insistent on keeping addressing climate issues in the bipartisan deal.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 28, 2021

Sinema Slammed for Opposing $3.5T Bill: “We Didn’t Elect Sinema as President”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) has once again thrown a major wrench into Democrats’ plans, this time announcing her opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill that her party was planning to pass to widen the safety net for struggling Americans as the nation battles the pandemic.

Sinema told the Arizona Republic on Wednesday that “I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion — and in the coming months, I will work in good faith to develop this legislation.” Her statement seems to ignore the fact that Democrats and Democratic leadership have largely united in support of the bill and have emphasized many times over recent weeks that they plan to pass the bill before the Senate goes into recess in August.

Senate Democrats need all 50 caucus members to vote for the bill to pass it via budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority vote to pass legislation. The reconciliation bill contains long-vaunted goals like expanding Medicare to include vision and dental coverage, provisions to combat the climate crisis, proposals to help strengthen unions and the working class, and a tax hike on corporations and the wealthy.

The senator also said in the statement that she will support beginning the reconciliation process, meaning that Democrats could still move both bills together. But her opposition to the price tag is highly likely to complicate matters, as Democrats have indicated that they are all-or-nothing on the reconciliation bill. The $3.5 trillion figure that she evidently thinks is too high is already a compromise for progressive members of Congress, who wanted something closer to $6 trillion.

Democrats are opposed to the bipartisan infrastructure plan on its own. House Transportation Committee Chair Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) called it “crap” in a closed-door meeting Tuesday, criticizing the White House and Sinema, who he referred to as a Republican.

Some progressives have already expressed opposition to voting for the infrastructure bill if the reconciliation bill is whittled down. “Without a reconciliation package that meets this moment, I’m a no on this bipartisan [infrastructure] deal,” wrote Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-New York).

Sinema’s opposition also throws into question the plan to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill that she helped negotiate. Democrats have insisted that they won’t pass the infrastructure bill unless the reconciliation package passes alongside it. This means that Sinema may have just sunk — or, at the very least, delayed — both bills.

The Arizona senator’s announcement frustrated progressives and Democrats alike, many of whom have been hinging their hopes to pass vital legislation through the reconciliation bill. Sinema has gained a reputation among progressives for blocking Democratic goals with her staunch support of the filibuster and opposition to crucial proposals like the $15 federal minimum wage.

“Time for the White House to play hardball. We didn’t elect Sinema as President and we won’t let her obstruction put a Republican in the Oval Office in 2024. It’s the reconciliation bill or GOP controlling every level of government again, period,” said Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) on Twitter.

“Good luck tanking your own party’s investment on childcare, climate action, and infrastructure while presuming you’ll survive a 3 vote House margin – especially after choosing to exclude members of color from negotiations and calling that a “bipartisan accomplishment,’” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), referring to the fact that the bipartisan group of centrists negotiating the infrastructure bill are all white.

Sinema’s announcement is also likely to draw ire from her constituents. Recent polls have found that Sinema’s favorability is tanking among Arizona Democrats, setting her up for a potential primary challenge. But she’s not up for re-election until 2024, leaving plenty of time for obstruction — or perhaps reformation and a return to form.

Sinema seems not to care that her own state is flooding, the west is burning, and infrastructure around the country is crumbling. Sinema is more interested in gaining GOP friends and blocking much needed resources, than fighting for her residents’ future. https://t.co/TfSc0uoY1j pic.twitter.com/nTFC2lizfK

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) July 28, 2021

The Arizona senator’s announcement comes as the bipartisan group of senators, of which Sinema is a member, announced Wednesday that they have finalized negotiations on the infrastructure bill. The bill, which is smaller than the previous draft, could advance to debate on the Senate floor as soon as Wednesday, though Sinema’s announcement calls that into question.

The bill includes $550 billion in new spending, $29 billion smaller than the previous draft of the bill and about $1.7 trillion less than President Joe Biden’s original proposal of $2.25 trillion. The final text of the agreement has yet to be released, but it includes spending for improving the country’s roads, highways, bridges, rails and internet infrastructure.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has said that the bill could come to a second cloture vote as early as Wednesday night. The first vote to advance the bill last week failed, with Republicans uniting against it.

But it’s unclear whether or not the bill has enough Republican votes to pass. Politico reports that the bill appears to only have six confirmed GOP votes as of Wednesday afternoon, and the legislation needs 10 Republicans and all Democrats on board to advance to debate on the floor. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he believes the bill has the votes, but it remains to be seen if the vote pans out that way.

After Sinema’s statement, it’s also unclear if the bill will have enough Democrats to pass as well. Schumer was planning to advance both bills soon, and though Sinema may vote to begin the process, her opposition means that the reconciliation bill would not be any closer to passing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has emphasized that she won’t bring the infrastructure bill to a vote until the reconciliation bill has passed the Senate.

Aside from Sinema and the Democrats, there are few practical reasons for Republicans to block the bill. After chipping away at the bill for months, they have arguably won more in the negotiations than the Democrats have. They have not only gotten the infrastructure spending chipped down to nearly a quarter of its original value, but they — alongside centrist Democrats — have gotten Biden’s American Families Plan thrown out of bipartisan consideration entirely.

Democrats and progressives have said in recent weeks that Republicans may have been angling, through the months of negotiations, to simply delay the bill. In the process, then, they could water it down and politicize the issue, only to pull their support for it at the last minute.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 28, 2021

Former Oregon GOP Rep. Pleads Guilty to Letting Violent Mob Into State Capitol

Former Oregon Republican state Rep. Mike Nearman has pleaded guilty to official misconduct after he let a violent far right mob into the state Capitol late last year.

Nearman must now pay a $2,700 fine, perform 80 hours of community service and is banned from entering the state Capitol grounds for 18 months. The fine is meant to pay for damages done to the building. The Republican was expelled from office in June for allowing the mob into the state Capitol.

But, as The Washington Post points out, Nearman said after his sentencing on a conservative radio show that he doesn’t think that he did anything wrong that day, despite having pleaded guilty. “I don’t think I committed a crime, and I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said.

The statement is clearly confounding after Nearman’s guilty plea earlier that day, and the video footage of Nearman allowing the QAnon-affiliated supporters into the building is clear cut and damning. Though the former lawmaker said on the radio show that he pleaded guilty in order to avoid a long and expensive court battle, his motivations for denying fault may have more to do with his political career than legal consequences he might face.

In court, Nearman revealed his true intentions for letting the mob into the building: he told the judge that he believed it “would make me appear favorable to certain citizen groups,” reports The Oregonian. Those groups, presumably, would be the QAnon mob and other far right conspiracy peddlers who were behind the protests that day.

The group had been outside the Oregon Capitol in December protesting coronavirus restrictions that barred the public from entering the building. Some of the individuals were armed, and they had wanted to occupy the Capitol.

After Nearman opened the door to the mob, they clashed with police, trying to shove their way in and using bear spray against the officers. Lawmakers from both parties condemned Nearman’s actions when voting to expel him.

“The facts are clear that Mr. Nearman unapologetically coordinated and planned a breach of the Oregon state Capitol,” Oregon Democrat and House Speaker Tina Kotek said. “His actions were blatant and deliberate, and he has shown no remorse for jeopardizing the safety of every person in the Capitol that day.”

The Republican leader of the House agreed, saying that there could “easily have been a death on that day.” Nearman was expelled 59 to 1, with Nearman being the only opposing vote.

The facts of Nearman’s case echo that of January 6, when a violent Donald Trump-supporting mob shoved and fought their way into the U.S. Capitol. Then, too, the mob chanted conspiracy theories fueled by Trump and the far right, clashed with police and called Black officers racial slurs. The January 6 attack happened just over two weeks after Nearman let the far right mob into the Oregon Capitol.

The judge in Nearman’s case said that she was listening to testimony from Capitol Police officers on her way to the courthouse on Tuesday. Officers testified in front of the House committee to investigate the January 6 attack. They expressed anger that Republicans like Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia) — who said, and still defends, his statement that the attack was a “normal tourist visit” — continue to deny the severity of the attack.

This, again, is similar to Nearman stating that he didn’t believe he did anything wrong. And the congressional Republicans’ motivations for denying the gravity of the attack and the subsequent deaths are likely similar to Nearman’s: gain support with far right QAnon and conspiracy theory believers who want the violence downplayed, perhaps so they can do it again.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 28, 2021

Warren, Schumer & Pressley Urge Biden: Pause Student Loan Payments Until March

Democrats on Tuesday renewed their call for President Joe Biden to extend the student loan debt pause and make good on his campaign promises to cancel student debt.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) held a press conference urging Biden to extend the student debt pause once more. The pause is currently set to end at the end of September.

“We’re here today to call on President Biden to extend the pause on student loan payments, which right now is set to expire in September,” Schumer said. “It’s proven to be one of the most effective steps that the government has taken to help Americans get through the health and economic crises created by COVID-19.”

Schumer said making student debtors pay their loans back now, as the nation is still undergoing the pandemic, is “harsh, unfair and, in many instances, would be cruel.”

The lawmakers also called on Biden to cancel up to $50,000 of student debt for every borrower. Progressive lawmakers and advocates have been campaigning for Biden to cancel student debt since before he took office, but he has so far failed to do so, despite promising on the campaign trail that he would cancel up to $10,000 of debt.

This has frustrated progressives and Democrats who say that Biden could cancel student loan debt with “a stroke of a pen.” Though his chief of staff hinted earlier this year that he was exploring the possibility of cancelling even up to $50,000 of debt, as progressives have urged, the president has yet to act on the proposal.

This week’s effort to influence Biden is one of a series of attempts by Democrats to get the president to take action on student debt. Last month, Schumer, Warren and Pressley, along with nearly 60 other colleagues, signed a letter urging Biden to extend the pause. In the letter, Warren and colleagues urged Biden to extend the pause until March 31 of next year or whenever the economy reaches pre-pandemic levels, whichever is longer.

Schumer said on Tuesday that the student debt pause has demonstrated the importance of student loan cancellation. “We’ve heard about how being saddled with this debt has affected millions of Americans’ lives and so many choices that they’d like to make,” he said. “They’re not able to pursue the career they want. They’re putting off getting married and starting a family. They aren’t able to open a business, buy a house, buy a car, which many of them need to get to work.”

“We know how much of a difference extending the pause makes,” Schumer continued. “Well, ten times over cancelling $50,000 in debt would be even more important and helpful” to help revive the economy and address racial disparities in student loan burdens. As the lawmakers have pointed out before, student debt disproportionately affects Black people and other groups like LGBTQ people.

Warren pointed out that people who never graduated college but still carry student debt will especially be affected if student loan payments are reinstated. She pointed to a recent Pew study, which found that two-thirds of borrowers have said that it will be difficult for them to begin payments on student loans again if they were to restart soon.

Student debt has risen precipitously over the past decades. In 2004, borrowers collectively owed $250 billion; now, borrowers owe about $1.5 trillion. That’s $1.5 trillion not in the pockets of the people with debt — about one in eight Americans.

“These people live with a sword over their heads, and every day that goes by, that sword draws a little closer,” Warren said. The Massachusetts lawmaker has been calling for months for Biden and the Education Department to give relief to borrowers, sending letters to student loan servicers and the Education Department requesting information on how borrowers are affected by loans.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 27, 2021

Nina Turner Opponent Facing Potential Ethics Probe for $17 Million in Contracts

Shontel Brown, who is running against progressive Nina Turner in the Democratic primary race for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District, may be under an ethics probe by the state of Ohio for contracts she voted to award to her partner.

Brown, the Cuyahoga County Democratic Chair and city council member, had voted in 2017 to award Cleveland contractor Perk with a series of contracts totaling $17 million, The Intercept found. Her partner, Mark Perkins, has close ties to Perk. Brown’s campaign has received $13,000 in donations from Perkins’s family and the Cifani family, who own Perk.

Now, The Daily Poster has found that Brown may be under an ethics investigation by the state of Ohio for the contracts. The publication reviewed emails that showed that the Ohio state auditor’s office has reviewed The Intercept’s findings and has referred them to the state ethics commission.

The establishment-backed candidate’s votes to award the contract were despite the fact that she had pledged to “recuse herself from county contracts with ties to Mark Perkins as necessary” in 2014, The Intercept pointed out. Perkins and Brown were engaged at one point and public records show that they have shared addresses.

Perkins often works with Perk through his company, McTech. Perkins’s uncle had founded Perk, and other members of his family own businesses that regularly work with Perk.

The revelations come just a week before the special election, and come amid a fierce campaign by establishment Democrats against Turner, a progressive and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) surrogate. Turner is supportive of progressive proposals like Medicare for All and has been welcomed with open arms by progressives in Congress, gaining the support of people like Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

Brown, meanwhile, has the backing of Democrats like Hillary Clinton and House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-South Carolina). Her campaign has also been helped along by Third Way, a Wall-Street funded Democratic think tank known for attacking progressives, which spent $250,000 on ads opposing Turner last week.

Other outside forces have also come to Brown’s aid in her attempt to defeat Turner. A pro-Israel PAC has spent $738,000 opposing Turner and $203,000 supporting Brown. They join a coterie of corporate lobbyists who have also held fundraisers for Brown.

The amount of money being poured into the primary campaign from monied interests shows the establishment’s fear of Turner being elected. Polling shows Turner ahead of Brown, and the progressive has built a name for herself among the left.

But, as Normon Solomon pointed out in Salon, figures like Clyburn endorsing Brown shows “high-ranking Democrats are more determined than ever to keep Turner out of Congress if they possibly can.”

Progressives have drawn parallels between the establishment’s determination to get Brown rather than Turner elected and the recent fervor among establishment Democrats to crush Buffalo mayoral candidate India Walton, an avowed socialist who defeated the incumbent Democratic mayor last month. In Buffalo, establishment Democrats have been fearmongering about Walton’s politics, resorting to McCarthyist Red Scare tactics.

This week, the Buffalo Common Council, made up of nine Democrats, has begun exploring the possibility of doing away with the office of mayor in city government. It appears that they are making such a drastic move just to avoid having a socialist mayor, echoing the extreme election tactics of Republicans around the country.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 27, 2021

Report: Real Estate Groups Paid GOP Lawmakers Huge Sums to Reinstate Evictions

As the national eviction moratorium, originally created for the pandemic, is set to end on July 31, a new report finds that the real estate industry has been lobbying for federal regulators to end the policy for months.

The report by Accountable.US, which calls itself a government corruption watchdog group, finds that Senators Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania), who both raised objections to the eviction moratorium as early as December of last year, have pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars each from real estate groups. Crapo has taken nearly $281,000 and Toomey $183,000.

Real estate groups have filed lawsuits in courts across the country, including the Supreme Court, trying to get the eviction moratorium struck down. Meanwhile, the influential National Association of Realtors has lobbied across Washington to get the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) moratorium ended.

This aggressive lobbying comes despite the fact that top corporate rental companies have reported stable or good performance in the first quarter of 2021, the report finds, with many of them reporting “solid” finances. The finding suggests that, despite the heavy lobbying, the ability to evict tenants isn’t necessary for these companies to profit.

“Even during a pandemic and severe economic downturn, the real estate industry still managed to post strong profits as families in every corner of the country battled homelessness,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, in a statement.

“To make matters worse, while many landlords continued to thrive, they fought tooth and nail to prematurely end the CDC’s eviction moratorium and kick millions of Americans out of their homes amid a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic,” Herrig continued, saying that it’s crucial for lawmakers to pass housing aid.

President Joe Biden had extended the eviction moratorium last month but pledged that it would be the last month that the moratorium would be in place. Advocates praised the temporary extension, but have warned that it won’t be enough to stymie an eviction wave as the country still battles the COVID pandemic.

Democrats had sent a letter to Biden asking him to extend the moratorium before the announcement, saying, “By extending the moratorium and incorporating these critical improvements to protect vulnerable renters, we can work to curtail the eviction crisis disproportionately impacting our communities of color.”

The Biden administration has estimated that the eviction moratorium has prevented 1.55 million evictions, though that figure could be higher as over 8 million people have reported falling behind on rent during the pandemic, according to the Census Bureau.

In a hearing held by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis on landlord abuses and evictions, Jim Baker, the director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, pointed out that many landlords have been filing to evict their tenants despite the ban. “Since last September, some of the world’s largest asset managers that manage trillions of dollars have filed to evict residents,” Baker said.

“While many renters have faced dramatic hardships during the pandemic, many corporate landlords have done extremely well and are growing and buying more houses,” said Baker. Despite that, many corporate landlords bankrolled by large finance firms have filed thousands of eviction actions, he said.

Indeed, the eviction moratorium was put in place to shield the country as millions lost their jobs and were at threat of experiencing homelessness and becoming even more susceptible to the virus if the moratorium wasn’t in place. A recent report by Pew found that the pandemic caused twice as many renters to fall behind on rent payments than usual.

Advocates say that now is a terrible time to lift the moratorium as states are rushing to distribute millions in rental assistance that has yet to go out to renters. The pandemic is still ongoing, and many of the people most at risk of being evicted are also most susceptible to dying due to the virus.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 27, 2021

AOC Blasts White House Suggestion People Can “Out-Organize” Voter Suppression

As Republicans have for months swept the country with laws aimed at suppressing voters, the White House has taken a relatively soft stance on combating such efforts. In response, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) emphasized on Monday that now is the time to “fight like hell” for democracy.

A New York Times report last week found that the attitude surrounding voter suppression laws in the White House is that it’s possible to overcome the Republican efforts to get less people to vote. “In private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders,” the Times wrote, “White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression,’ according to multiple people familiar with the conversations.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded, saying in a tweet that “Communities cannot ‘out-organize’ voter suppression when those they organize to elect won’t protect the vote. And even if they DO out-organize, the ground is being set to overturn results.”

The reported stance within the White House frustrated progressives, Democrats and political wonks who pointed out that it is, indeed, impossible to “out-organize” voter suppression. “[L]et’s not forget that the Republicans’ anti-election campaign isn’t based on temporary fixes: these are new, permanent, state-level laws that will remain on the books indefinitely. If the plan is for Democrats to ‘out-organize’ their GOP opponents forever, it leaves Republicans with an even greater built-in electoral advantage,” MSNBC’s Steve Benen wrote.

Instead, the answer is for Democrats to pass voting rights reform, advocates argue. “The time to fight like hell for democracy is right now. We may not get another chance,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, promoting H.R.1, the For the People Act, at the end of the tweet.

Democrats have a plan to combat Republican voter suppression in the form of the For the People Act, a sweeping elections bill aimed at making elections more fair and transparent, which would walk back many of the voter-suppression measures that Republicans have been passing at the state level. But there’s virtually no chance for it to pass the filibuster in the Senate since it’s Republicans who are leading the charge on the voter suppression efforts to begin with.

Joe Biden and the White House have earned the chagrin of progressives and Democrats with their soft support of voting rights. The White House has launched a campaign to advocate for voting rights, but Biden defended the filibuster last week even after months of pressure from the left to end the archaic practice. He also said that Republicans “know better” than to block voting, somehow ignoring the stance that has developed on the right in regards to elections and the ability to vote over the past year or so.

Biden and people like Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) wanting to not do away with the filibuster in its current form, however, may prove to be a losing strategy for them — literally.

Republicans have all but said that they’re passing voter suppression bills so that they never lose an election again. Some of the voter suppression bills go so far as to allow partisan officials to overturn election results entirely and effectively throw out millions of votes, as alluded to by Ocasio-Cortez.

Even more concerning is the fact that, with the latest redistricting process underway, the GOP is poised to steal even more districts than they have before. In 2010, during the last round of redistricting, Republicans pulled “the most audacious political heist of modern times” through aggressive gerrymandering efforts, as author David Daley wrote. They had launched a covert campaign called “REDMAP” to take as many districts as possible through the process.

Now, Republicans are no doubt preparing to gerrymander again, but even more forcefully this time. The Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that federal courts had virtually no legal recourse to stop gerrymandering, paving the way for what experts say might be the worst, most partisan gerrymandering the country has ever seen.

“I’m very worried that we’ll have several states, important states, with among the worst gerrymanders in American history,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who studies redistricting, told The Guardian. “That’s not good for democracy in those states.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 26, 2021

Trump Calls Republicans “Weak Fools and Losers” For Negotiating Infrastructure

As Republicans scuffled with Democrats and the White House over the massively watered-down bipartisan infrastructure package on Monday, former President Donald Trump issued a statement pressuring the GOP to drop the negotiations entirely.

Trump said that the negotiations make the Republicans look weak and criticized Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) for capitulating to Democrats’ demands on the infrastructure bill, even though McConnell isn’t part of the bipartisan group forming the package. It’s McConnell, too, who has been unforgivingly critical of the Democrats’ proposals on infrastructure.

The former president also said that the Republicans should wait until 2022 to pass an infrastructure package, when he thinks “proper election results” — Republican-favoring results — could come in.

“Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise, and regain a strong negotiating stance,” Trump said. “Republicans, don’t let the Radical Left play you for weak fools and losers!”

Trump’s statement comes as Republican senators are blaming Democrats for yet another delay in the process, despite the fact that it’s the GOP that has dragged the infrastructure talks on for months. The statement from the former president, not known to mince words as much as his Republican colleagues, is also a show of the Republican mindset on the bill.

President Joe Biden and Democrats have already agreed to massive cuts to the infrastructure bill. The topline new spending has come down from $4 trillion to $579 billion, shedding many of the climate and socioeconomic measures from Biden’s original proposal along the way. Republicans have also had their way with the pay-fors on the bill, successfully cutting provisions to tax corporations and the wealthy and even nixing a proposal to fund the Internal Revenue Service to enforce existing tax laws on the rich.

For Republicans, cutting nearly all of the transformative measures from the bill evidently isn’t enough. Democrats sent Republicans an offer on Sunday to wrap up outstanding disagreements on the bill, which Republicans not only rejected but also branded as an insult, saying that the items on the Democrats’ offer were already decided.

The debacle is laying bare what appears to be the Republican strategy on negotiating for the bill, and elsewhere: Force Democrats to capitulate, or else threaten to withdraw GOP support altogether, thus imperiling the passage of the bill itself. It’s also possible that the Republicans, forever dangling the bipartisanship carrot in front of Democrats, were always planning to make good on their threats to kill the legislation in the end and make Democrats look weak.

Now Trump telling Republicans to withdraw their support reinforces that message. Republicans have largely gotten everything they wanted; the total figure for new spending in the bipartisan bill, $579 billion, is far closer to the GOP-only infrastructure offer of $257 billion from May, than Biden’s original proposal of $2.25 trillion.

Allowing Republicans to delay and weaken the bill over the course of several months is precisely what progressives were warning against early in the process for the bill. In May, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) warned the White House against negotiating with the Republicans, saying, “the bottom line is the American people want results.”

The public doesn’t always consider whether or not a bill was bipartisan when they see tangible positive results, Sanders said. “Frankly, when people got a, you know, $1,400 check or $5,600 check for their family, they didn’t say, ‘Oh, I can’t cash this check because it was done without any Republican votes,’” said the senator, referring to the direct relief payments passed in the American Rescue package.

Sanders warned later that month that Democrats could lose Congress in the midterm elections if they push too hard for bipartisanship with the party that has a stated disinterest in the practice. Progressives in Congress also put pressure on the White House to stop giving in to Republican demands on infrastructure, saying that they would withdraw their support for the bill if it omitted crucial proposals to address the climate crisis.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 26, 2021

Michigan Republicans Awarded Themselves COVID Money Meant for Frontline Workers

After Republican officials in Michigan voted to award themselves bonuses totaling $65,000 from federal COVID relief funds set aside for frontline workers, they have vowed to return the money — but only after public outcry and the filing of a lawsuit against them.

Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in Shiawassee county voted 6-0 to give themselves a significant portion of the $557,000 allotted to 250 county employees as hazard pay for working through the pandemic. MLive reports that they are the only county to have voted to do so.

While county employees received $1,000 to $2,000 for their work, the commissioners voted to give themselves much more. Commission chairman Jeremy Root received $25,000 last week. Two commissioners received $10,000, while others got $5,000 each.

The commissioners, all Republicans, voted to award higher sums to other top Republican officials as well — like Sheriff Brian BeGole, who received $25,000.

Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Michigan) criticized the commissioners’ vote. A spokesperson for Kildee told ABC12 that the commissioners decided “to benefit themselves instead of the community.”

“American Rescue Plan dollars were intended to help frontline workers and families impacted by the pandemic, not elected officials,” Kildee said. While health department officials received $2,500 and other lower-level staff received only $1,000, the commissioners awarded themselves 10 times those amounts.

One Michigan resident has sued the officials, accusing them of violating the law by holding a “secret private meeting” in which they voted on the amounts that they were going to pocket “outside the view of the public.” Meanwhile, other county employees only received an average of $2,148 for their work, the lawsuit says.

The county prosecutor, Scott Koerner, also pushed back on the officials’ vote, saying that he believed the bonuses were illegal. The commissioners had voted to give Koerner $12,500.

It’s likely that the bonuses were, indeed, given out in violation of guidelines for the funds from the federal government. A Justice Department spokesperson told MLive that “[American Rescue Plan] dollars used for hazard pay should prioritize low-income workers who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and essential workers who have faced the greatest risk of exposure,” MLive wrote.

The GOP commissioners pushed back on the criticism. “Since these payments were made, confusion about the nature of these funds has run rampant,” they said in a statement. They wrote that they “deeply regret that this gesture has been misinterpreted, and have unanimously decided to voluntarily return the funds to the county, pending additional guidance from the state of Michigan.”

One of the commissioners, Marlene Webster, pushed back on the statement that the public “misinterpreted” the bonuses. Webster wrote in a Facebook post — where she also insisted that she didn’t realize she was voting for a bonus for herself — that the statement issued by the board of commissioners is “an insult to the citizens of Shiawassee county.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 26, 2021

Republicans Jeopardize Monday’s Infrastructure Deadline With More Demands

Republicans have rejected a Democratic offer to wrap up outstanding final details on the bipartisan infrastructure package, imperiling promises from the Senate group to have the bill finished by Monday. This week is crucial for moving ahead on the bill, but there are still outstanding issues over things like funding for mass transit.

Republicans in the bipartisan group objected to Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) filing to advance the bill last week, saying that the bill would be ready by Monday. Every Republican in the Senate voted against advancing the bill, making it fall far short of the 60 votes it needed to advance to debate on the floor.

Now, Monday has arrived, and there are still multiple issues that have yet to be hammered out within the group — and the two parties can’t even agree on which issues are still outstanding.

“The ‘global offer’ we received from the White House and Chuck Schumer was discouraging since it attempts to reopen numerous issues the bipartisan group had already agreed to,” a GOP source told CNN. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said over the weekend that the outstanding issue was on funding for mass transit on the Republican side.

But, according to Democrats familiar with the negotiations, there are more unresolved issues than just mass transit. Funding for crucial infrastructure like highways, water and broadband are still in question. There’s also still disagreement in terms of how much of the leftover COVID stimulus funds can be used to pay for the bill and on a rule called the Davis-Bacon, which says that federal contractors can’t pay employees less than the “prevailing wage” for construction projects.

Senators were optimistic over the weekend that it can be done soon. “We’re down to the last couple of items, and I think you’re going to see a bill Monday afternoon,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) said on Sunday on Fox News. With Republicans rejecting the Democrats’ last offer, that deadline could very well be missed.

If the senators come to an agreement on the bill soon, then Schumer could call a vote to advance the bill again this week. If it fails to garner the required votes, he’ll have to start the process of filing for cloture all over again, which could delay the bill even further.

Time is of the essence as the Senate is set to leave for recess in two weeks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) emphasized again over the weekend that she wants the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill to be passed with the infrastructure bill, so this week is crucial for getting the bills moving.

Not only are Republicans in disagreement over what’s left to negotiate, they’ve also expressed frustration with Democrats over the transit issue. They claim to have made fair offers to Democrats on transit, and have threatened to withdraw their support unless the Democrats capitulate to their offers. “Unless Democrats show more flexibility, this deal is unlikely to happen,” a GOP source told Politico.

It isn’t much of a surprise that Republicans again seem to be delaying the infrastructure bill. They’ve held up the bill for months in negotiations, and are still unsatisfied with it despite having whittled it down to nearly an eighth of the original size that President Joe Biden had proposed. And, still, they blamed the delay on Monday on Democrats.

“If this is going to be successful, the White House will need to show more flexibility as Republicans have done and listen to the members of the group that produced this framework,” a GOP source told CNN. But the White House has already capitulated to a wide swath of Republican demands, watering the bill down to what it is today.

Instead, it’s Republicans who bear more responsibility for delaying the bill than Democrats. In the first Senate-wide vote on the measure, they had rejected Schumer’s cloture filing last week despite the fact that final details don’t need to be ironed out in order for the bill to advance to debate on the Senate floor, as the majority leader pointed out.

Democrats and progressives have said repeatedly that the months-long delay is a tactic employed by the GOP to polarize and water down Democratic proposals. They point to the example of the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama when Republicans similarly dragged out talks for months only to vote against it anyway. In the process, however, they achieved what they set out to do — politicize and weaken the bill considerably.

“My fear is that we could see a repetition of what we saw with the Affordable Care Act,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) told ABC last week, “where discussions went on and on and on and then never went any place.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 22, 2021

Over 40 Progressive Orgs Unite to Pressure Congress to Pass Pro-Union PRO Act

Union membership has been declining for nearly six decades as conservatives and corporate bosses have chipped away at workers’ rights to collectively bargain. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, aims to fix that — but it’s lying stagnant in Washington, leaving workers in the lurch.

A new coalition of over 40 progressive organizations are aiming to fix that. The group, called the Worker Power Coalition, was launched on Thursday to push Congress to pass the PRO Act. They will focus specifically on pushing Democrats in particular with an ad campaign in states that they say are key to securing a majority on the proposal.

The coalition is made up of influential organizations representing a range of interests. Members of the Worker Power Coalition include political organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, MoveOn and the Working Families Party; climate groups like the Sunrise Movement, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club; and other organizations like Economic Policy Institute. It also has the backing of several major unions like Communications Workers of America and International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT).

Our dignity as workers has been under attack for decades and the pandemic has made that exploitation more clear. That’s why workers across industries are uniting to form the Worker Power Coalition. Learn more at https://t.co/H4oawOBQyL

— PassthePROAct (@PassthePROAct) July 22, 2021

The proposal has been championed by labor and climate organizers, as well as progressive and Democratic lawmakers, as the most consequential pro-labor legislation of this generation, or perhaps ever in the U.S. The PRO Act would roll back so-called right-to-work laws that hogtie labor unions, create harsher penalties for illegal union-busting efforts and protect contracted workers by allowing them to unionize alongside employees.

However, the bill is currently lying stagnant after having passed the House in March. The Senate filibuster, and a couple of Democratic senators, stand in its way.

Advocates have been able to flip key centrists like Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and, more recently, Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) into supporting the PRO Act. But Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) and Mark Warner (D-Virginia) are still holding out.

The Worker Power Coalition is looking to convince holdouts by running ads in Virginia and Arizona. They’re more generally looking to establish the PRO Act as a major progressive issue and elevate it as a matter of immediate importance.

“The fight to pass the PRO Act isn’t a political issue, it’s an issue of dignity and fairness for the people who spent the last year risking their lives to keep the rest of us safe,” Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said in a statement. Workers like those at Amazon warehouses, for instance, have faced dangerous, terrible working conditions to process packages during the pandemic while also facing fierce union-busting efforts from the corporation.

“The PRO Act sets a new standard of dignity and fairness in the workplace, and helps essential workers meet their basic needs on and off the job — from improving benefits, to protecting women and undocumented workers from abuse at work, to making sure workers can use the bathroom when they need to,” Mitchell continued. “Workers are caring for us like never before, and it’s time Congress started caring for them.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) announced last week that parts of the PRO Act are included in the Democrats’ reconciliation bill. Though advocates cheered its inclusion, it is as yet unclear which parts of the bill are included, whereas the wide breadth of the PRO Act is part of its appeal for labor advocates.

“We applaud Democrats like Senator Sanders, who are fighting to get as much of the PRO Act as possible included in reconciliation,” said Ryan Kekeris, communications director for IUPAT, adding that IUPAT supports passing the entirety of the PRO Act through any means necessary, including abolishing the filibuster.

Polling shows broad support for passing the entirety of the pro-union proposal. A recent poll by Hart Research Associates showed that, in nine key battleground states like Virginia, Arizona and West Virginia, 63 percent of likely voters supported the PRO Act, with 87 percent of Democrats in favor. Even among Republicans, 45 percent are in favor of the legislation with only 40 percent opposed.

“[O]ur allies in the Senate should feel emboldened by polling that shows voters overwhelmingly support penalizing companies when they violate workers rights, whether that’s firing workers who spoke up for safer working conditions during the pandemic, forcing workers to attend captive audience meetings, or misclassifying workers as independent contractors to deny them their rights as employees,” Kekeris said. “These abuses must stop.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 22, 2021

Biden Echoes Progressives, Saying Low Wages Are Driving Worker Shortage

At a town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Wednesday night, President Joe Biden appeared to side with progressives on the issue of the so-called worker shortage sweeping the country, saying that it’s a low-wage issue instead.

When an audience member and restaurant owner asked the president how he plans to incentivize people into returning to work, Biden pointed out that workers have shouldered disproportionate blame for businesses not being able to find workers. He challenged the Republican narrative that people are lazy and would rather collect unemployment than return to work and said that it’s the businesses that must attract the workers with appropriate pay and benefits.

“There’s some evidence that maintaining the ability to continue to … have to pay your rent so you don’t get thrown out and being able to provide” are priorities for people in considering their financial situation, the president said.

He suggested that many people may be shifting industries, saying “I think it really is a matter of people deciding now that they have opportunities to do other things and where there is a shortage of employees, people are looking to make more money and to bargain.”

Biden told the business owner that, if businesses want to attract more employees, they should offer higher pay because people won’t settle for $7 or $8 an hour. “If you make less than 15 bucks an hour working 40 hours a week, you’re living below the poverty level,” the president said. Indeed, studies have shown that even $15 an hour isn’t enough for people to cover basic expenses, especially for families.

The president’s remarks echo what progressives have been saying over the past several months. As many businesses are reopening and rehiring in this stage of the pandemic, business owners and corporations have complained that expanded unemployment benefits are to blame for unfilled job openings, fueling Republican grievances.

But research has shown that many frontline workers are unwilling to work to serve increasingly hostile customers while making low wages, especially while risking exposure to COVID-19 at their workplace or while using public transit. Wages have largely stayed stagnant since before the pandemic, writes the Economic Policy Institute, but with workers having to wade through anti-mask and anti-vaccine customers, “The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.”

As One Fair Wage found in a survey of restaurant workers earlier this year, of restaurant workers who have considered leaving their jobs during the pandemic, an overwhelming majority cite low tips and wages as a reason to leave. The second most common reason for wanting to leave, meanwhile, was fear of COVID.

Restaurant owners, anecdotally, have shown that low wages may be the underlying problem: as The Washington Post reported, when Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor in Pittsburgh posted job openings that paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25, they didn’t get applications for months. But when they raised the starting wage to $15, they got more than 1,000 applications in one week. Restaurant owners across the country, the Post found, have had similar experiences.

Many workers may also be recognizing new opportunities, as Biden suggested, and moving to jobs that have more consistent expectations and hours, even if they don’t pay more.

Progressives lawmakers have pushed back on the argument that the unfilled vacancies are due to unemployment benefits. “We don’t need to end $300 a week in emergency unemployment benefits that workers desperately need. We need to end starvation wages in America,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) in May. “If $300 a week is preventing employers from hiring low-wage workers there’s a simple solution: Raise your wages. Pay decent benefits.”

Biden echoed that sentiment on Wednesday, saying he’s seen “no evidence” that additional unemployment checks are stopping people from working.

Though Biden pushed for $15 an hour wages on Wednesday, however, he did not fall in line with progressive messaging on how to raise the federal minimum wage. Biden insisted that the filibuster in the Senate — currently blocking a wide swath of Democratic priorities like infrastructure, climate and a higher minimum wage — is not only necessary, but somehow is preventing chaos in the Senate.

But the Senate is already in chaos, with every major Democratic proposal being completely held up or blocked outright by Republicans, even when Democrats make major concessions. Luckily for the party, Biden’s approval or disapproval isn’t strictly needed to get rid of the filibuster. Unluckily, Senate Democrats need unity on the subject that they don’t have.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 22, 2021

Sanders Touts Reconciliation Bill With Universal Pre-K and Guaranteed Sick Leave

In a new op-ed, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) touted the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to act on the climate crisis, reform the tax code, and provide support for a struggling working class.

“The biggest win for the working class in generations is within reach,” Sanders wrote about the bill in The Guardian.

With the wide and growing disparities between the lowest earners in the U.S. and the top 1 percent, Sanders emphasized that “now is the time” for the bill. While billionaires are able to exploit tax loopholes and low statutory tax rates to dodge taxes, sometimes entirely, millions of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, the senator pointed out.

Sanders also pointed out that the bill is timely and sorely needed because of the acceleration of the climate crisis. Climate change is largely unmitigated in the U.S. and, even as just the last weeks have shown, it’s already having deadly effects and threatening the fabric of our society. “We must stand up to the greed of the fossil fuel industry, transform our energy system and lead the world in combating climate change,” Sanders said.

The Democrats’ reconciliation bill aims to tackle climate and socioeconomic issues at once. The $3.5 trillion is less than Sanders had originally proposed, but he’s said that it’s still enough to get everything he wants done, just for a shorter length of time. Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) have hailed the bill — if it passses — as the most consequential bill for the working class since the New Deal.

Sanders had a big hand in crafting the bill. It’s because of his original proposal of $6 trillion that the bill is as large and ambitious as it is, Democratic senators have said in praise. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) called him the “human embodiment of shifting the Overton Window” on the reconciliation bill and more.

The Vermont senator wrote that the $3.5 trillion figure was reached after compromise with others in the Democratic caucus and the Budget Committee, which he chairs. He also pointed out that no Republicans will vote for the bill, which is a safe prediction.

The bill, he said, will “end the days of billionaires not paying a nickel in federal income taxes” by raising taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. It’s an opportunity for using hoarded wealth to uplift the middle and lower classes, he wrote, saying “Under this proposal, no family making under $400,000 a year will pay a nickel more in taxes and will, in fact, receive one of the largest tax cuts in American history.”

Meanwhile, the middle and lower classes will receive a wide swath of benefits. The reconciliation bill will further extend $300 a month child tax credits, which is estimated to cut child poverty in half. Under the bill, community college will be free and pre-kindergarten will be available for every child with a universal pre-K program.

The bill takes steps to uplift the working class, Sanders pointed out. It establishes universal paid medical and family leave, “end[ing] the international disgrace of the United States being the only major country on Earth” to not guarantee such benefits. As the senator previously announced, the bill will also include provisions of the much anticipated PRO Act, which contains consequential provisions to make it easier for workers to organize and unionize.

The Democrats’ bill, which they plan to pass with a simple majority in the Senate, will also address the climate crisis with proposals like a Civilian Climate Corps and a clean energy standard; it proposes expansions to Medicare and funding for affordable housing; and opens pathways to citizenship for immigrants.

The pandemic has exaggerated nearly all of the issues that Democrats are aiming to address in the reconciliation bill, but Republicans are against nearly all of its proposals. Many of the provisions in the reconciliation bill are in fact items that GOP members have negotiated out of Joe Biden’s original infrastructure packages.

But there isn’t time to work around Republican objections, Sanders said in the op-ed. “The future of working families is at stake,” he concluded. “The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 21, 2021

McCarthy Pulls Out of Jan. 6 Committee After Pelosi Nixes Trump-Allied Picks

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has withdrawn all five of his picks from the committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The decision comes after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) rejected two of his picks, citing a need to protect the “integrity” of the investigation of the deadly attack.

Pelosi nixed Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Indiana) from the committee on Wednesday. Both representatives had voted against certifying the election results in January directly after Donald Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. They were both also part of a Texas-led lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes from swing states to favor Trump, but was swiftly shot down by the Supreme Court.

“With respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject the recommendations of Representatives Banks and Jordan to the Select Committee,” Pelosi said in a statement, emphasizing the gravity of the attack and its ramifications.

Despite the fact that Pelosi said she would accept McCarthy’s other picks of Rodney Davis (R-Illinois), Kelly Armstrong (R-North Dakota) and Troy Nehls (R-Texas), McCarthy wasn’t pleased.

In a statement, McCarthy called Pelosi’s decision an “egregious abuse of power and will irreparably damage this institution” and called the committee a “sham” even though it has been clear from the start that Pelosi had ultimate say over who was chosen. He said that, unless Pelosi capitulated to his demands and reinstated his picks, the GOP would pull out of the process.

Pelosi hasn’t responded to McCarthy’s move, and the future of the committee is unclear.

McCarthy’s picks for the committee were already causing concern, and showed that “He has zero interest in getting to the bottom of what really happened (and why) when the US Capitol was stormed by rioters convinced by former President Donald Trump that the 2020 election had been stolen from him,” wrote CNN’s Chris Cillizza.

Wednesday’s move to completely boycott the committee even further suggests that McCarthy was never interested in investigating the attack.

It’s possible, too, that gutting the committee is what he’s been angling for all along — after all, Republicans had already rejected a previous bipartisan commission proposal, and McCarthy had threatened Republican members’ committee spots if they joined that earlier version of the group. Plus, McCarthy is likely to be subpoenaed by the group for a phone call he had with Trump just as the mob was breaching the Capitol.

In picking Banks and Jordan, then, McCarthy must have known that he would be raising merited concerns with Pelosi. Especially since, almost immediately after their placement on the committee was made public, the two Republican lawmakers began making statements directly and baselessly implicating Pelosi in helping to prolong the attack on the Capitol.

Jordan suggested on Tuesday that Pelosi may have some responsibility for the magnitude of the attack and law enforcement’s failure to contain the crowd. “There’s one question that needs to be answered, and that’s why wasn’t there proper security presence that day. And that’s a question only the speaker can answer,” he told CNN, alluding to previous baseless allegations he’s made about Pelosi delaying the National Guard’s response to the attack.

Jordan is a close ally of Trump’s who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by the former president in January for “[leading] the effort to confront the impeachment witch hunt.” Jordan had spearheaded the GOP attack on special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into election interference from Russia.

The Ohio lawmaker’s intentions for the committee were also suspect. When asked about his goal for the group, Jordan deflected and took the time to attack Democrats instead on Tuesday. “You know what this is about. This is about going after President Trump. The Democrats don’t want to talk about anything else.”

Banks also implied that Pelosi had something to do with the attack over Twitter on Wednesday, saying “The question that all of us should be asking: what is Speaker Pelosi afraid of?” Like Jordan, Banks also attacked Democrats in a statement about his participation in the committee on Monday night, shortly after the committee picks were announced.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 21, 2021

Bezos’s Space Stunt Got Almost as Much TV Time as Climate Crisis in All of 2020

Broadcast news networks are notoriously bad at covering the climate crisis, dedicating a vanishingly small amount of airtime — year after year — to the grave existential threat despite the many potential stories they could be running about it.

Their neglect of the climate crisis is on stark display in a new statistic: According to Media Matters for America, morning TV shows spent nearly as much time on Jeff Bezos’s space launch on July 20, 2021 as they did on the climate crisis in all of 2020.

The morning shows on broadcast networks combined spent 212 minutes covering Bezos’s space trip just on Tuesday alone, Media Matters researchers found. Meanwhile, in the entirety of last year, the shows spent a combined 267 minutes on the climate crisis.

If it seemed like Bezos got a lot of coverage for his space launch today, he did. Consider this: pic.twitter.com/MHEANb2LQp

— Evlondo Cooper III (@EvlondoCooper) July 20, 2021

Bezos’s space trip was 11 minutes long. By contrast, the climate crisis has been ongoing for decades and daily threatens the fabric of our society and the continued existence of our species, if it continues unabated.

Further, Bezos’s trip to space was largely a PR stunt, meant to garner excitement around the billionaire and his space company while also buying fawning coverage from news outlets. It comes at a time when billionaires have come under increased scrutiny for paying zero or fewer taxes than ordinary working people and progressives put forward the argument that nobody should be allowed to accrue as much wealth as people like the Amazon CEO.

As progressives argue, the space trip was wasteful and almost insulting to the Amazon workers, who, under Bezos, suffer terrible work conditions. “Amazon workers did pay for this — with lower wages, union busting, a frenzied and inhumane workplace, and delivery drivers not having health insurance during a pandemic,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter.

And yet, judging by the amount of coverage that the morning broadcast shows dedicated to the Bezos flight versus the climate crisis, it would almost seem as though they’re of equivalent importance.

In fact, CNN recently bumped climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who was slated to discuss the climate crisis as Death Valley was hitting record high temperatures, in order to cover the other recent billionaire space stunt — businessman Richard Branson’s brief jaunt to the edge of space.

CNN’s decision to bump Hayhoe for Branson’s stunt “shows that cable news, and TV news as a whole, still largely continues to fail at grasping the climate crisis as the existential threat it is,” wrote Earther’s Molly Taft. “Instead, coverage prioritizes entertainment and sensationalism that keeps people watching the commercial breaks.”

What makes it especially frustrating too, Taft writes, is that TV news networks appear to be reaching a breakthrough with covering climate this year. Networks linked recent heat waves in the American West to climate change in 27 percent of segments, Media Matters research showed, and have improved coverage in recent months.

Mentioning the climate crisis in 27 percent of segments on the heat wave is still quite low, especially when researchers have found that it was almost certainly brought on and worsened by climate change.

Indeed, climate advocates have expressed frustration for years that broadcast news as a whole largely ignores the climate crisis. In 2019, according to Media Matters, broadcast news shows dedicated less than 1 percent of their reporting to the climate crisis.

That’s despite the fact that 2019 was a landmark year for the climate crisis as the second warmest year on record at the time. It’s now been bumped to third place, with 2020 tying for first place with 2016. And 2019 was even an improvement on 2018’s coverage, with networks having spent a combined 238 minutes on climate in 2019 versus only 142 minutes the year before.

Media analysts and climate communication researchers argue that broadcast news — and media at large — can make a difference with more urgent and frequent climate coverage. The American public is growing more and more concerned about the climate crisis despite a dearth of coverage from corporate news outlets, and that impact could be even higher if the networks dedicate the time and effort to cover it.

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
July 21, 2021

AOC Calls GOP Refusal to Advance Infrastructure Bill Tactics for “Killing Time”

In March, President Joe Biden introduced an infrastructure bill that was slated to cost about $4 trillion total in new spending. In the intervening months, Republicans and centrist Democrats slowly whittled at that number, and the proposals in the bill. Now, it’s a paltry $579 billion in new spending — and Republicans, they say, still aren’t happy.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) set a procedural vote to advance the bipartisan infrastructure bill for Wednesday, saying that “it’s time to move forward” with the bill. The topline spending number hasn’t changed, and they’ve just been negotiating the details for a month, as Schumer pointed out.

But Republicans, who have stalled the bill with negotiations for months, say that they’ll vote against advancing the bill to debate because (despite months of negotiations) they still need more time.

Evidently, all 50 Senate Republicans are set to reject advancing the bill, which means that even the Republicans who had helped to negotiate the bill in its current form aren’t planning to vote for it. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who is also part of the bipartisan group negotiating the bill, say that the vote should wait until next week, when more details of the bill can be hammered out.

But Schumer disagrees with their reasoning. The vote on Wednesday isn’t whether or not to approve the bill; it’s a vote on whether or not to advance with debate on it. “There’s no reason it should fail,” Schumer told CNN on Tuesday. “What is the reason? They say they need the whole bill text, they haven’t asked for that on bill after bill after bill.”

Meanwhile, one of the major points of contention in the bipartisan negotiations is how to pay for the bill. Republicans have rejected proposal after proposal to pay for the bill, refusing to agree to tax hikes on corporations and the rich and even rejecting modest funding for the Internal Revenue Service to better enforce tax law. Instead, they’ve proposed taxes on the middle and lower classes, which Democrats won’t agree to.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said Wednesday that if Democrats want to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans won’t agree to that either. “I can’t imagine there will be a single Republican voting to raise the debt ceiling after what we’ve been experiencing,” he said.

He added that if Democrats want to raise the debt ceiling — one of their only options left after so many pay-for options have been rejected — they’ll have to pursue it themselves in the reconciliation process.

Even so, if Democrats choose a path to raise the debt ceiling that circumvents Republicans, conservative Democrats like Manchin could stand in their way. Plus, Democrats raising the debt ceiling opens an avenue for the GOP to criticize them for spending, even though they weren’t too concerned about the national debt during the Donald Trump years.

“The leader’s statements on debt ceiling are shameless, cynical and totally political,” Schumer said in reaction to McConnell’s statements. “This debt is Trump debt. It’s COVID debt.”

The takeaway, argue progressives, is that Republicans are dangling their support for the bill in front of Democrats while delaying the bill to further politicize and weaken the proposal. This is similar to what happened to the Affordable Care Act during the Obama administration: Democrats kept making concession after concession to Republicans for the proposal until it was significantly weaker than the original idea. And then, no Republicans voted for it anyway.

There are clear parallels between then and now. Without Republican support for pay-fors or a raising of the debt ceiling for the bill, it’s unclear how it will get passed at all. A stalemate over the debt ceiling could end up leading to yet another government shutdown.

“They’ve been killing time for months and and at this point, I believe it’s starting to get to a point where this bipartisan effort is seeming to serve less on investing in our infrastructure and serving more the end of just delaying action,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s been enough.”

This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.