In their negotiations over the next budget reconciliation bill with conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Senate Democrats are working on two provisions that could help balance the budget for Medicare and close a major Donald Trump-era tax loophole.
On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) released a plan to allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices for the most expensive drugs and cap out-of-pocket costs for recipients at $2,000 a year. It would also place a cap on the amount that drug companies can raise prices annually. The plan reportedly has the support of all 50 Senate Democrats, and is pending review from the Senate parliamentarian.
The new drug price proposal is slightly narrower than last year’s proposal, which also included a plan to cap the cost of insulin at $35. Progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) had hoped to get a major expansion of Medicare, including allowing it to negotiate prices for a wider range of drugs and expanding it to cover dental, hearing and vision, but the plan was watered down thanks to pharmaceutical industry-funded Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona).
Democrats passed a bill introducing the same price cap on insulin earlier this year, but the legislation has stalled in the Senate. Senate Republicans are likely uniformly opposed to the current drug price plan, which Democrats plan to include in a roughly $1 trillion reconciliation bill that can be passed in the Senate through a simple majority vote.
Democratic aides also say, according to the Associated Press, that Senate Democrats are planning to extend the solvency of Medicare. They’re hoping to raise $203 billion to fund the service until 2031. The program is currently set to start running out of funding in 2028.
They’re aiming to extend Medicare’s solvency by closing a tax loophole created by Republicans in 2017 that has allowed wealthy executives to dodge hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, in taxes — including Medicare taxes. The current proposal would make it so that people with incomes higher than $400,000 a year and couples with incomes higher than $500,000 a year would have to pay a 3.8 percent tax on earnings from pass-through businesses, or businesses that pass all of their income onto owners and investors.
Proposals to lower drug prices and expand Medicare are incredibly popular among the electorate. Polling done by Data for Progress last year found that about 83 percent of likely voters support expanding Medicare to include dental, hearing and vision. Other polling, conducted by CBS, found that 88 percent of people support lowering prescription drug prices.
The popularity of the plans could be due to exceptionally high drug prices in the U.S. Last year, a Government Accountability Office report found that, among 20 name brand prescriptions, prices were about four times higher in the U.S. than they were in places like Australia and France, and about 2.5 times higher than in Canada. Meanwhile, the amount the pharmaceutical industry gained in sales from the U.S. was nearly double that of the rest of the world combined in 2020.
The fact that Democrats are drafting the two Medicare provisions is a sign that Manchin may be in favor of the plans, though the lawmaker played a major role in watering down and ultimately killing the party’s reconciliation bill last year. Democrats are hoping the new proposal may also include provisions to address the climate crisis, with as much as $300 billion in clean energy tax incentives.
The day after a horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two adults were killed on Tuesday morning, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) told reporters that he supports passing legislation to reform gun laws in the U.S. — unless doing so will require getting rid of the filibuster.
Manchin has consistently defended the filibuster over the past year and a half, even as it was repeatedly used by Republicans to sabotage the Democratic party’s entire legislative agenda, including the Build Back Better Act.
Shortly after the Uvalde shooting, Manchin expressed dismay that Republicans in the Senate wouldn’t join him and his Democratic colleagues to pass “common sense” gun legislation. For any gun reform bill to pass in the Senate, it would likely require the backing of all 50 Democrats, plus 10 Republicans, without being blocked by the filibuster.
“It makes no sense why we can’t do common sense things to try to prevent some of this from happening. It’s just unbelievable how we got here as a society,” Manchin told reporters.
But the right-wing Democrat continued to defend the filibuster, claiming it is “the only thing that prevents us from total insanity,” despite the fact that Republicans will likely employ the rule to block any proposed gun legislation from passing.
“You know where I stand,” Manchin added, referring to his stance on changing filibuster rules.
Although Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has expressed support for bringing a vote on gun measures to the Senate floor, he told his colleagues on Tuesday not to expect one any time soon, as it would likely be blocked by a Republican filibuster.
Manchin has refused to budge on the filibuster several times since President Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. He has repeatedly expressed his opposition to proposals to change filibuster rules in order to pass legislation that would have blocked Republican state lawmakers from disenfranchising voters.
Democratic insiders have said that Manchin has seemed open to reforming the archaic Senate rule in past negotiations, only to abruptly change his mind soon after.
“You think you’re just about there. You think you’ve got an agreement on most of the things and it’s settling in. And then you come back the next morning and you’re starting from scratch,” a Democratic source said to Axios in January, describing the process as akin to “negotiating via Etch A Sketch.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) sent a letter to executives of both Fox News and its parent company Fox Corporation on Tuesday, demanding that they stop promoting white supremacy on air, and citing the network’s amplification of the so-called “Great Replacement” theory that inspired a white supremacist massacre in Buffalo, New York, last weekend.
That theory, which Schumer rightly points out in his letter “has no basis in fact,” is rooted in far right ideology but is rapidly becoming more prevalent in mainstream conservative circles. Its proponents posit the lie that there is a conspiracy to replace white people with people of color in countries where white people make up the majority of the population, like the U.S.
The theory is cited in the manifesto written by the mass shooter who killed 10 individuals and injured three others in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, this past weekend.
Schumer’s letter to Fox executives — including owner Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan Murdoch, Suzanne Scott, CEO of Fox News Media, and Jay Wallace, president and executive editor of Fox News Media — was written in response to Fox News’s consistent promotion of the theory, particularly by its news personalities. One analysis of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” found that the primetime host has referenced the racist theory in more than 400 episodes over the past six years.
Carlson responded to criticism of his commentary in light of the horrific Buffalo attack by suggesting that his critics were using the mass shooting as a means to censor him.
“So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud,” Carlson said on his program Monday night. “That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext and a justification.”
Carlson’s rhetoric from this week alone only confirms Schumer’s point: The network, he said in his letter, is engaged in the “reckless amplification” of a “white nationalist, far-right conspiracy theory.”
“For years, these types of beliefs have existed at the fringes of American life,” the New York senator said. “However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors.”
Schumer then cited a recent poll from the Associated Press, which found that nearly one-third of Americans believe in the theory. That same poll found that Fox News viewers were close to three times as likely to believe in the idea than viewers of other cable news networks.
The problem goes far beyond a single incident, Schumer went on, referencing a 2019 massacre in El Paso,Texas, in which a white man killed 23 people out of anger over a supposed “Hispanic invasion.”
“I urge you to take into consideration the very real impacts of the dangerous rhetoric being broadcast on your network on a nightly basis,” he concluded.
Sometimes, all you can do is stand back and breathe.
“I never expected the ultra-MAGA Republicans who seemed to control the Republican Party now,” the president of the United States said on Monday. “I never anticipated that happening.”
To all of us who have now been shouting for decades about the inexorable march toward this precise state of affairs, the willful obliviousness of this statement from Biden is truly stunning.
Imagine if Bill Gates announced that he only recently realized the electron is a thing, or if Luciano Pavarotti just thought he was yelling the whole time, or if they started using Diet Coke and Mentos in the fountains at the Bellagio. People would flip out, right? This is not reality. I’m not sure what sort of perspective the president is leaning on when he makes the kind of proclamation he coughed up on Monday, but it has little to do with the goings-on down here on this ball of dirt we call Earth.
Almost completely without fail, President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Schumer and every other member of the ossified Democratic Party “leadership” somehow fail time and again to see what has been staring them in the face since Ronald Reagan rewired the country. Even this article isn’t new; I’ve written a version of it annually for more than 20 years now, and not even the damn names change.
The big abortion vote in the Senate yesterday? This was supposed to be Schumer’s big strategic move, or something. The point? To get Republicans on the record as opposing abortion. WELL STONE THE CROWS, nobody thought it would turn out like it did, right?
Nearly all the Republicans in Congress live to vocalize their disdain for Roe, and if I make my bet, each of those votes promptly went into a direct fundraising mailer to the GOP base. Ol’ Chuck made some money for his pals across the aisle, and gave Joe Manchin another chance to stick his thumb in Schumer’s eye. May as well have had them vote on whether or not they are actually mammals.
Help me out here, because maybe it’s me… but how many clues do you need before you come to conclude that the GOP is no longer a political party, but a well-funded far-right insurrection club packed to bursting with a rancid concoction of woman-haters, gay-bashers, flagrant racists, gun fetishists, Christian dominionists and warmongers with dreams of empire oozing from their eyes?
Trump didn’t do this; politically and historically speaking, he came down with the last drop of rain. All he did was flip the switch, applying the proper lack of shame to every petulant grievance these people have been rubbing together for 40 years. They haven’t been quiet about it, either. Where’s the damn mystery here?
It was maybe a clue when Newt Gingrich turned the House of Representatives into a single-minded engine of destruction arrayed against the Clinton White House.
It was not hidden when Republican activists like Roger Stone violently attacked the vote count in Florida and delivered the 2000 election to another right-bent Supreme Court.
It was right there when George W. Bush and a bunch of Reagan cast-offs lied us into a pair of two-decade wars.
It wasn’t magic when Bush supporters became Tea Partiers and then MAGA fanatics. It’s all the same GOP base, the grandchildren of Barry Goldwater. All they did was change t-shirts and bollix the spelling on a whole new set of protest signs. They are the same people with the same goals, and they have been with us since before Bobby got shot. Would flash cards be helpful?
President Biden shouldn’t need to be reminded of this one, because he was right there in the front row when it happened: GOP governors from a pile of red states refused to take free money to start their ACA exchanges, because doing so would badly damage the program’s rollout and deny Barack Obama a clean win. These guys screwed their states and millions of their constituents just to brick the nation’s first Black president. I can draw you a map.
More recently? Hm… how about four long years of Donald Trump frothing hate and madness into every available camera? How about his supporters backing him no matter what career-killing blunder he committed? How about the violence of his rallies and the swelling ranks of the “patriot” militias? How about the Gohmerts and the Greenes and the Gosars and the Jordans not-so-quietly becoming the voice and face of the party, even as they labor to defenestrate the very government they work for? Back in Lincoln’s day, people like that were called “Copperheads” and cast as poisonous snakes wielding venom to support the Confederacy. Now, they’re called “Republicans,” and the Democratic leadership barely bats an eye.
How about the attack on the Capitol? The world saw the Confederate battle flag being carried down those august marble halls as rabid Trump fans feverishly threatened to hang Democrats from a gibbet that was waiting out on the lawn. Trump offered his own vice president as a blood sacrifice to the mob, a turn of events that was only narrowly avoided because Pence can run faster than his ambitions when the chips are down.
How about Trump leading the 2024 presidential election pack by galactic margins, even in the face of all that has transpired? That isn’t enough to inform Biden that his old pals in the Republican Party are literally or figuratively dead and buried, and bourbons with secessionists is no longer on the menu because they’d just as soon throw him down the stairs as pass a word with him?
Here’s what I’d like, and it should not be hard to pull off. Get Biden, Pelosi and Schumer in a locked room with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Have Cheney and Kinzinger explain in excruciating detail why they just subpoenaed five Republican House members over the 1/6 insurrection. Further, have them explain how Trump and his people are laboring mightily to steal the next presidential election in broad daylight.
Cheney and Kinzinger are perfect for this role, because absent a few extra genes, they come from the same family tree as the bedlamists currently running their party. How long has it been like this? They know. What can be done to thwart it? They probably have some ideas.
At a bare-bones minimum, such a meeting might serve to drill some much-needed reality into the skulls of these Democrats, who seem constitutionally incapable of properly judging the caliber and intentions of their opponents. The republic is sliding down the edge of a keen knife right now, and doe-eyed surprise that there are mean people in the building is precisely not what is required in the moment.
It won’t actually solve anything, of course, but God help us, it’s a start. Maybe I can finally stop writing this article every year.
A bill that would have recognized and protected abortion rights across the United States, codifying many aspects of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, failed to garner enough votes for passage in the Senate on Wednesday.
Forty-nine Democratic senators voted for the bill, while 50 Republicans, plus Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, voted against the legislation.
Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the vote. Before the roll call was taken, Democratic lawmakers from the House had marched from their chamber to the Senate, chanting “My body, my choice” to encourage a vote affirming the legislation they had previously passed.
The vote was held in response to a draft opinion from the Supreme Court that was leaked earlier this month, in which five conservative justices, constituting a majority, signaled support for overturning the nearly 50-year precedent of abortion rights protections that were established in Roe.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), speaking before the vote took place, acknowledged the likely outcome, but noted that the vote would demonstrate to Americans exactly where their elected senators stand on the bill.
“The public will not forget which side of the vote senators fall on today, they will not forget who voted to protect their freedoms, and they will not forget those responsible for the greatest backslide of individual liberties in half a century,” he predicted.
“To protect the right to choose, voters need to elect more pro-choice senators this November, and return a pro-choice majority to the House,” he added. “If they do, Congress can pass this bill in January, and put it on my desk, so I can sign it into law.”
Schumer also warned voters that if they elected “more MAGA Republicans” — that is, lawmakers who are strongly aligned with former Republican President Donald Trump — they would likely see a nationwide ban on abortion in the next legislative session.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has indeed signaled that his party is headed in that direction, noting that a national ban on the medical procedure could be “possible” if Republicans take control of Congress.
“If the leaked opinion became the final opinion, legislative bodies — not only at the state level but at the federal level — certainly could legislate in that area,” McConnell said last week. “And if this were the final decision, that was the point that it should be resolved one way or another in the legislative process. So yeah, it’s possible.”
Democrats in the United States Senate say they plan to bring up a vote next week to pass legislation that would codify abortion protections recognized in the 1973 landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade — but their action will likely be an exercise in futility, as they do not have the votes to get it past a 60-vote filibuster threshold.
The vote is in reaction to the leaked draft opinion from the Supreme Court, written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, that suggests the institution is set to overturn the half-century-old precedent protecting a person’s right to access abortion services throughout the country.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) confirmed the vote would happen.
In a Twitter post, Schumer said the vote was necessary so that “Americans will see where every single Senator stands” on the issue.
That comment from the majority leader is perhaps a recognition of the fact that the bill is doomed to fail. Democrats are nowhere near the 60 votes needed to overcome the Senate filibuster, and the vote is being seen by many as a political gesture rather than a realistic means of addressing the potential end of abortion rights protections for millions of Americans.
“The plan is little more than an effort to send a political message before the midterm elections and a seismic ruling that could have major legal, cultural and electoral consequences, with deep significance for voters across the political spectrum,” wrote The New York Times’sAnnie Karni in a report on the vote.
Even if Democrats eliminated the filibuster completely, however, it’s unclear whether they’d be able to get every member of their own caucus on board with passing abortion protections.
The legislation that’s up for a vote, the Women’s Health and Protection Act, passed easily in the House last year but was blocked when it reached the Senate by Republicans and Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia. Manchin opposed the bill on the grounds that it provided too many protections for individuals when it came to abortion rights.
Since his vote to block the legislation in February, Manchin has not indicated any shift in his stance on the issue, nor has he said much about support for a watered-down version of the bill, offered by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), that would establish very limited protections for abortion across the country while still allowing states the ability to place harsh restrictions on access to the medical procedure.
Some may view any efforts to negotiate with Manchin as futile because of the inconsistency between Manchin’s eventual vote and his private conversations with progressive Democrats on other pieces of legislation throughout the past year. In fact, one Democratic insider, speaking to Axios in January about these discussions with Manchin, said that working with him was like “negotiating via Etch A Sketch.”
Following the leak of a draft opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court indicating that the institution is set to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling making abortion legal throughout the U.S., more attention has been given to three specific justices who have likely endorsed that opinion — and what they said during their confirmation hearings just a few years ago.
The draft order says it represents the majority opinion of the High Court. With all three liberal bloc justices likely to vote against it — and reports indicating conservative Chief Justice John Roberts was also unlikely to support completely dismantling the established precedent — the remaining five conservative bloc members are the most likely to potentially upend Roe.
Three of those conservative justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — were confirmed in the past five years, under former President Donald Trump. Amid criticism and examination of how detrimental such a ruling could become, renewed scrutiny has been given to those three justices in particular, as their appointments directly led to the possibility of Roe being officially overturned later this year.
All three justices, as nominees at the time, gave answers indicating they would give deference to the nearly 50-year-old precedent protecting abortion rights. Their private conversations with lawmakers, too, are inconsistent with what appears to be their ruling on dismantling Roe.
In 2017, Gorsuch was nominated by Trump, who had himself promised only to select anti-abortion nominees to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch sought to assure senators tasked with approving him that he would not take the issue of abortion lightly, telling them during his hearings that he would have “walked out the door” had the former president demanded he overturn Roe.
In an exchange with Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) during those same hearings, Gorsuch was asked whether he agreed with specific findings from Roe, including the idea that, for the purposes of the 14th Amendment’s interpretations, a fetus is not a person.
“Do you accept that?” Durbin asked.
“That is the law of the land. I accept the law of the land, senator, yes,” Gorsuch responded.
In 2018, Kavanaugh also described Roe in similar terms. In private discussions with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), she said that the nominee had told her that the case and others like it protecting abortion rights were “settled law.”
Kavanaugh tweaked that language a little bit during his hearings, but what he did say seemed to match what Collins suggested: that he believed Roe was mostly settled precedent.
“It is settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court, entitled the respect under principles of stare decisis,” Kavanaugh said. He added:
The Supreme Court has recognized the right to abortion since the 1973 Roe v. Wade case. It has reaffirmed it many times.
And while Barrett tried to avoid calling Roe a super-precedent — a type of precedent that is seen as untouchable, in terms of how much harm it could cause if reversed — she herself acknowledged that her opinion on its status “doesn’t mean that Roe should be overruled.”
Taken together, these statements imply that the three justices, when they were nominees being considered by the Senate to serve on the nation’s highest court, would take a cautious approach to changing Roe’s abortion protections, if they took any action on the matter at all. Instead, all three appear to have eagerly signed on to a draft order (authored by Justice Samuel Alito, another anti-abortion member of the conservative bloc) to undo the decades of precedent at the very first opportunity that presented itself.
Several lawmakers have spoken out against the draft order, stating that, if it indeed becomes the opinion of the Supreme Court when it comes to abortion rights, it was done so erroneously and without consideration of precedent, as those justices had promised.
Collins herself has expressed disappointment in confirming Kavanaugh specifically, noting that her private conversations with him did not indicate he’d upend Roe.
“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said in a statement this week.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) blasted the draft opinion as wrongly decided. They also described the conservative justices who comprised the majority in the decision as liars.
“Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation,” Pelosi and Schumer said in a joint statement.
On April 4, the Senate agreed to a $10 billion package to fund the Biden administration’s ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The negotiators heralded it as a major success, and the administration announced that it would allow vital COVID services to continue.
Yet, as with so much else that passes for “success” in this fractured and fractious political environment, the bill was in fact a stunning failure — in this case, representing a disaster for the basic principles of global pandemic response.
President Biden had initially requested over $22 billion in funding — for ongoing testing and vaccines, for medical research, and, crucially, for overseas aid, to help poorer countries ramp up their testing and vaccine regimens. In the original proposal, $5 billion was dedicated to the international response.
Since 2020, the pandemic has raged in poorer countries such as India, but the exact scale of its carnage has often been underplayed by those countries’ governments. India, for example, claims that it has lost about 500,000 citizens to the disease. This week, however, the World Health Organization estimated that the true number was closer to 4 million. Without accurate public health data, it becomes ever harder to tailor appropriate responses to the pandemic in those countries; and without effective interventions, the risk of new, potentially more lethal variants emerging, grows by the day.
Most Americans, and the vast majority of elderly Americans, have had at least two shots against COVID, with many having also received their boosters (and many of those who aren’t vaccinated have made a conscious choice not to be, despite the widespread availability of free vaccines). By contrast, in poorer nations, vaccination rates remain perilously low, often not by choice. By the start of 2022, only about 10 percent of Africans had both the original course of vaccines and the booster shots. In many countries, such as Mali and South Sudan, Tanzania and Cameroon, only about 1 in 20 had received even their first vaccine dose. According to The New York Times global tracker, in Uganda, only 1 in 1,000 individuals have received boosters. Only 3 percent of Pakistanis have received their boosters. Only 2.2 percent of Georgians have been boosted. And the list goes on.
These are abysmal numbers, and they point to the ongoing need for massive international investments and assistance in providing vaccines to poor countries, and then in helping those countries actually get shots into arms.
Wealthy countries, which invested huge sums in mRNA vaccines, have managed to largely kick-start their economies again, and return life to relative normalcy for residents after months of lockdowns, and keep their health systems afloat even during recent surges. However, poorer countries risk ongoing health system inundation with each new surge. The U.S., U.K., and other affluent, powerful nations are now acting as if the pandemic is largely over; yet for poorer nations, largely unvaccinated nearly 30 months into the public health crisis, it is possible that the worst days of the outbreak are still to come.
At the end of the Senate negotiations, in which Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) served as the GOP negotiator, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer trumpeted a deal that made available far less than half the amount initially requested and contained exactly zero dollars earmarked for international COVID responses. If that’s a “success,” God only knows what a Schumer failure would look like.
For the past 15 months, the GOP, along with a handful of more conservative Democratic senators, have stymied almost every major spending initiative and policy priority of the Biden administration. And time and again, the White House and its Senate allies have caved, arguing that a little bit is better than nothing. It’s been a losing strategy politically: Witness the continual compromising around the Build Back Better Act, and the ultimate failure to secure any legislation on that front; witness the cascading series of failures to implement meaningful climate change policies. It has also been a losing strategy in terms of public opinion: Witness Biden’s collapsing poll ratings, especially among younger, more idealistic voters, and the broad sense among the voting public that the administration waffles away its political capital rather than truly doubling down and fighting for what it believes in.
If the political will were there, it’s inconceivable that funds wouldn’t have been easily found to cover international vaccine efforts. Yet political goodwill is in perilously short supply in Washington these days.
As if to prove the point that this was less to do with fiscal responsibility and more to do with political gamesmanship, a day after the much-heralded “bipartisan” agreement was reached, the GOP began pushing to tack on even more cost-cutting and anti-asylum seeker amendments, and the Senate moved further away from actually passing the deal that its own negotiators had reached only the previous day. By April 8, Schumer had accepted that the legislation wouldn’t be passed before the Senate recessed for Easter and announced that no vote would be held until at least April 25.
So much for Biden and Schumer’s vaunted negotiating skills. The story of the U.S.’s disengagement with the international COVID response efforts is a saga of failure and abandonment, pure and simple.
Every time Schumer trumpets a “bipartisan” agreement, the result is something that progressive Democrats hate and that the GOP views as simply a launch pad to further extremes. It’s past time for Schumer to actually fight for important political values and vital societal investments. If he can’t, or won’t, then he is simply whistling in the wind.
Progressive groups are asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to restart negotiations on the budget reconciliation package that contains the bulk of President Joe Biden’s social and climate agenda, which passed the House under the banner of “Build Back Better” before stalling in the Senate last year.
Refusals by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and other centrists to support the legislation prevented the Senate’s razor-thin Democratic majority from reaching a 50-member consensus necessary for passage. The bill would have needed to pass through the special “budget reconciliation” process in order to dodge Republican obstruction in the evenly divided Senate.
Social and environmental advocates are emphasizing that there’s still a dire need to pass the policies the Build Back Better bill contained. Democrats are currently rallying around proposed spending on climate and clean energy programs, and progressive groups say relief for working people and families is badly needed due to the rising cost of fuel, food, and other necessities.
In an open letter to Schumer released on Monday, a coalition of more than 120 progressive organizations said the urgency behind the legislation is even greater now than when the House passed its version in November 2021. Schumer should restart negotiations over the legislation “energetically,” the groups said, and sections of the bill where there is “significant agreement” should start moving through committees now.
“Working people are facing rising costs for food, health care and other necessities and median rent prices rose an astounding 20 percent in 2021, furthering a national housing crisis,” the groups wrote. “Taking steps to decarbonize and build a green economy becomes more pressing by the day.”
Biden and many Democrats hoped to fund new climate initiatives and make an array of social investments through budget reconciliation, but Manchin balked at the original $1.7 trillion price tag and proposals designed to move the country away from coal and other fossil fuels, arguing that new spending would add to inflation. However, Manchin has signaled he may support a revised package that funds new programs with taxes on corporations and the wealthy that could also be used to lower the federal deficit, a major priority for the conservative Democrat, according to reports.
Even if Manchin supports a new package, there are concerns that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the other conservative Democrat who helped sink Build Back Better in the Senate last year, may oppose proposed tax hikes on corporations and top earners. Votes from both senators are needed to pass the package.
The package appears to be undergoing a rebranding. Biden did not say the words “Build Back Better” in his recent state of the union speech, and Schumer did not mention Build Back Better by name in a recent letter to colleagues that outlined Democratic priorities ahead of a retreat for lawmakers.
“In reconciliation, Senate Democrats have introduced additional legislative proposals to lower the rising cost of energy, prescription drugs and health care, and the costs of raising a family,” Schumer wrote to fellow Democrats. “Senate Democrats are focused on delivering on our promise to fight these rising costs.”
The coalition of progressive groups that released the open letter to Schumer on Monday did not use the words Build Back Better, either. They called the legislation a “reconciliation package” instead.
Whether the package will get a new name remains to be seen. Regardless, progressives are pushing Democrats to pass as much of the original package through Senate as possible, which may require breaking the bill up into smaller, individual pieces of legislation.
In a letter to Biden on Monday, a group of 89 House Democrats said that $555 billion in climate investments included in the House-passed bill could serve as a “building block” to restart negotiations.
The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the window of opportunity for salvaging a sustainable future is rapidly closing. People across the U.S. experienced the impacts of climate change in the form of extreme weather and raging wildfires last year. Given widespread agreement over the bill’s climate provisions in the Senate, the lawmakers wrote, the climate measures provide Biden and Schumer with a “key starting point” for negotiations.
“Responding now will protect American families and businesses against the most devastating financial impacts,” they wrote. “But the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to transition at the speed required, and we will have incurred billions in damages and harm to our communities, infrastructure, environment, and public health and safety along the way.”
Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, said Democrats have a mandate to deliver after voters gave them control of Congress and the White House in 2020.
“They can rightly take credit for significant accomplishments, especially the American Rescue Plan,” Mitchell said in a statement. “But with the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit, and with investments in children and families, health care, elder care, housing, and climate hanging in the balance, the work is unfinished.”
A Republican-led filibuster blocked the passage of a bill that would have codified the tenets of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established abortion rights and protections, which is currently at risk of being overturned by conservative justices.
The bill, titled the Women’s Health Protection Act, would have established a right to abortion care across the country. It also would have expanded abortion access by limiting how states can restrict the procedure, ending measures that seek to dissuade individuals from having an abortion, like mandated ultrasounds or biased counseling.
Notably, conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (West Virginia) also voted in favor of the filibuster, defying his fellow party members in the Senate and choosing to shoot down what some observers have described as the last “viable path to keeping abortion legal.”
Although the outcome would have been the same if Manchin had chosen to side with his party, his decision to join the GOP in blocking legislation that would have enshrined the right to abortion in the U.S. was condemned by abortion rights activists.
Although the measure was shot down by Manchin and Republicans, Monday’s vote was historic, marking the first Senate vote on codifying the protections established in Roe.
The bill, which already passed the House of Representatives, had 48 Democratic cosponsors in the Senate. Manchin and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania) were the only Democrats who refused to endorse the bill. On Monday, Casey voted with his party to start debate on the bill.
Establishing a federal law on abortion is critical, especially as the Supreme Court is currently considering whether or not to keep Roe in place. If the Court overturns the half-century precedent that that ruling established, several states across the country would revert to pre-Roe laws that are still technically on the books, banning abortion outright.
Lawmakers and activists vowed to continue pushing for legislation recognizing abortion rights.
“Although #WHPA failed to advance today because of opponents of abortion in the Senate, we will continue advocating for protection of abortion at the federal and state levels,” abortion provider and activist Kristyn Brandi said on Twitter. “Our patients deserve access to this safe, essential health care.”
The Committee on House Administration will soon hold a hearing on proposals to ban members of Congress from being able to trade individual stocks, taking a step toward eventually voting on such legislation.
According to Insider, which spoke to two anonymous sources, the committee has requested testimony from government watchdog groups like the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Lawmakers have also invited the Congressional Research Service to testify.
The committee didn’t confirm the hearing with Insider, saying that hearings aren’t typically announced until a week before they’re held. A committee hearing would be a big step to move the proposal forward within the House. Republicans have not yet chosen a witness for the hearing.
It’s unclear if a stock trading ban would pass if it came to a vote now. However, recent bills have had rare bipartisan support, and some Senate Republicans are in favor of such proposals. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) back the idea; an early draft of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address slated for Tuesday night included support for the effort, but may be taken out to include other priorities.
Lawmakers in the House and the Senate have introduced several different stock trading bans. One of the strictest proposals was introduced in February by Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Steve Daines (R-Montana) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Matt Rosendale (R-Montana).
The bipartisan, bicameral legislation would outright ban members of Congress and their spouses from owning stocks, requiring them to divest from all stocks other than widely held investment funds while in office. Violations would carry a $50,000 fine per infraction.
This goes slightly further than other proposals, like one from Senators Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) and Mark Kelly (D-Arizona). Ossoff and Kelly introduced a bill in January that would ban more family members from owning stocks; it would also ban spouses and dependent children from actively trading stocks.
But the bill would only require that those stocks be put into a blind trust when members take office, meaning that lawmakers can still influence their stock portfolios in a blind trust with legislation that could affect companies that they had previously invested in.
Government watchdogs say that a stock trading ban must be strict in order to be effective. In guidelines circulated to Congress, CREW says that stock trading bans must not allow members to put their portfolios in a blind trust, must ban spouses and dependent children from trading stock and must have a strict enforcement mechanism. Bans also shouldn’t allow for intent loopholes, CREW says – in other words, there shouldn’t be a carveout for the lawmakers who supposedly unknowingly violated the law.
No one bill that has been introduced so far adopts all of those principles; of those requirements, Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-Missouri) bill only has a clear enforcement mechanism, according to CREW, requiring members to give gains from banned stock trades to the Treasury Department.
As lawmakers have shown, however, enforcement is key. Lawmakers and their aides regularly violate the STOCK Act, which places disclosure requirements on members’ stock trades. According to financial filings, members will often report multimillion dollar trades months late. But violators typically only face a small fine of around $200.
Republican Sen. Rick Scott (Florida) shot down Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-New York) attempt to bring a bipartisan bill to alleviate billions of dollars of debt for the United States Postal Service (USPS) to a swift vote on Monday.
The Postal Service Reform Act, which the House passed last week, gives the USPS’s finances much-needed reforms, forgiving $57 billion of its over $200 billion in liabilities. Critically, the bill gets rid of a requirement that the agency pre-pay Medicare costs for employees decades before they retire, which has kept the agency in debt for many years.
Schumer requested that the Senate bring the legislation to the floor via unanimous consent to make a small revision to correct a clerical error in the bill. Scott’s objection to the procedure will cause delays, which is “regrettable,” Schumer said.
“Even though this will delay the bill, we will pass it. We will have to just go through this elaborate process, the old fashioned and often discredited rules of the Senate that the senator from Florida’s employing,” Schumer said. “But we will pass this bill because America needs it.”
Because Scott blocked unanimous consent to fix the error, the bill could be delayed for another few weeks. As the Washington Post’s Jacob Bogage pointed out, the easiest path for the bill would be to send it back to the House to fix the error and then send it back to the Senate. But this would prolong the process to at least March.
Scott claimed that he supports the bill, but that he thinks it should undergo a slower process through the Senate. In a press release on Monday, however, he said that he believes the provision to help dig the USPS out of debt would supposedly harm Medicare – although no other agency is required to pay Medicare decades in advance like the USPS is.
In reality, Scott is likely trying to keep the Postal Service in debt as a means of advancing the larger conservative goal of defunding the agency and perhaps eventually privatizing it. GOP lawmakers have also attacked and attempted to delegitimize the USPS for years to throw doubt on the mail-in voting system, which Republicans claim helps Democrats win elections. Indeed, ahead of the 2020 election, Scott introduced legislation that would have effectively invalidated a huge portion of mail-in votes in future elections.
However, Scott’s delay may end up frustrating both Republicans and Democrats alike. The bill passed the House on a widely bipartisan basis, with a 342 to 92 vote margin. GOP members view the legislation as an endorsement of conservative Postmaster Louis DeJoy’s 10-year plan to slow service and increase costs for the agency, which has garnered fierce opposition from Democrats and the public.
Still, the bill’s reforms are vital for the long-term health of the agency, Democrats have said. Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-New York), who introduced the bill, praised its passage in the House last week. “These reforms ensure the Postal Service continues as an independently operated organization that Americans can continue to rely on for the years to come,” she said.
The bill has the support of at least 14 Republican senators, meaning that it likely has enough votes in the Senate to pass when it eventually comes to a vote.
The momentum behind a widely popular effort to ban stock trading by members of Congress is growing, with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reportedly instructing fellow Democrats to unite behind a specific legislative proposal.
“After weeks of silence, Senate Democratic leaders have asked lawmakers to propose improvements on rules governing congressional stock trading,” Insiderreports. “In a call Friday, Democratic leadership staff told legislative directors for Democratic senators about their aspirations for bringing a congressional stock-trading ban bill to the floor of the U.S. Senate.”
The development comes weeks after Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) ignored pushback from prominent Democratic leaders — including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — and unveiled legislation that would bar members of Congress, their spouses, and their children from buying and selling stock while in office.
“It’s working. Keep pushing,” Ossoff tweeted Sunday, highlighting the Senate Democratic leadership’s openness to the proposed ban.
Thus far, just eight Senate Democrats have officially signed on as co-sponsors of Ossoff’s bill (S.3494), which he introduced alongside Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) last month.
“It’s time for Congress to act and ban members from trading stocks while they’re in office,” Sean Eldridge, founder and president of Stand Up America, said Sunday.
Despite broad support from the public and growing backing from rank-and-file lawmakers, some Democratic leaders remain opposed to a prohibition on stock trading. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said last week that he’s “not sure that it’s necessary” to enact such a ban given existing rules against insider trading — rules that critics say are far too lax and seldom enforced.
Schumer, for his part, said last month that he doesn’t “own any stocks” and that banning individual trading by sitting lawmakers would be “the right thing to do.”
It’s unclear where Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a key swing vote who owns a stake in his son’s West Virginia coal business, stands on the proposal.
“I don’t own any stocks, and I think that’s the right thing to do.”
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer comments on the recent push to bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks. pic.twitter.com/pZ3V7EE4pm
A recent analysis of financial documents by Capitol Trades and reporting from MarketWatch found that congressional lawmakers or members of their families traded an estimated $355 million worth of stock in 2021, a year in which the coronavirus pandemic killed hundreds of thousands of people across the U.S. and pushed many into financial ruin.
While insider trading has long been commonplace on Capitol Hill, suspiciously timed transactions during the pandemic — particularly soon after Covid-19 was detected in the U.S. — brought fresh attention to lawmakers’ use of secret information to buy and sell stock.
Former Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.), Ossoff’s Republican opponent in the 2021 U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, was a prolific stock trader, and he was accused of using insider information to buy shares of companies that stood to benefit from the pandemic.
“Recent revelations about stock trades at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic and economic downturn, increasingly prevalent violations of the STOCK Act’s reporting requirements, and investigations and even convictions of members of Congress pertaining to insider trading have all served to galvanize public interest and media scrutiny around real and perceived corruption in Congress,” a coalition of 14 advocacy groups wrote in a letter endorsing Ossoff’s legislation last month.
“The public needs to know that Congress recognizes the issue of insider trading as a problem that undermines its own legitimacy and erodes the trust of voters,” the coalition added. “The good news is that Congress is able to respond to this concern in a meaningful way by advancing S. 3494 and sending it to President Biden’s desk for his signature.”
Over 80 Democrats have demanded that President Joe Biden cancel a portion of student debt and release an Education Department memo on his legal authority to do so, in an effort led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Chuck Schumer (D-New York) this week.
In a letter to the president, the lawmakers wrote that Biden should immediately cancel up to $50,000 of student debt per borrower – a move that would boost the economy and provide a lifeline to the millions of Americans with student loans. The lawmakers emphasized that the president should act with urgency, as student loan payments are due to restart in three months.
“Canceling $50,000 of student debt would give 36 million Americans permanent relief and aid the millions more who will eventually resume payments their best chance at thriving in our recovering economy,” the lawmakers said. “In light of high COVID-19 case counts and corresponding economic disruptions, restarting student loan payments without this broad cancellation would be disastrous for millions of borrowers and their families.”
Data released on Thursday shows that the U.S. economy was on an upswing last year despite the pandemic; restarting student loan payments could impede that process. The data also demonstrates that the payment pause, which was in place for all of 2021, didn’t stop the economy from beginning to recover from the impact of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, resuming payments will have an enormous impact on many borrowers’ lives. Thousands of borrowers have reported that student loan payments take a large portion of their income, making it difficult to afford bills and essentials. A recent report for Warren and Schumer found that borrowers will lose out on $85 billion annually once loan payments resume.
The burden of student debt is holding back nearly an entire generation from being able to make financial decisions freely, even impeding upon borrowers’ ability to buy a house. Canceling this debt could raise homeownership rates and credit scores; such a move would also likely result in a higher gross domestic product (GDP).
“[T]he enduring weight of student loan debt has negated opportunities for many borrowers to truly transform their lives and our country,” the lawmakers wrote. “More than 80 percent of borrowers with student loan debt report that it holds them back from being able to afford a home. Without this debt, many would be in a better position to begin saving for homeownership as well as retirement and starting a business.”
The lawmakers also urged Biden to release a memo assessing the legality of canceling student debt via executive order. Although the Education Department prepared the memo in April, the administration refused to publicly acknowledge it for months. Ultimately, the existence of the memo was uncovered by the Debt Collective through a Freedom of Information Act request, but the contents of the document were completely redacted.
“Publicly releasing the memo outlining your existing authority on cancelling student debt and broadly doing so is crucial to making a meaningful difference in the lives of current students, borrowers, and their families,” the lawmakers wrote. Debt activists have also been organizing efforts to pressure Biden on the issue.
The Biden administration’s refusal to release the memo has led debt activists to speculate that the document confirms that the president has the legal authority to cancel student debt with a stroke of his pen – but that he doesn’t actually want to do so.
On the campaign trail, Biden promised to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt per borrower, a promise he has repeatedly come under fire for breaking. Last week, Biden dodged a question from a journalist who asked him about his plan to cancel student loans during a press conference; the president answered a second question from the reporter, said nothing about the student loan question and promptly left the conference.
Many progressives and activists say that even cancelling up to $10,000 of debt per borrower wouldn’t be enough. Student debt cancellation advocates like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), who signed on to the Democrats’ letter this week, have encouraged Biden to cancel student debt completely.
Ahead of a crucial vote to amend the filibuster to support voting rights, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has said that he would be open to supporting candidates levying a primary challenge to conservative Democrats Senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona).
Sanders told reporters on Tuesday that he would consider backing primary challenges to the two filibuster holdouts when they’re up for reelection. The senators, who are basking in the praise and political contributions from conservative groups, stand in the way of nearly every Democratic priority currently before Congress.
The Senate’s protracted battle on the filibuster is coming to a head this week. Schumer announced on Tuesday that he will bring a filibuster reform vote to the chamber after Republicans inevitably vote to shoot down the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which could take place as soon as Wednesday or Thursday.
Though the two lawmakers aren’t up for reelection until 2024, both senators’ approval ratings have been falling fast as they stand in the way of Democratic progress – and an October poll found that Sinema would lose to progressive challengers if the election were held immediately.
Sanders, who has previously expressed frustration with the two senators, condemned their opposition to filibuster reform in a Twitter video on Tuesday.
“Right now, every Republican will be voting against us, and that’s pretty pathetic,” he said. “But what’s equally pathetic, as of now, two Democrats will be voting against us as well. I would hope very much that those two Democrats, Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin, will rethink their position and understand that the foundations of American democracy are at stake.”
Schumer is proposing an implementation of a talking filibuster for the voting rights bill. This means that the bill will be able to pass with a simple majority vote after any opponents delay the vote by speaking on the Senate floor, if they so choose. Currently, bills must overcome a 60-vote threshold in order to pass.
The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which is a combination of two voting rights bills that have both been passed by the House, would greatly increase financial transparency in campaign donations and restore provisions of the Voting Rights Act meant to protect marginalized voters.
Voting rights advocates and progressives have welcomed Schumer’s plan, saying that it’s necessary to put senators’ views on the filibuster issue – which serves as somewhat of a proxy vote for voting rights – on the record. Sinema and Manchin have both already said that they will vote against the reform.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer confirmed Tuesday evening that if Republicans continue to obstruct a long-delayed voting rights package, he will move to bring back the talking filibuster for just that legislation.
Schumer (D-N.Y.), flanked by other top Senate Democrats, announced the plan during a press conference after a caucus meeting that followed a floor debate on the House-approved bill, the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.
The strategy was welcomed by progressives, including Christina Harvey, executive director of the advocacy group Stand Up America.
“Senate Democrats are on the Senate floor right now embracing a rare opportunity to substantively debate voting rights,” Harvey said. “But they have an even rarer opportunity to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act at the end of this debate, if they are willing to stand together and do it.”
“Now that they have found a way to open debate, under the current rules, Democrats can and must force a public debate that ends with a majority vote after every senator has exhausted their time,” she said. “It may take weeks, but if Senate Democrats can find the political courage this moment requires, they have the tools right now to pass voting rights legislation and save our democracy.”
Throughout the current congressional session, voting rights legislation has been blocked by Senate Republicans as well as two Democrats — Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — who have so far opposed abolishing or reforming the filibuster.
Make Republicans start a talking filibuster. Then we can ask Senator Sinema and Senator Manchin: what was the point of the filibuster? To debate? Is this enough debate? There is no limit to what we need to do right now to save our democracy. pic.twitter.com/IQhEo7Dntw
“The Senate spent an entire year drafting, considering, and debating voting rights legislation,” Schumer said during the press conference. “Senate Republicans have spent the same amount of time refusing to negotiate with our members, including Sen. Manchin, or even debate this legislation.”
The Democratic leader highlighted that over the past year — in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election — GOP state legislators have enacted voter suppression laws in key states across the country, sparking demands for Congress to fight back.
“If the Senate cannot protect the right to vote, which is the cornerstone of our democracy, then the Senate rules must be reformed,” Schumer declared. “If the Republicans block cloture on the legislation before us, I will put forward a proposal to change the rules to allow for a talking filibuster on this legislation.”
“We feel, very simply, on something as important as voting rights, if Senate Republicans are gonna oppose it, they should not be allowed to sit in their office,” he added. “They gotta come down on the floor and defend their opposition to voting rights, the wellspring of our democracy.”
The GOP shouldn’t be allowed to sit in their offices and block voting rights
They should have to come to the floor and defend anti-voting rights positions
The Senate has an opportunity this week to do that—a vote to change Senate rules to promote public debate on voting rights pic.twitter.com/QvCQBcPI0w
While Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine (Va.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), and Raphael Warnock (Ga.) all spoke after Schumer, whether the rule change happens will ultimately depend on Manchin and Sinema.
After Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the majority whip, suggested the talking filibuster approach to journalists earlier Tuesday, Manchin signaled that he would not support the change.
Politico’s Burgess Everett tweeted that “Manchin says he doesn’t support a talking filibuster that goes around [the] 60-vote threshold and won’t support the nuclear option to change rules,” adding that the senator “says he’s fine with a primary challenge over this.”
According to the reporter, Manchin specifically said: “I’ve been primaried my entire life. That would not be anything new for me… It’s rough and tumble. We’re used to that. Bring it on.”
MANCHIN told @christianjhall and other reporters he’s against this new talking filibuster plan. NOT willing to go nuclear, as he has said consistently over the last few months https://t.co/eIIwZjya5D
Though Schumer refused to indicate whether he would support 2024 primary challenges to Democrats who don’t get onboard with filibuster reform, only saying that “I’m not getting into the politics,” earlier in the day Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told journalists that he would back such efforts.
“What’s at stake is the future of American democracy,” said Sanders. “And the fact that all over this country, Republican governors and legislators are moving aggressively to suppress the vote and to impose extreme gerrymandering, among many other things.”
“Anybody who believes in American democracy has got to vote to enable us to go forward with 50 votes to suspend the filibuster, at least on this vote,” he added.
Sen. Joe Manchin asked questions at the Dems’ caucus meeting, and several Democrats sought to “clarify” his view about the historic use of the filibuster, per source
Sen. Sinema was not physically present but participated on the phone and didn’t speak
As Common Dreamsreported earlier Tuesday, the progressive advocacy group Indivisible found that 94% of its members in Arizona said they would support primarying Sinema when she is up for reelection in two years if she sinks voting rights legislation.
Indivisible and Stand Up America are among the organizations urging Senate Democrats to hold the Senate floor for “as long as it takes” to pass their voting rights package.
As Megan Hatcher-Mays, Indivisible’s director of democracy policy, put it: “We want a full airing of the ways Republicans are undermining our right to vote across the country — on a partisan basis, for the record — and how the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act would save our democracy from these attacks.”
Over the last two months, it’s become increasingly clear that President Joe Biden’s best days in office might be almost certainly behind him. Though he was never going to be an FDR-type figure, overly credulous press coverage and endorsements notwithstanding, Biden could claim significant victories in his first year in office. The American Rescue Plan Act, passed in March 2021, and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, passed that November, were massive pieces of legislation that far exceeded Obama’s response to the global financial meltdown during his first year in office.
Now, entering his second year, Biden’s agenda appears to be dead in the water. The much-touted Build Back Better Act, Biden’s signature legislation, has completely stalled out on Capitol Hill. It was initially linked with the infrastructure bill, but Democratic leadership and conservatives in the party were successful in beating down the Congressional Progressive Caucus until they ultimately relented and separated the bills. Ever since the bills were decoupled, Biden’s social spending bill has been dying a slow death at the hands of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
In the final days of 2021, Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, sensing impending doom, switched gears. The top priority became voting rights and election reform, although what that meant specifically was anyone’s guess. The White House and congressional leadership began pushing two bills, the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Separately, some Senate Democrats began working with Republicans on a bill to amend the Electoral Count Act, which would change the law that Donald Trump attempted to exploit to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The January 6 committee is working on their version of a similar bill.
Schumer, for his part, has been reluctant to move forward with the much narrower Electoral College reform bills, believing that it would undercut any broader voting rights expansion. Last week, Biden gave what was touted as a major speech on voting rights, during which he finally supported a “carve out” for the Senate’s filibuster for voting rights legislation. The following day, he went to Capitol Hill to marshal support for his various efforts.
Both the speech and the trip to negotiate with lawmakers risked being too little, too late. Local Georgia voting rights groups boycotted Biden’s address because they believed voting rights had become a second-tier issue for Biden, rather than a core priority. New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote that Biden’s efforts “came in the last days of the battle.” As for his attempt to twist arms in the Senate, Politicocharacterized it as “doomed for failure.” Even more embarrassingly, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema apparently blindsided the administration with a Senate address reiterating her opposition to a filibuster carve-out just minutes before Biden was set to meet with Democrats to rally support for his voting bills.
Much like Biden’s and Schumer’s approach to the Omicron wave, the White House and congressional leadership appear to be several steps behind on every issue they touch. The administration is reactive, and has been on its back foot for months. Biden’s poll numbers have cratered, which is to be expected to a certain extent, but he and his advisers aren’t doing themselves any favors with their scattershot approach.
Most of the blame for this sorry situation rests squarely at the feet of Senators Manchin and Sinema. Some have said working with Manchin is “like negotiating via Etch A Sketch” due to his constantly shifting negotiating positions. He holds so much power in the closely divided Senate that liberal TV host Chris Hayes has argued the White House should wave the white flag and just ask Manchin to write a Build Back Better bill that he’d sign. “I don’t quite understand why we haven’t gotten to the point where they say, Senator Manchin, write the bill that you will vote for and we will pass it, because that’s the only way out of this,” Hayes toldThe New York Times’s Ezra Klein. Others have argued for a similar approach to election reform, claiming that fixing the law Trump tried to use to stay in power, the Electoral Count Act, is the best and only option on the table.
Unfortunately, even these inadequate measures may prove to be too large a lift. Manchin, for his part, has already walked away from one version of the spending bill that he had previously endorsed. There’s no reason to believe he wouldn’t do the same again. And any bipartisan election reform legislation that hampers Republican legal claims toward minority rule could stall out in a million different ways. Still, it’s understandable for those on the left to look over these meager offerings and take what few victories may be available. The time for playing hardball may have passed Biden by, and his pressure campaign is likely as much a form of virtue signaling to disaffected liberal voters as it is a real push to get passable legislation.
The broader blame for the predicament the Democrats find themselves in falls on the shoulders of the faction of the party that Biden and Schumer belong to — the same faction as Manchin and Sinema. Decades of divestment from pro-labor policies in favor of neoliberal Clintonian triangulation has resulted in a party at odds with itself. The party is uninterested in, and incapable of, pursuing long-term strategies that require building a bench of progressive candidates and elected officials. Instead, the party’s organs function as an incumbent reelection racket and a jobs guarantee program for wealthy consultants whose only function is to punch to the left.
There’s no reason that the Democrats couldn’t field, support and elect a working-class candidate in West Virginia or Arizona, if that had been a multiyear priority. Rather than spending time and money training and cultivating teachers, working-class activists and union organizers, the Democratic Party has treated those types of candidates as hostile enemies to be vanquished. Instead, they prioritize prosecutors and veterans of a particular, centrist ideological bent. As a result, there will always be a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema — or a Joe Lieberman — willing to tank the party’s entire agenda.
The irony is that after spending his career as a conservative Democrat, Biden’s agenda is being thwarted by his own supposed allies. He ran as a creature of the Senate, who could force Republicans to support some of his most ambitious plans due to his decades in elected office. Now, he can’t even whip support from his own party. If the Democrats hadn’t spent decades doing everything possible to disempower the left and the party’s activist base, Biden might actually be able to advance his legislation. Unfortunately for the millions of people in the United States who stand to benefit from Biden’s stalled plans, that has never been a priority for the modern Democratic Party.
Sen. Bernie Sanders saidFriday that by vowing to uphold the archaic Senate rule standing in the way of voting rights legislation, his Senate colleagues Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are putting “the future of American democracy” at risk.
“It is a sad day when two members of the Democratic caucus are prepared to allow the Freedom to Vote Act to fail,” the Vermont senatortweeted. “I hope very much they will reconsider their positions.”
Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) opposition to weakening the 60-vote filibuster rule — a stance theyreiteratedThursday — effectively tanks their party’s hopes of passing voting rights legislation to thwart the GOP’smass disenfranchisementandelection subversionefforts in states across the country.
It is a sad day when two members of the Democratic Caucus are prepared to allow the Freedom to Vote Act to fail and undermine the future of American democracy. I hope very much they will reconsider their positions.
Despite the likelihood of failure, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY.) said the Senate will debate thenewly assembledFreedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act on Tuesday, a day after the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
“If Senate Republicans choose obstruction over protecting the sacred right to vote — as we expect them to — the Senate will consider and vote on changing the Senate rules, as has been done many times before, to allow for passage of voting rights legislation,” Schumersaidin a floor speech after Sinema made clear she would not back any such changes,intensifying callsfor a 2024 primary challenge.
The support of every member of the Senate Democratic caucus and a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris would be needed to enact a rule change.
With federal action likely not forthcoming, local Democratic officials and activists “now say they are resigned to having to spend and organize their way around” theslewof fresh Republican-authored voting restrictions, theNew York Timesreported, “a prospect many view with hard-earned skepticism.”
In a Julyletterto President Joe Biden, a coalition of 150 civil rights organizations wrote that “while we support the notion of a broad-based coalition of advocates, we cannot and should not have to organize our way out of the attacks and restrictions on voting that lawmakers are passing and proposing at the state level.”
“Nor can we litigate our way out of this threat to democracy,” the groups warned. “We must remember that at critical times in our history, one party has been forced to act alone in securing the fundamental democratic rights of American citizens, including Congress’ passage of both the 14th and 15th Amendments. Any rule or procedure that functions to stop bills from ever being considered on the floor is not a procedure to promote debate; it is a procedure to promote gridlock.”
While this plan avoids an initial filibuster, final passage of voting rights legislation will still require a confrontation on the Senate rule at some point. Either Republicans will have to allow a vote on the bill without blocking it — a highly unlikely possibility — or Democrats, faced with a GOP filibuster, will have to amend the rule after the bill is blocked.
“To ultimately end debate and pass the voting rights legislation, we will need 10 Republicans to join us — which we know from past experience will not happen — or we will need to change the Senate rules as has been done many times before,” Schumer wrote in his memo.
At that point, “every senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy,” Schumer added.
Currently, the specific changes to the filibuster that Schumer intends to propose are unclear, although there are several possible options. Democrats could restore the “talking filibuster,” which would require a senator to speak nonstop in order to block legislation. They could also create a “carve-out” that allows exceptions to the filibuster rule if a bill relates to voting rights. Finally, Democrats could opt to ditch the rule altogether – but although progressive advocates have repeatedly called for the elimination of the filibuster, it’s unlikely that this measure will be considered.
Even members of the Senate Democratic caucus are unsure which path Schumer plans to take.
Moderates in the Senate Democratic caucus have been negotiating with Manchin on the filibuster for weeks. Recently, a source with knowledge of the negotiations said that Manchin’s inconsistency has been a major obstacle.
“You think you’re just about there. You think you’ve got an agreement on most of the things and it’s settling in. And then you come back the next morning and you’re starting from scratch,” the source said.
President Joe Biden plans to give a speech on Tuesday in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss the need to pass voting rights legislation at the federal level — and to express his support for changing the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate to do so.
Republicans have used the Senate filibuster to block major voting rights bills four times over the past year. As GOP-led state legislatures across the country impose voting restrictions in response to Trump’s 2020 election loss, advocates have demanded that Democrats enact voting rights protections, even if that requires limiting the power of the filibuster.
Prior to the announcement that Biden will support changing the filibuster, a coalition of voting rights groups said that the president shouldn’t come to Georgia unless he had a plan for passing voting protections through both houses of Congress.
Speaking on voting rights without a strategy to address the filibuster issue would be “an empty gesture,” the coalition said, adding that it would “reject any visit by President Biden that does not include an announcement of a finalized voting rights plan.”
Since the coalition released their statement, the president has prepared a speech about the need to change the filibuster in order to pass voting rights bills, which he plans to give upon his arrival in Georgia.
“The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation,” Biden plans to say on Tuesday. “Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch.”
“I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” the president will go on. “And so the question is: where will the institution of the United States Senate stand?”
Democrats in the Senate have yet to determine the specific changes to the filibuster rule they will actually propose. Negotiations between moderate members in that chamber have stalled, due in large part to Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-West Virginia) lack of consistency on the issue.
Manchin is an ardent defender of the filibuster, so it’s likely that any adjustments will be minimal, as changing the rule would require the support of all 50 senators in the Democratic caucus. But Manchin’s stance seems to change from one day to the next, sources close to the negotiations have said.
“You think you’re just about there. You think you’ve got an agreement on most of the things and it’s settling in. And then you come back the next morning and you’re starting from scratch,” one source said, adding that trying to get Manchin’s support for changing the rule has been “like negotiating via Etch A Sketch.”
Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) promised a vote on changes to the filibuster by January 17 if Republicans continue to block voting rights legislation. Although that deadline is getting closer, Schumer hasn’t yet proposed specific changes to the rule.
In order to change the filibuster rule and pass voting rights legislation, the Senate “must evolve, like it has many times before,” Schumer said.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has promised to set up a vote on changing the filibuster later this month if Republicans in the Senate continue to block voting rights legislation.
Schumer made a similar promise to change filibuster rules in early November, after Republicans blocked voting rights legislation for the fourth time in less than a year — that time, it was the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would have allowed federal oversight on state election laws to prevent racial discrimination at the ballot box.
This time, Schumer’s promise appears to hold more weight, as he’s selected a day for Democrats to vote on changing the filibuster.
In a “Dear Colleague” letter on January 3, Schumer wrote about the anniversary of the January 6 Capitol attack, noting that the U.S. had faced numerous threats to its democracy since the 2020 presidential election — including the onslaught of Republican-backed voter suppression bills across the country.
“Much like the violent insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol nearly one year ago, Republican officials in states across the country have seized on the former president’s Big Lie about widespread voter fraud to enact anti-democratic legislation and seize control of typically non-partisan election administration functions,” Schumer wrote. “While these actions all proceed under the guise of so-called ‘election integrity,’ the true aim couldn’t be more clear. They want to unwind the progress of our Union, restrict access to the ballot, silence the voices of millions of voters, and undermine free and fair elections.”
Schumer vowed that the Senate would “take strong action to stop this antidemocratic march” by passing voting rights protection bills. But Democrats must change filibuster rules to prevent Republicans from blocking such legislation, he added.
“We must ask ourselves: if the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can we in good conscience allow for a situation in which the Republican Party can debate and pass voter suppression laws at the State level with only a simple majority vote, but not allow the United States Senate to do the same?” Schumer said.
The Senate “must evolve, like it has many times before,” to address the assault on democratic rights, Schumer went on. He said that a vote on changing the filibuster was scheduled for January 17 — Martin Luther King Jr. Day — “to protect the foundation of our democracy: free and fair elections.”
Of course, it will be difficult for Democrats to persuade Republicans to allow the passage of voting rights legislation or to vote for altering the filibuster — and several moderates in the Democratic caucus have also expressed opposition to such a move, most notably Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. However, other moderates in the caucus, including Angus King (I-Maine), Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) and Jon Tester (D-Montana), have been negotiating with Manchin and Sinema since before the holidays to discuss amending the filibuster rule. Possible amendments to the rule could include returning to a standing or talking filibuster in order to block legislation.
Schumer’s letter didn’t specify whether he wanted to make small changes to the filibuster or end the rule completely.
Polling from March of last year indicated that most Americans are in favor of ending the filibuster completely if it would enable the passage of meaningful voting rights protections. In a Data for Progress/Vox survey, 52 percent of respondents said they would support altering the archaic Senate rule if it meant the For the People Act would get passed, while only 37 percent said they would be against it.
After the Biden administration announced on Wednesday that it is extending the federal student loan payment pause, progressive lawmakers are encouraging the president to take further action by cancelling student debt.
Debt advocates and lawmakers have been pressuring Joe Biden to follow through with his campaign promise to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt per borrower, some of them urging him to forgive student loans altogether. These calls were amplified after the administration announced that it would be extending the payment freeze for another 90 days, until May 1 – a decision that debt cancellation advocates say was largely influenced by public pressure.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) praised the extension on Wednesday. “I applaud President Biden for once again pausing federal student loan payments for 45 million Americans,” he said. “Now let’s cancel it. All of it.”
The Vermont senator has long advocated for the cancellation of all federal student debt and included the measure in his platform during his 2020 presidential run. Sanders’s stance is more radical than that of other debt cancellation advocates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), who have urged Biden to cancel up to $50,000 in debt.
While this would eliminate all debts for a vast majority of borrowers, it would still leave many borrowers – often those with the most dire need for cancellation – with a large burden to bear. Roughly 6 percent of borrowers owe $100,000 or more in student loans, meaning that a plan to cancel about $50,000 in debt would still leave millions of borrowers with tens of thousands of dollars to pay off.
But either proposal would be more impactful than Biden’s promise to cancel up to $10,000 in debt per borrower – and also more impactful than cancelling no debt, which is what Biden has done so far.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) also celebrated the extension. “Thank you!” she wrote. “Next step: cancellation.”
“This is what happens when we all come together to raise our voices,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) said, praising debt advocates for putting continued pressure on Biden. “Extending the student loan payment pause is a HUGE step forward that will help people get through this pandemic. Now let’s keep pushing until [Biden] cancels student loan debt.”
Warren, Schumer and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who have been leading an ongoing effort to pressure Biden on loan forgiveness, issued a joint statement on the Biden administration’s decision. “Extending the pause will help millions of Americans make ends meet, especially as we overcome the Omicron variant,” they said. “We continue to call on President Biden to take executive action to cancel $50,000 in student debt, which will help close the racial wealth gap for borrowers and accelerate our economic recovery.”
Indeed, data finds that Black and other non-white borrowers have been disproportionately affected by the student loan crisis. The Brookings Institute found that the average white graduate owes $28,006 in student loans four years after graduation, while the average Black borrower owes $52,726 – nearly double that of white graduates. Debt cancellation could help close the racial wealth gap; a recent report from the Roosevelt Institute found that cancelling up to $50,000 per borrower could increase the wealth of Black Americans by a whopping 40 percent.
Financial assistance in the form of debt cancellation is especially urgent right now, as many families are about to lose a crucial safety net in the midst of yet another wave of the pandemic. The child tax credit program – which was expanded as part of the COVID stimulus packages – was crucial in reducing child poverty this year. But the last payment of the program went out recently, and thanks to Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and his staunch opposition to the program, poverty rates may go back up as the program expires.
Advocates say this makes debt cancellation all the more necessary, as it could help bolster the wealth of lower- and middle-income families as COVID continues to rock the economy. “The administration must now deliver on the President’s promise to cancel student debt, and lower costs for families at a time of tremendous health and economic uncertainty,” wrote the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “We need to continue our economic recovery and quest for racial justice.”
Congress voted to raise the debt limit on Tuesday after months of brinkmanship and Republican obstruction that threatened economic disaster.
The resolution raises the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion, staving off the next battle on the fiscal move until 2023. Both chambers of Congress passed the measure largely on party lines, with only one Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) voting in favor. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it into law as soon as possible.
Over the past months Republicans in the Senate have been threatening to send the U.S. into default for the first time in history over their refusal to raise the debt ceiling. Even as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was working to cut a deal with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) this month, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) insisted that Democrats capitulate to Republican demands on the debt ceiling and tack the issue to their reconciliation bill.
GOP obstruction, which was led by McConnell, pushed the country incredibly close to a default, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen predicted would occur on December 15. If the U.S. defaulted, Republicans were likely to blame Democrats for the ensuing economic disaster, obfuscating GOP responsibility.
Even a short default would have caused long-term economic instability, economists warned; a long-term default, meanwhile, would have mechanically triggered a recession, sending the fragile COVID economy spiraling and destroying up to $15 trillion of household wealth. President Joe Biden had slammed Republicans for their political games, calling it “hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful.”
McConnell and 13 other Republicans in the Senate ended up capitulating on their dangerous game last week, voting with Democrats last week to allow the debt ceiling to be passed with a simple majority in the chamber.
Schumer applauded the resolution’s passage on Tuesday. “As I have said repeatedly, this is about paying debt accumulated by both parties, so I am pleased Republicans and Democrats came together to facilitate a process that has made addressing the debt ceiling possible,” he said.
Indeed, a significant portion of U.S. debt was racked up by Donald Trump. With Republican lawmakers’ help on issues like tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, the national debt rose by nearly $8 trillion during Trump’s term. This is the third highest increase to the deficit by any presidential administration, only lower than George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom oversaw large wars.
Still, with Republicans refusing to vote to bypass a filibuster on the debt ceiling bill directly, the GOP has set itself up to spew spurious talking points about the debt ceiling in order to attack Democrats. Republicans have been lying about whose debts need to be paid, ignoring their outsized role in the current debt situation. Meanwhile, with only Democrats voting on Tuesday to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans have already begun to attack the party for supposed irresponsibility.
“Later today, every Senate Democrat is going to vote on party lines to raise our nation’s debt limit by trillions of dollars,” McConnell said ahead of the vote. Likely referring to the reconciliation package known as the Build Back Better Act, he continued, “if they jam through another reckless taxing and spending spree, this massive debt increase will just be the beginning.”
However, as the typically conservative Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found, the Build Back Better Act passed by the House would actually decrease the deficit. Republicans also had very little to say about the debt ceiling when the CBO estimated that the 2017 tax cut would cost the government $2.3 trillion over ten years.
If student loan payments are allowed to resume without mass debt cancellation, borrowers will lose out on billions of dollars monthly, according to a new report done on behalf of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts).
The Roosevelt Institute analysis finds that while the payment pause has helped borrowers save money and even accrue interest, it will cost them over $7 billion a month if payments resume in February. This translates to $85 billion annually.
Restarting payments will especially impact Black and Latinx people, who hold disproportionate amounts of student loans and who struggle to repay those loans at higher rates. Another recent Roosevelt Institute analysis found that canceling up to $50,000 of student debt per borrower would increase Black Americans’ wealth by 40 percent.
Canceling student debt could have wide-ranging positive effects for the economy, adding over $173 billion to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product in the first year alone.
Warren, Schumer and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) cited the report to renew their call for President Joe Biden to extend the payment pause and cancel up to $50,000 of student debt. On Wednesday, the lawmakers sent a letter to the White House saying that they want to present “alarming new information” on the loan repayment resumption.
“In order to prevent the student debt crisis from dragging down on our economic recovery, undermining the effectiveness of the American Rescue Plan, and causing unnecessary pain and stress for American families, we strongly urge you to extend the pause on student loan payments and interest and act to cancel student debt,” the lawmakers wrote.
The Roosevelt Institute also urged Biden to take action on student loans in their report, saying that “the Biden administration should take the lessons learned from the student loan payment pause and implement a full cancellation of student debt via executive order.”
Because the economy is still unstable for many lower- and middle-income Americans, resuming student loan payments could result in major financial disruption for borrowers. A recent survey of over 33,700 people by the Student Debt Crisis Center found that 89 percent of borrowers were not financially secure enough to resume student loan payments, which averaged nearly $400 a month before the pandemic.
These payments present a significant financial burden to borrowers. Over a quarter of respondents said that a third of their income or more will go toward payments, while a tenth of respondents said that payments will cost at least half of their income.
Lawmakers have said that the pandemic is still affecting the economy — and they’ve also argued that the emergence of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is reason enough to extend the pandemic repayment pause. Researchers are still studying the new variant, but officials say it may require an additional booster dose of COVID vaccines.
This latest letter is the continuation of more than a dozen efforts by Warren and other lawmakers this year to urge Biden to take action on student loans. On the campaign trail, Biden promised to cancel up to $10,000 of student debt per borrower.
Biden hasn’t just failed to cancel student debt; his administration has also lied about the existence of an Education Department memo on the subject. Earlier this year, Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain said that the Education Department would be examining the issue and releasing their opinion on whether or not Biden has the authority to cancel student debt.
That memo was never released, and for months, the administration has said that they don’t have any information on its contents. The memo’s existence was only made public through a Freedom of Information Act filed by debt activists — and it was dated April 8, meaning that the administration has had the memo for months and kept it secret from the public.
So far, the Biden administration’s only step toward student loan relief has been to extend the student loan repayment pause until the end of January next year. With less than two months until payments are scheduled to begin again, and with the administration’s relative weakness on other pandemic protections like the eviction moratorium, it’s unclear whether Biden is planning to take action.
Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have reached an agreement on the debt limit, subverting the economic disaster that would have taken place if the United States government were to default on its debts for the first time.
The proposed workaround would temporarily bypass Republicans’ ability to filibuster Democrats on the debt ceiling vote — leaving many progressive advocates questioning why the measure can’t be taken for other critical issues, like voting protections and reproductive rights.
McConnell has said that he believes he has the 10 GOP votes that will be necessary to advance the deal. After the proposal is passed, a second bill, which deals with the actual raising of the debt limit, could be advanced in the Senate without any Republican support.
The proposal will benefit both parties in different ways. Democrats will be able to pass a one-time debt ceiling increase that could go beyond the 2022 midterms, allowing them to put the issue on the backburner between now and November. Meanwhile, Republicans will still have the ability to vote against raising the debt limit — as they promised they would do in October — without fearing that their votes will lead the U.S. to default on its debts.
The deal comes after the Treasury Department recently estimated that the government would exceed its current debt limit sometime in the second half of December.
The deal would also be a one-time thing, barring a similar agreement from being passed in the future. After Democrats raise the debt ceiling later this month, neither party will be able to raise the debt ceiling with a simple majority vote again, as they will no longer be able to bypass the filibuster.
Several progressive advocates have expressed their frustration that a filibuster workaround could be negotiated on this issue but not for similarly high-stakes issues.
“If we can make a filibuster carve out for the debt ceiling, than [sic] we can do it for voting rights and the right to choose,” said State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a Democrat from Pennsylvania.
Richard Stengel, a political analyst for MSNBC, tweeted about the deal, directing his ire at Democratic lawmakers.
“That’s great that you figured out a way to raise the debt ceiling with 51 votes. How about using 51 votes to save our democracy by getting rid of the filibuster and passing voting rights?” Stengel wrote.
“If the Senate is willing to work around filibuster rules to protect the economy, they should be willing to work around it to protect our vote,” read a tweet from Stand Up America, a progressive organization dedicated to combating voter suppression and corruption.
Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, directed her comments toward Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia who steadfastly opposed any changes to the filibuster.
“So a filibuster carve out and the Senate is not destroyed. Sen. Manchin has equated the filibuster with democracy itself,” Ifill wrote. “If you can make an exception for the debt ceiling you can do so to protect voting rights.”
In the third quarter of this year, as the Democratic leaders of Congress were scrambling to decide what to keep in President Biden’s reconciliation package and what to cut, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer accepted a $66,000 bundle of campaign contributions from the head of the health insurance industry’s top lobbying group.
The bundle of checks, collected and given to Schumer’s campaign by Matt Eyles, the president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), was disclosed in a lobbyist bundling report covering July through September that Schumer filed with the Federal Election Commission. The report does not indicate the exact date that Eyles gave the bundled donations to Schumer.
A review of FEC filings shows that Eyles’ Q3 bundle is the first time he or any other AHIP lobbyist has bundled donations for Schumer. It was the largest bundle, by total dollar amount, that Schumer has received since 2016. Campaigns have to disclose bundled donations when they are forwarded to them, either physically or electronically, by lobbyists or PACs that were established by lobbyists.
Eyles’ organization is the health insurance industry’s largest lobbying group, with annual expenditures of around $60 million per year. In the third quarter of this year, AHIP disclosed lobbying the Senate and House on the Build Back Better Act and other issues that have been part of discussions around the bill. Its members include Cigna, Aetna, and Humana.
One of the group’s goals for the Build Back Better Act has been to block a proposal from the Biden White House to add dental, vision, and hearing benefits to Medicare. Most Medicare Advantage plans, such as those offered by Cigna and Aetna, include dental, hearing, and vision benefits, so adding these coverages under traditional Medicare would be a hit to the insurance companies’ competitive advantage against the government. According to Politico, insurance companies were “freaking out” over Biden’s proposal for dental, vision, and hearing Medicare coverage, but they kept it mainly behind the scenes since it would be bad optics to be seen as opposing better health coverage for seniors.
The pared-down version of the bill that emerged from the Democratic leaders’ negotiations and was put on the House floor does not include dental or vision coverage for Medicare patients. Of the three areas of health care coverage the insurance industry sought to kill, only hearing has so far survived.
Dental and vision coverage could be added back to the bill in the Senate — and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has said on Twitter that they will be in the Senate version — but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), a critical swing vote, says he opposes the coverages because he is worried about the program’s solvency.
Forty-seven percent of Medicare beneficiaries did not have dental coverage in 2019, according to a report from Kaiser Family Foundation. Without routine dental care, oral health issues often go unaddressed until individuals are in extreme pain and are forced to pay out of pocket for expensive treatments. In some cases, senior’s oral health issues can lead to fatal infections, while in many cases they have to take antibiotics that damage their intestinal microbiome and therefore weaken their immune systems.
Asked for comment on the $66,000 bundle of donations from the AHIP lobbyist, a Schumer spokesperson told Sludge that the senator “is one of the Senate’s biggest advocates for Medicare expansion and has been doing everything he can to pass the most robust legislation possible.”
Schumer’s campaign received many more health insurance industry donations in the third quarter besides the AHIP bundle. AHIP’s PAC gave him the legal maximum of $5,000 on Sept. 30, and health insurance company donations that appear in his quarterly disclosure include those from PACs affiliated with Humana ($5,000), Cigna ($1,500), Molina Healthcare ($5,000), MVP Health Care ($2,500), and more. Many more insurance executives also donated to the senator, including $20,300 from UnitedHealth Group executives like executive vice president and chief financial officer John Rex, and senior vice president of policy and strategy Catherine Anderson.
Also in Schumer’s third quarter lobbyist bundling report are bundles of $37,200 from the PAC of American Health Care Association, a nursing home group, and $46,200 from the American Council Of Life Insurers PAC, a trade association whose hundreds of member companies represent 95% of industry assets. Schumer is up for re-election in 2022.
The Build Back Better Act was passed by the House of Representatives on Nov. 19 and has been sent to the Senate, where it may be voted on under budget reconciliation rules, which do not allow its opponents to filibuster. The bill is likely to face further cuts to accommodate the wishes of conservative Democratic senators, whose votes will be needed in the 50-50 split Senate. If the bill is changed and then passed, it will be ping-ponged back to the House for another vote.
After Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) tweeted a video depicting an animated version of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Monday, Democratic leaders in Congress have called for an investigation into the Arizona lawmaker.
“Threats of violence against Members of Congress and the President of the United States must not be tolerated,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) wrote on Tuesday. She then called on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) to join her in “condemning this horrific video,” asking him to “call on the Ethics Committee and law enforcement to investigate.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) also condemned Gosar’s video, calling it a “disgusting video from a pathetic man.”
The video, which Gosar tweeted on Monday, depicts Gosar’s face overlaid on an anime character slashing the neck of a character with Ocasio-Cortez’s face superimposed on it. After killing Ocasio-Cortez, the video shows Gosar — alongside Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) — preparing to attack President Joe Biden.
McCarthy has been mum on the issue so far — and it’s unlikely that the house minority leader will pursue formal disciplinary action against Gosar, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out on Twitter. “He’ll face no consequences because [McCarthy] cheers him on with excuses,” she wrote. Although this isn’t the first time that the New York progressive has faced violent language and threats from her colleagues, there has never been any action or ethics investigations in response. “All at my job,”Ocasio-Cortez continued, “and nothing ever happens.”
The House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee also called for an ethics investigation on Tuesday, saying, “In any other job in America, if a coworker made a video killing another coworker, that person would be fired.”
“Mr. McCarthy needs to decide whether he will finally stand with the American people on the side of law and order or he will continue to support violence and chaos,” wrote the committee’s co-chairs, Representatives Matthew Cartwright (Pennsylvania), Debbie Dingell (Michigan), Ted Lieu (California) and Joe Neguse (Colorado) in a statement.
Predictably, Gosar’s office has downplayed his violent threat. In a disingenuous statement released on Wednesday, Gosar said that he doesn’t “espouse violence or harm against any Members of Congress or Mr. Biden,” despite the video showing him literally espousing violence against Democrats. He then made the dubious claim that the video was meant to portray fights over bills in Congress — fights, evidently, where politically motivated murder is justified.
If McCarthy chooses to ignore this incident, it wouldn’t be the first ethics violation that he’s blatantly ignored. Multiple far-right members of his caucus have been tied to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in which several people died and the lives of many lawmakers, including Vice President Mike Pence, were threatened.
Last month, Rolling Stonereported that one of the attack’s organizers claimed a number of extremist right-wing Republican lawmakers had helped plan the attempted coup, specifically naming Gosar, Greene and Boebert. That report was met with silence from Republican leaders.
In fact, some experts say that McCarthy himself has violated ethics rules. Earlier this year, McCarthy threatened telecommunications companies, saying that if they comply with the January 6 committee request to retain call records related to the attack, the GOP “will not forget.” In an op-ed for Politico, ethics experts Norm Eisen and Fred Wertheimer said that this threat should be subject to a House Ethics Committee probe, and perhaps even a criminal referral.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are calling for Gosar to be removed from Congress. “Every day these white supremacists push the limits further and further to see how far they can go without consequences. This puts lives in danger,” wrote Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) on Tuesday. “Enough with the violent bigotry. Expel this white supremacist clown.”
For the fourth time this year, Republicans have filibustered to block voting rights protections proposed by Democrats — prompting Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-New York) to hint that his party might consider changes to the legislative rule.
Republicans blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a bill named for the late Democratic lawmaker and civil rights activist who spent much of his career advocating for voting rights. The bill would have enabled the federal government to oversee state voting laws in order to prevent racial discrimination during elections, as well as overturned two Supreme Court rulings over the past decade that loosened regulations in the Voting Rights Act.
Speaking on Wednesday from the Senate floor, Schumer did not directly address the issue of the filibuster. However, he did allude to changing the rule — which many have described as a Jim Crow relic — in order to ensure voting rights reforms could pass.
“Just because Republicans will not join us doesn’t mean Democrats will stop fighting,” Schumer said. “This is too important. We will continue to fight for voting rights and find an alternative path forward, even if it means going it alone.”
Schumer added that he and Democrats should “explore whatever paths we have to restore the Senate so it does what the framers intended — debate, deliberate, compromise and vote.”
Also on Wednesday, Schumer met with Democratic Senate caucus members to “strategize” about having “family discussions” within the party to “restore the Senate” when it comes to passing voting rights, according to a senior Democratic aide who spoke to The Hill.
This isn’t the first time that Schumer has alluded to reforming the Senate rule. In September, when Republicans threatened to filibuster the Freedom to Vote Act (a watered-down version of the more expansive For the People Act), Schumer warned that he and his party would do whatever was necessary to pass a voting rights bill.
“We’re going to take action to make sure we protect our democracy and fight against the disease of voter suppression, partisan gerrymandering and election subversion that is metastasizing at the state level,” Schumer said at the time.
While many progressives would welcome changes to the filibuster or even the elimination of the practice altogether, Schumer’s threats to reform the filibuster ring somewhat empty, considering the change would require the support of all 50 Democrats in the Senate. Many conservative Democrats have said they oppose filibuster abolition or reform — including one of the filibuster’s most vehement defenders, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia).
In an op-ed he wrote in April, Manchin said there was “no circumstance” in which he would support weakening the filibuster. Instead, he said, lawmakers should try to reach agreements across the political aisle — despite zero indication from Republicans that they are willing to compromise on voting rights or any other Democratic proposals.
“Instead of fixating on eliminating the filibuster or shortcutting the legislative process through budget reconciliation, it is time we do our jobs,” Manchin said.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) has endorsed India Walton, the Democratic candidate for the mayor of Buffalo. Election day is on November 2, less than two weeks away.
“Today, I endorse [India Walton], the Democratic nominee for Mayor of Buffalo. She’s a community leader, nurse, and mother with a clear progressive vision for her hometown,” wrote Schumer on Thursday. “Dems are at our best when we build a big tent and forge inclusive coalitions to fight for everyday people.”
Though Walton, a socialist, won the Democratic primary for the position in June, the New York state’s Democratic Party establishment has aligned itself against her. Schumer’s endorsement stands in contrast to his state’s party, though it is standard for party leaders to endorse the party’s candidate in significant races.
Schumer appeared to acknowledge shady tactics waged by the state party’s establishment in his endorsement. “India Walton won the Democratic primary fair and square and is the nominee,” he wrote. “Throughout my career, I have worked long, hard, and diligently to bring federal resources to Western New York and I look forward to doing that with India Walton for the betterment of the people of Buffalo.”
Walton celebrated Schumer’s endorsement on Thursday. “I am honored to receive the endorsement of [Senator Schumer]. Together, we will beat back these Republican attacks and build the safe, healthy Buffalo we all need and deserve,” she wrote. She continued to highlight other high-profile endorsements like those of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).
If elected, Walton would be the first socialist mayor of a major city in the U.S. in 60 years.
Perhaps because of this, Walton’s candidacy has been marked with strife due to the state’s party establishment. Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who took over after Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace, has not endorsed or otherwise vocally supported Walton, and important state Democrats like Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes and state Chairman Jay Jacobs have remained similarly unsupportive.
Jacobs made headlines earlier this week after comparing a hypothetical endorsement of Walton to an endorsement of Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, one of the most detestable and racist living figures in American history. Jacobs later apologized for the comparison — though not until he faced considerable backlash.
The party has made some other desperate moves in attempts to block a socialist mayorship. In August, Buffalo’s Common Council explored the possibility of getting rid of the mayoral position entirely after sensationalism and fear mongering took over prominent Democrats and some local media outlets.
Walton is still in a powerful position. She has gathered the support of several unions herself as well as the support of national progressive and socialist organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party and Run For Something. As a result of Brown’s write-in campaign, however, it is still unclear who will come out on top next month.
Brown’s tenure has been marked by financial mismanagement and scandal involving government contractors with ties to the mayor’s campaign. The incumbent mayor has touted the support of local police officers, despite a failure, critics say, to reign in corruption and violence by the Buffalo Police department.
Meanwhile, Walton has run on a campaign promising to address public safety by expanding non-police de-escalation resources, like involving social workers in mental health outreach and investments in restorative justice in place of imprisonment. She has also promised to invest in traditionally marginalized communities like the city’s East Side, which is majority Black.
The debt ceiling crisis has been temporarily settled — momentary relief to be followed almost certainly by at least some degree of mayhem just when Santa is warming up the sled — and almost nobody is satisfied with the outcome. The jangled confusion of today’s “resolution” is the essence of what happens when Republicans try to govern Republicans.
At first blush, the idea of confusion within the GOP ranks seems incongruous; they are, if anything, more adept at marching in step than the Marine Corps Brass Band. Look closer, though, and understand where they’re marching to: “No masks! No mandates! Donald Trump is the president!” This is the far right being shoved by the far-far right, and the lot of them inevitably wind up going over a cliff together, inevitably taking the rest of us with them.
A perfect microcosm of this phenomenon has been unspooling itself in Idaho this week. The Gem State is no stranger to hard-right politics; there is currently a movement to have Idaho absorb five conservative Oregon counties and refashion itself as, I don’t know, Super Trump Idaho or something. The senior senator from Idaho is Mike Crapo, who famously un-endorsed Trump after the “grab her by the p—-y” video came to light at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. After the roof caved in on him, Crapo scrapped his un-endorsement and stapled himself to Trump for all time.
So, yeah, it can get pretty weird in Idaho, but this story is another thing entirely. The state’s Republican governor, Brad Little, took a trip on Tuesday to the southern border in Texas, where he was joined by ten other Republican governors to grandstand about President Biden’s immigration policies.
The moment his plane disappeared into the sky, his lieutenant governor — one Janice McGeachin, among the hardest of the hard righties in that state and an assumed candidate for Little’s job next time it comes up — initiated what amounted to a palace coup in order to shove a wad of far-right nonsense into the daylight.
First, McGeachin attempted to call up the Idaho National Guard and send it to the Texas/Mexico border, presumably near where Little already was, in order to fight the “invasion” of the country. She was stonily rebuffed by Major General Michael J. Garshak, commander of the Guard, who reminded her, “As you are aware, the Idaho National Guard is not a law enforcement agency.”
McGeachin wasn’t finished. Assuming the powers of the governorship, the lieutenant governor signed a number of executive orders banning vaccine requirements for all K-12 schools and universities, even though no such requirements existed to begin with; she banned stuff that wasn’t there. From Texas, Little rescinded her executive orders and National Guard call-up, and scolded her actions as “an affront to the Idaho constitution.”
I’m not sure why Little was surprised. McGeachin pulled this same number back in May when Little left town for a conference of the Republican Governors Association. After he left, McGeachin barred all local officials and state schools from requiring masks, even though, again, no such requirement existed. Little reversed her again, reprimanded her again, and will likely have to deal with her when he runs for re-election. These little insurrections were McGeachin’s first campaign commercials, and they have put Little in a bind.
Little, who is far right, gets shoved by the far-far right McGeachin, all because of Donald Trump’s ongoing gravitational pull within the Republican Party. Little put no mask or vaccine mandates in place — a fact his state is suffering for — but McGeachin has painted a portrait of Little The Lefty crushing everyone’s freedom while she alone acted in defense of liberty. Little can try to explain himself, but all McGeachin has to do is howl “Tyranny!” and she’s won the exchange… so Little will be forced to tack even further to the right to defend his flank.
As it goes with Idaho, so it goes in Washington, D.C. The country came to this place with the debt ceiling because Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to throw sand in the gears of President Biden’s domestic agenda but was not intentionally destructive enough to appease his own far-far right flank. He and Little should compare notes.
The handiest hostage in McConnell’s initial effort was the threat of defaulting on the nation’s debt, an act that would have clobbered an already precarious global economy. As the October 18 deadline drew closer, Democrats could not be sure if McConnell was truly enough of a nihilist to follow through on his threat, and they began scrambling for ways to go around him. That got weird in a hurry; ideas like minting a trillion-dollar coin were floated and dismissed.
Meanwhile, McConnell started getting an earful from banks and business interests, asking him to kindly refrain from destroying the world. Overtures were made by McConnell to the Democrats regarding potential resolutions, at which point the far-far right within McConnell’s caucus began to shove. What deal? they asked. I thought we were doing this. We have to do this!
Then it got better: “Looks like Mitch McConnell is folding to the Democrats, again,” Trump whaargarbld from Florida. “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand. Don’t let them destroy our country!”
Not to be outdone even by his lord and master, Sean Hannity of Fox News weighed in. “Radical Democrats on Capitol Hill have a brand new hero,” he seethed, “with their multi-trillion-dollar socialist agenda now stalled in Congress, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is throwing them a lifeline. In a backroom deal, McConnell agreed to raise the debt ceiling, giving Democrats more time to use a process known as ‘reconciliation’ to ram through their socialist agenda.” Hannity concluded his aria by demanding that McConnell “stop being a Washington swamp-creature and start acting like a conservative.”
Despite this outraged yowling, the deal came together before noon on Thursday. “Top Senate Democrats and Republicans said on Thursday that they had struck a deal to allow the debt ceiling to be raised through early December,” reportsThe New York Times, “temporarily staving off the threat of a first-ever default on the national debt after the GOP agreed to temporarily drop its blockade of an increase.”
The problem — of course there’s a problem, there’s always a problem — is that the McConnell “resolution” accepted by the Democrats does not fully meet the amount required to meet the country’s debt, and it will all have to be re-litigated in December, smack-dab in the middle of the holiday season and right when the next government shutdown confrontation is set to take place. While McConnell may enjoy the chaos this will inevitably cause, the fact remains that what came out of his oven on this was half a loaf, and half-baked at that, because of the shouting from his own right flank.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took the deal because it averts an imminent economic apocalypse, and also gives his caucus a couple of months to hammer out the details of President Biden’s Build Back Better Act. All for the good, sure, but also a damn mess, one created by an intramural shoving match between Republican politicians seeking to out-Trump each other in time for next year’s midterms. Just another day of Republican politics, Idaho-style.
