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Category: chuck schumer

  • Schumer Announces Deal Reached With GOP Senators to Fund Government Through Dec

    Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (center) leaves after speaking to reporters following a Democratic policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on September 28, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    On Wednesday evening, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) announced that Democrats and Republicans in the Senate had reached a deal to avert a government shutdown this week.

    On Monday, Republicans blocked efforts to fund the government beyond the midnight deadline on Friday morning. Without a continuing resolution to produce more funds, there was the possibility of a government shutdown, which would have resulted in the sudden halting of a number of federal services for an indeterminate amount of time.

    Schumer announced that Republicans had agreed not to block a new vote on the measure, set to come sometime midday on Thursday — hours before the deadline would have been reached.

    “We have an agreement on the CR — the continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown — and we should be voting on that tomorrow morning,” Schumer said on Wednesday night.

    The resolution is set to keep the government open through at least December 3. It will include funding for emergency services, such as disaster relief, as well as funding for the resettlement of Afghan refugees.

    Upon passage, the bill will likely be voted upon and passed in the House of Representatives later that day, and signed into law by President Joe Biden.

    The agreement on the continuing resolution is a significant development, as it will avert a crisis that would have started this week. One analysis found that as many as 6 million jobs could have been lost if government funding wasn’t continued on Thursday.

    Although the measure addresses how the government will be funded for the next two months, it does not resolve the raising of the debt ceiling. The U.S. is set to default on its debt obligations around October 18 if nothing changes in the immediate future, a situation that could come with serious economic repercussions.

    Defaulting on the debt could mean the U.S.’s ability to borrow money will be negatively impacted. In 2011, the mere possibility of default led to the nation’s credit rating being downgraded by Standard & Poor’s for the first time in 70 years.

    Failing to adjust the debt ceiling wouldn’t just affect the government’s credit rating — it would also have rippling effects on the rest of the country, and could cause a recession that would damage an already weakened economy.

    “It would only take a couple of months of missing federal payments due to the debt ceiling to mechanically send the economy into recession — and that’s without assessing damage it would cause from financial market fallouts,” an assessment from the Economic Policy Institute warned.

    Some lawmakers believe that Congress should no longer have the responsibility of managing fiscal crises. On Thursday morning, Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pennsylvania) tweeted that legislation he proposed with Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Kentucky) could ensure that debt limits would never be a political issue to be debated on again.

    This artificial crisis is COMPLETELY avoidable,” Boyle tweeted. “The Debt Ceiling Reform Act that @RepJohnYarmuth and I introduced [Wednesday] would fix this problem.”

    According to a press release from Boyle, the proposed bill “would eliminate the debt limit as we now know it” and would transfer the authority to raise the debt ceiling to the Treasury Department.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Show They’d Rather Risk Recession Than Allow Democrats to Pass Bills

    Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer conducts a news conference after the Senate Democrats Policy luncheon in the U.S. Capitol on September 28, 2021.

    Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) blocked Democrats’ latest attempt to stave off economic disaster on Tuesday — and the more options Republicans shoot down to avoid a shutdown and debt default, the more the already fragile economy is at risk.

    McConnell rejected a call from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) on Tuesday for unanimous consent from the Senate to allow Democrats to pass a debt ceiling raise with a simple majority. If lawmakers don’t reach a solution on the debt limit and government funding by Thursday, the government will shut down and the U.S. would come closer to defaulting on its loans, a situation that economists say could be nothing short of disastrous.

    Instead of several workarounds that Democrats could employ, McConnell is insistent that they bend to his party’s will and work a debt ceiling raise into their reconciliation bill. But Democrats have made clear that it would be difficult — if not impossible — to go through Senate procedure quickly enough to pass the reconciliation bill before the country is slated to default. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says a default will happen on October 18 if Congress doesn’t take action.

    “To do this through reconciliation requires ping-ponging separate bills back from the Senate and the House.” Schumer said on Wednesday, according to NBC’s Frank Thorp. “Individual senators could move to delay and delay and delay. It is very risky and could well lead us to default, even if only one senator wanted.” Schumer went on to call the strategy “uncharted waters.”

    McConnell’s decision to shoot down yet another debt ceiling option makes the GOP’s motivations even more clear: Republicans would rather risk economic disaster than allow Democrats to pass their legislative agenda.

    “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will go out of our way to help Democrats conserve their time and energy, so they can resume ramming through partisan socialism as fast as possible,” the minority leader said on Tuesday. Despite McConnell’s fear mongering, the provisions of the Build Back Better Act do not include suddenly implementing socialism.

    However, other Republicans have been falling in line with McConnell’s dangerous obstruction. “Schumer is in the process of surrendering completely,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), per HuffPost’s Igor Bobic. “I expect that Schumer when he’s done with his political games he will do what we pointed out at the beginning, which is raise the debt ceiling using Democratic votes on reconciliation.”

    GOP lawmakers know that the reconciliation bill is in no position to pass the Senate, as it has no Republican support and conservative Democrats are working to water down the bill as much as possible. But the party leadership doesn’t actually want Democrats to pass the reconciliation bill and raise the debt ceiling — instead, they want to gut the reconciliation bill and ruin the Democrats’ chances at passing their agenda.

    “We plan to use the rules to slow down a lot of really bad policy,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said, according to a Forbes report. Referring to the possibility that Democrats will have to go through reconciliation to pass the debt ceiling, he continued: “I don’t mind seeing them burn up some floor time on reconciliation.”

    In what is an extreme and reckless show of obstructionism, McConnell and fellow Republicans are putting the economy’s health at massive risk. Unless Democrats are able to pass a temporary measure to fund the government — one of their only options left — the U.S. will likely have to default on its loans, a scenario that Yellen says would be unprecedented.

    A default would have catastrophic consequences for the economy. A Moody’s Analytics analysis last week found that a default could trigger a recession mirroring the Great Recession of 2008, costing six million jobs and yanking $15 trillion worth of household wealth out of the hands of the public. Even sans default, economists say that a short government shutdown, which becomes more likely every time Republicans shoot down another solution, would have generational consequences.

    It’s ironic for Republicans to accuse Democrats of playing political games when they are risking a recession just to block Democrats from passing a bill that would have major benefits to the working class — and then pinning all of the blame on Democrats.

    If Democrats do go the reconciliation route — which is unlikely given Schumer’s objections, but possible given the desperation of the situation — some writers and economists are saying that Democrats should use the opportunity to nullify the debt limit entirely. This would eliminate the possibility of politicians using it as a political pawn and would simply make the government run smoother, advocates say.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Schumer Hints at Filibuster Workaround If Republicans Stonewall Voting Rights

    Chuck Schumer points at somebody

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) warned Republicans on Tuesday that if they unite against an upcoming voting rights bill and reject its passage, he and the chamber will explore a workaround to the filibuster to pass the bill through a simple majority.

    “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, per Reuters.

    Earlier this month, a group of Democratic senators released the Freedom to Vote Act, a modified version of the For the People Act, which the House passed in March. Though the new voting rights bill is weaker in some ways than the For the People Act, the compromise bill still contains many of the pillars of the For the People Act — and crucially, has the support of conservative Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

    Manchin has been trying to whip up at least 10 Republican votes for the bill so that it can pass under the 60-vote filibuster rule. But it’s incredibly unlikely that any Republicans would be swayed to support voting rights legislation that would allow more people to vote, which they believe puts them at a disadvantage.

    Democrats and progressives have spent the past few months pushing for filibuster reform or abolition. Filibuster abolitionists have said that the arcane rule is obstructing a wide swath of Democratic priorities; reformists have focused on the voting rights bill, arguing that voting rights are important enough to carve out an exception for.

    The urgency of the matter has pushed President Joe Biden to support filibuster reform for voting rights — and Biden has reportedly been talking with Schumer to coordinate a strategy to align Democrats with the cause.

    Biden has previously held out on supporting filibuster reform, saying in July that Republicans “know better” than to pare down voting rights across the country. The same month, the White House even suggested that Democrats could “out-organize” voter suppression — a suggestion that was widely panned by progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York).

    The fight over the filibuster has underscored every fight in the Senate over the last nine months. Faced with several existential issues like the encroaching fascism of the Republican party and the rapidly worsening climate crisis, Democrats have a small window of opportunity to pass vital legislation before the 2022 midterms, when early projections predict that Republicans could retake the majority in the House and potentially the Senate.

    However, the voting rights legislation is particularly timely because of the Republican state-level campaign to restrict access to the ballot across the country. Since the beginning of this year, several Republican-governed states have collectively passed 30 laws that make it harder to vote, according to a July report from the Brennan Center for Justice.

    Since then, states like Texas have passed more such restrictive laws, many of them would disproportionately make it harder for Black and Brown communities to cast a ballot. These voter suppression laws restrict mail-in and early voting in particular, two things that Donald Trump targeted as president.

    Without legislation like the Freedom to Vote Act, Democrats could be permanently facing uphill battles in elections in many states. Voting rights advocates say passing sweeping voting rights legislation is crucial for saving democracy in the U.S, and to ensuring that Republicans can’t rig every election going forward and passing other laws to disenfranchise the will of voters when they lose elections.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Parliamentarian Blocks Dems From Including Immigration in Reconciliation Bill

    People attend a protest and display signs in support of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals)

    Democrats were dealt a heavy blow over the weekend after the U.S. Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled that lawmakers could not include pathways to legal citizenship for noncitizens living in the country within the proposed $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package.

    The parliamentarian acts as an arbiter of the rules of the Senate. Often compared to a “referee” by the media, the person in the role can determine whether or not certain aspects of reconciliation bills adhere to the rules for those pieces of legislation.

    This is the second instance in 2021 where MacDonough has ruled that Democrats cannot include an important legislative policy goal within a reconciliation package they have proposed. Earlier this year, MacDonough said that a minimum wage increase couldn’t be included in a bill related to coronavirus economic relief.

    On Sunday, MacDonough made a similar ruling against changes to immigration law that Democrats were proposing, including, among other items, allowing Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status holders to receive green cards.

    “Changing the law to clear the way to [legal permanent residence] status is tremendous and enduring policy change that dwarfs its budgetary impact,” the parliamentarian said.

    A parliamentarian’s opinion is usually respected, but the presiding officer of the Senate — in this case, Vice President Kamala Harris — can overturn their decision if they wish to do so. Some Democrats are calling on Harris and other Democratic leaders in the Senate, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), to do just that.

    “This ruling by the parliamentarian is only a recommendation. @SenSchumer and the @WhiteHouse can and should ignore it,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) wrote in a tweet.

    Jose Lopez, co-executive director of Make the Road New York, also called on lawmakers to press forward and find a way to include immigration reform within the $3.5 trillion spending package.

    “Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration have committed to bringing home legalization for our neighbors and loved ones in this budget reconciliation package, and we will hold them to their word,” Lopez said in a statement.

    But Democratic leaders, while exploring other options to address the ruling from MacDonough, have hinted that they are not likely to directly confront the parliamentarian’s decision, and that they will ultimately choose to comply.

    “Senate Democrats have prepared an alternative proposal for the Parliamentarian’s consideration in the coming days,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the second-ranking Democrat in the upper chamber.

    “The Parliamentarian’s ruling is deeply disappointing but we fully expect our partners in the Senate to come back with alternative immigration-related proposals for the Parliamentarian to consider,” the White House also said in a statement given to Axios.

    A reconciliation bill allows legislative priorities to be considered without the need to have a filibuster-proof supermajority within the Senate — just a simple majority of Senators have to support the bill for it to pass. If Democrats’ other considerations include proposals to pass immigration reform through separate bills, the likelihood of them being blocked by Republicans through a filibuster increases significantly.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Senate Passes Infrastructure Bill With Some GOP Support. Don’t Get Too Excited.

    Mitch Mcconnell

    Like wet molasses getting pushed up a sandy hill, President Biden’s two-pronged $4.7 trillion infrastructure package is wending its incremental way toward finally becoming reality.

    This first portion, a $1.2 trillion package aimed at modernizing the country’s moldering public works and power grids, passed the Senate today by a vote of 69 to 30. This is a significant step. The number of Republicans who voted “Yes,” including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, is no surprise, despite the partisan strife that is our collective daily bread these days; 18 GOP senators voted with all 50 members of the Democratic caucus to evade the filibuster earlier in the process, and the bill itself is wildly popular across a broad spectrum of voters.

    These people will go home for the August break soon, and are happy to have something in hand to prove they actually work for a living. After all, it’s Washington D.C.; the details of the bill matter far less than the fact of the bill’s passage. In this instance, the bill contains a fraction of what was originally proposed — the GOP won a number of legislation-shrinking victories here, including the removal from the bill of a plan to increase IRS attention on wealthy tax evaders — but after years of fruitless “Infrastructure Weeks” dating all the way back to the Obama administration, it represents a notable triumph for a first-year president.

    “The legislation, which still must pass the House, would touch nearly every facet of the American economy and fortify the nation’s response to the warming of the planet,” reports The New York Times. That last bit is more than a bit exaggerated; while there are aspects of the bill devoted to addressing the beyond-urgent climate crisis, the best climate bits got shaved off in negotiations between conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans. Progressive lawmakers will attempt to salvage some (though not enough) of those elements within the $3.5 trillion second prong of the plan.

    Don’t expect to see orange-vested workers driving shiny black steel jackhammers anytime soon, alas; this bill, like all things in Creation apparently, must bend to the vacation plans of Congress. The House is out of session until September, so Biden won’t have anything to sign for real until people are well into the argument about who should be playing quarterback for the Patriots.

    For House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this delay could prove to be a boon. House progressives are rightfully outraged by the volume of vital climate material that was left out of this first bill, and others within the caucus want both portions to be voted on simultaneously. Short version: Pelosi will almost certainly not recall the House to vote on these bills earlier than scheduled; this will give her time to square these sundry circles, hopefully in favor of the planet for a refreshing change of pace.

    The $3.5 trillion second half — what Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders on Monday called “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s” — is immediately next up on deck, and unless I miss my guess, the fur is going to fly on this one.

    “For now, the Senate’s budget blueprint specifically paves the way for significant new spending on child care and education, as Democrats look to fulfill a promise to make community college free for two years,” reports The Washington Post. “The budget resolution also opens the door for lawmakers to extend a recent set of expanded federal tax credits that help families with children. Another bucket of spending would target the environment, addressing Democrats’ concerns that the bipartisan infrastructure deal would not go far enough to address issues related to the warming planet.”

    Minority Leader McConnell has made it plain that his entire caucus would gnaw off a limb before voting in favor of this massive, deeply progressive piece of legislation. This puts the 60-vote filibuster threshold squarely back on the table, and in order to dodge it, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will have to shepherd this thing to daylight by way of reconciliation: a narrow, budget-based process that requires only 51 votes for passage.

    There are 50 votes in the Democratic caucus, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaking vote from her role as president of the Senate. Schumer does not need any Republican votes … unless Joe Manchin, or Kyrsten Sinema, or Jon Tester, or some other right-bent Democrat decides to go sideways and vote with McConnell and the Republicans. In the absence of any GOP votes in favor, such an act would all but doom the measure. If it does pass, this second-half bill would also be sent to the House, where it would face the same slate of travails as the first.

    Oh, P.S.: Hovering over it all is the fact that McConnell is threatening to obliterate the U.S. economy to get his way, again. We saw a lot of this in 2011, when Republicans took the debt ceiling hostage while trying to thwart the Affordable Care Act. They ultimately failed, but the mere threat was enough to rattle the economy’s cage and proved to be a setback to the recovery after the financial Armageddon of 2008.

    Why is this McConnell threat dangerous and reckless? The debt limit isn’t about spending more money, but is about promising to make good on what we’ve already spent. It is the “full faith and credit” of the federal government itself, and if that is allowed to be abrogated, it would cause a global economic earthquake in the middle of a growing pandemic while a great deal of the joint is either on fire or under water. Bad timing, thy name is Mitch.

    “The Treasury Department has already begun deploying ‘extraordinary measures’ to fund the government’s obligations,” reports CBS News. “The Congressional Budget Office has said the government could run out of cash by October or November without an increase or suspension of the debt limit.”

    As Esquire blogger Charles P. Pierce is wont to say: “This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Analysis Shows GOP Can Take Control of Congress by Gerrymandering Just 4 States

    A Fair Maps Rally is held in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on March 26, 2019, in Washington, D.C.

    Republicans might be able to take control of Congress in next year’s midterm races without needing to win over a single additional voter.

    As Democratic senators scramble to piece together a compromised version of the For the People Act, an electoral reform and voting rights bill, a new study finds that the GOP could gerrymander its way to victory in the 2022 midterms.

    An analysis of Census data from a Democratic-aligned data firm called TargetSmart, first reported by Mother Jones, found that Republicans could pick up between six to 13 seats in the House of Representatives through redistricting electoral maps in just four southern states alone — Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Texas. If Republicans take five seats in the 2022 midterms, it would result in the GOP winning a majority of seats in the House, as Democrats currently have a five-seat lead in that legislative chamber.

    Put another way, the GOP could win the midterm elections if voters behave the same way that they did in congressional elections in 2020, simply if Republican-run state legislatures are able to redraw maps in their own favor.

    Republicans have a significant redistricting advantage over Democrats in deciding how congressional maps will look in the next decade. According to one analysis, the GOP will have sole control over the design of 187 congressional districts, compared to just 75 for Democrats. The remaining districts will be drawn by bipartisan governments or independent commissions, or are “at-large” seats where there’s only one congressional representative in that state.

    Supporters of the For the People Act argue that this disadvantage is precisely why electoral reform is needed — to ensure that the redistricting process is free from partisan gerrymandering on both sides of the political aisle. The legislation had called for requiring every state to create independent commissions to redraw maps, rather than giving political parties the chance to create boundaries that work to their advantage.

    On Wednesday several senators were seen working inside the offices of Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-New York), crafting what they said would be a compromise of the For the People Act, which failed to garner the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster earlier this year. Among those working on the new legislation were Sens. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia) and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), the latter who said he opposed many aspects of the original For the People Act for being too partisan, in his mind.

    Several aspects of the compromise bill are left uncertain, however, about what this legislation would do or if it can earn enough support to bypass the filibuster. Manchin has said he would not support any efforts at ending or reforming the filibuster in order to pass a voting rights bill. And beyond the question of the filibuster, it’s still unclear whether the compromise bill will include reforms for redistricting at all.

    Polling shows that most Americans back such reforms, including those with conservative viewpoints, in spite of stiff opposition to the idea from Republicans. A survey conducted in February by the R Street Institute, a right-leaning organization, found that 57 percent of likely Republican voters support creating independent redistricting commissions in states across the country, while only 25 percent oppose the idea.

    A Vox/Data for Progress poll from March also showcased significant support for the For the People Act, prior to it being blocked in the Senate. The poll had specifically mentioned the reforms in the bill, including redistricting reform and non-partisan commissions redrawing maps, and asked respondents whether they supported ending the filibuster in order to get those reforms passed. A majority of voters, 52 percent, said they backed it, while just 37 percent said they were opposed.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

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

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren greets supporters at a rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on June 9, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Jeopardize Monday’s Infrastructure Deadline With More Demands

    The U.S. Capitol Building is seen reflecting on glass on July 26, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Mitch McConnell Is Threatening to Stifle Debt Ceiling Vote to Get What He Wants

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell makes his way to a news conference after the Senate Republican policy luncheon in the Capitol on July 20, 2021.

    If you enjoy the sound of gears grinding and the sight of brazen insurrectionists playing the hurt bird, this week on Capitol Hill is at the top of your menu. It’s got everything: traitors running amok, Democrats actually acting like they have the majority and Republicans threatening to take the global economy hostage — again — because it’s all they know how to do.

    Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday rammed through a vote to open debate on the portion of President Biden’s infrastructure plan that cannot be passed by way of reconciliation. Predictably, the vote was hamstrung by a GOP filibuster and lost 51-49; Schumer himself voted against it in the end, but only because doing so allows him to bring the measure up for another vote.

    Bringing this to a vote now was an interesting decision by Schumer. All through the week, allegedly “moderate” Republicans, and more than a few Democrats, begged Schumer to hold off on the debate vote because they were really close to getting the whole thing nailed down, you guys, they swear. Schumer, after apparently having been injected with some form of galvanizing memory juice, was able to recognize foot-dragging when it was right there under his nose, and called for the vote anyway.

    Schumer lost, but didn’t lose, because the message was clear: This thing is coming, and GOP senators need to decide if they are going to vote against a wildly popular set of bills. It was refreshing to see the majority leader recognize when his colleagues across the aisle are wasting time for the sake of wasting time. This time, he had no truck with it, and now everyone’s positions are vividly staked out.

    The most significant indication that Republicans were wasting time deliberately because they have few moves left is the fact that they made all sorts of conciliatory “we’ll get this done soon” noises after the debate vote failed. If they had the horses to kill the thing outright, they’d say so — and do so — in no uncertain terms. They are using “let’s work together some more” the way deep-sea predator fish use phosphorescent lights at the end of an antenna stalk to lure prey in the darkness of the ocean depths. Fortunately, and perhaps only for now, Schumer appears unwilling to take the bait.

    On the other side of the building, the move toward an actual investigation into the January 6 sacking of the Capitol building got spicy. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy coughed up five Republican names for the committee, including two terrible Jims: Jordan and Banks. Jordan in particular was an execrable pick, a Technicolor “eff you” to Speaker Pelosi and the whole notion of an actual investigation. Pelosi responded by chopping Banks and Jordan off McCarthy’s list, at which point McCarthy had a tantrum and pulled every Republican from the panel. “We will run our own investigation,” he said.

    The mainstream press responded to this with entirely predictable “Oh Noes Bipartisanship!” noises, but in point of fact, McCarthy appears to have done Pelosi — and indeed the entire country — a great service.

    “We should be thankful that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) just pulled Republicans out of any involvement in the select committee to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection,” report Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman for The Washington Post. “In so doing, he ensured that the committee’s investigation will both have more integrity and be more likely to undertake a valuable accounting.”

    The folks at Politico agree: “[McCarthy’s] announcement that he would withdraw all his members from the panel unless she reverses course is exactly what a lot of Democrats were hoping for. Now, Democrats (plus Rep. Liz Cheney) can subpoena whomever they want, whenever they want, without any protest. If they decide to have closed-door depositions with Trump White House officials, the former president will have no spies in the room to report back. And the public hearings will be free of GOP complaints.”

    It’s definitely weird to see Democrats go two-for-two in a strategy clash with Republicans, but they will need every once of acumen to deal with the looming fiasco behind door number three. The debt ceiling vote arrives in 10 days — that pesky thing which, if bungled, threatens to turn the global economy into Thanos infinity dust — and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear that he will stifle the debt vote to get what he wants.

    “Top Senate Democrats accused the minority leader Wednesday of plotting to hold the economy hostage,” reports Politico, “after McConnell said he doesn’t expect any Republican senators to vote to prevent the U.S. government from defaulting on its loans in the coming weeks.”

    Of course, Lindsey Graham is more than happy to play pilot fish to McConnell’s great white shark. If you feel like you’ve seen this movie before, it’s because you have. Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce explains:

    In 2010, for the first time in the country’s history, the newly elected Republican congressional majorities threatened to trash the country’s full faith and credit by refusing to suspend the debt ceiling. This was around when Mitch McConnell infamously referred to the debt ceiling as a “hostage that’s worth ransoming.” As the economy was still staggering out from under the economic catastrophe of 2008 and 2009, the mere threat of holding the debt ceiling hostage was enough to slow the economic recovery.

    Comes now Lindsey Graham and his merry band, just as the entire nation is still staggering under the burden of a revived pandemic and still staggering out from under four years of presidential corruption … flipping the playbook to the same damn page. It is relevant to point out that the debt ceiling was raised three times during the last administration, including in the wake of a budget-busting tax cut, without a peep from Graham or McConnell. Graham says he’ll lay out the terms of the extortion next week.

    Well, bully for next week. This incipient debt ceiling crunch will almost certainly affect both the infrastructure debate and the 1/6 committee’s investigation. McConnell and Graham have signaled they will turn the national and global economies into a garbage fire if they don’t like the lay of things. Biden and Schumer are going to have to summon heretofore unheard-of levels of resolve to call this incredibly reckless bluff, which they must do. If they don’t, all of this will come to nothing.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

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

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks with supporters during an event outside Union Station on June 16, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • 84 Democrats Sign Letter Demanding Civilian Climate Corps in Reconciliation Bill

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks at a press conference urging the inclusion of the Civilian Climate Corps., a climate jobs program, in the budget reconciliation bill, outside of the U.S. Capitol on July 20, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    As Democratic leaders hash out the details of the upcoming $3.5 trillion reconciliation deal, dozens of Democratic lawmakers are uniting behind a proposal to create a Civilian Climate Corps and rallying for its inclusion in the bill.

    Eighty-four Democrats signed a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) urging them to incorporate their proposal for the Corps on Tuesday.

    “We have a historic opportunity to make bold investments in our public lands, clean energy, and climate resiliency, all while creating good-paying jobs, building a diverse workforce, and strengthening career pathways,” write the Democrats. “It is in the spirit of this conviction and dedication that we write to express our strong support for funding a Civilian Climate Corps in the upcoming reconciliation package.”

    Letter signatories include progressive climate advocates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), who introduced a proposal to create a Civilian Climate Corps earlier this year. It’s an idea that has roots in the justice-focused, jobs-creating and climate-crisis tackling Green New Deal, and has been long sought after by climate advocates.

    Over the past months, it has emerged as a top priority for progressives. Members from all across the Democratic caucus signed on to the letter, however, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who faced activist pressure to support the idea.

    The Civilian Climate Corps is a proposal to create a jobs program to employ many Americans, potentially millions, to combat the climate crisis with conservation, carbon reduction and adaptation projects across the country. The idea was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps and has been championed and pushed for by progressive lawmakers and climate activists like the Sunrise Movement alike.

    “It’s time for us to pass a bold and equitable Civilian Climate Corps to reinvent, reimagine, and rebuild America,” Markey said in a statement. “With a robust investment in wages, worker benefits, and climate-smart projects, we can center jobs and justice within the vision of a safer, healthier future and put a diverse group of well-paid workers on the pathway to life-long careers in the clean energy economy.”

    In their letter, the Democrats demand the formation of a Corps that prioritizes “natural climate solutions” like increasing natural carbon sequestration and restoration of the coasts. They call for the proposal to center justice by directing half of the investment and recruitment for the group to be for and from frontline communities typically made up of low-income neighborhoods of color that suffer the worst consequences of climate change.

    The Corps must also work to reduce climate emissions with programs to install renewable energy infrastructure, train others in clean energy-related work and work towards improving energy efficiency, the Democrats’ proposal outlines. It would share funding and work in collaboration with other government agencies and groups like AmeriCorps, in line with President Joe Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach to the climate crisis.

    Following up on previous promises, Schumer said Tuesday that the reconciliation bill will include a Civilian Climate Corps, and that he will “fight to get the biggest, boldest CCC possible.” President Joe Biden signed an executive order supporting the idea in January, but didn’t include funding for the group in the order.

    Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that just fighting for the Corps isn’t enough. “This is a win but we can’t stop now,” she said, saying that the group must be justice-centered and fully funded.

    A Civilian Climate Corps is popular among the public, as the letter writers point out. Recent polling from Data for Progress finds wide bipartisan support for the idea among likely voters. Seventy-seven percent of those polled favored the idea, including 65 percent of Republicans and 85 percent of Democrats.

    “After historic levels of job loss due to COVID-19, this bold investment in jobs is a bipartisan priority,” wrote the Democrats. “From rural communities to urban centers, the Civilian Climate Corps will provide new career opportunities across the country.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Bernie Sanders Is the Real Force Behind the $3.5T Reconciliation Bill

    Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks to reporters about infrastructure legislation at the U.S. Capitol on July 14, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    When the idea of the reconciliation bill was originally floated in June, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) had an ambitious price tag in mind: $6 trillion. And, though the reconciliation bill currently in discussion is $3.5 trillion, senators say that the bill isn’t smaller because of Sanders.

    Though it’s yet unclear what exactly is in the reconciliation bill, lawmakers like Sanders and Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) have celebrated it, saying it would be the largest and most consequential measure if it passes Congress.

    The full bill has yet to be unveiled. But it contains some significant Democratic benchmarks like Medicare expansion, major climate provisions, tax hikes on the wealthy and parts of the pro-union PRO Act, which has been hailed by labor advocates as crucial legislation to protect the working class.

    It’s thanks to Sanders that Democrats have been able to include as many of their agendas items as they have, senators say. Senators on the Budget Committee told Politico recently that they see the committee chair’s $6 trillion benchmark as a negotiation tactic and that, if he had originally proposed a smaller bill, the Democrats would be looking at a much smaller price tag than $3.5 trillion.

    “Bernie Sanders is like a human embodiment of shifting the Overton Window,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), who is on the Budget Committee, told Politico. “We wouldn’t be there without him putting out $6 trillion.”

    Though Sanders had originally rejected a smaller price tag than the $6 trillion of his proposal, he has said that $3.5 trillion is still enough to fit everything he wanted to get passed — though for a shorter period of time than he would like. That means that there could still be future fights over renewing some of the proposals in the bill, writes Politico.

    Over the past months, Sanders has been exercising a much stronger influence over the White House and Washington at large than he previously has. He has a close relationship with the White House and President Joe Biden, who is receptive and supportive of Sanders’s ideas.

    Last week, the two had an extended meeting in which Sanders discussed the need for Biden to go bigger on his infrastructure bill. Biden’s original infrastructure proposal was $4 trillion — Sanders argued for his $6 trillion proposal, which the president was open to. The two also talked about uniting the party in support of the reconciliation bill.

    Though Biden’s support doesn’t always lead to results (Sanders talked to the White House constantly during the $15 federal minimum wage fight earlier this year to no avail), it signals an openness from Democratic leadership to progressive ideals. It also signals a shift from Sanders being a political outsider to being a dealmaker within the Democratic caucus.

    The largest hurdle for Democrats to cross now on the reconciliation package is the conservative plank of the party. Winning the approval of people like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) may prove difficult; and there’s already a fight brewing within the party over proposals to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices.

    Schumer is evidently prepared to move on with both the reconciliation and bipartisan infrastructure bills, however. The majority leader is expected to file cloture on the infrastructure bill on Monday, setting up a procedural vote on the matter later this week. The bipartisan group is still negotiating specifics of the bill — evidently, there’s still debate about something in every spending category. Meanwhile, Schumer is also preparing to get all 50 Democrats on board with the reconciliation bill by the end of this week.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Breyer Says His Health, Not Politics, Will Drive Decision on SCOTUS Retirement

    Associate Justice Stephen Breyer sits during a group photo of the Justices at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on April 23, 2021.

    United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, in his first public comments since the end of the Court’s term this summer, said he hasn’t yet come to a decision on whether he will resign from the bench soon.

    Breyer, at 82 years, is the oldest member of the Supreme Court, and has been an associate justice for 27 years. In his comments, which were made during an interview with CNN, Breyer explained that his decision to retire wouldn’t be based on the political makeup of the Court (or its potential to be shaken up even more than it already has been in recent years).

    “Primarily, of course, health,” Breyer said of what would drive his decision. “Second, the court.”

    When asked directly whether he planned to retire or not, he gave a one-word answer: “No.”

    Some are concerned that Breyer’s refusal to step down could lead to a situation similar to what happened last year with the passing of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at age 87 just six weeks before the 2020 general election. Former President Donald Trump immediately filled the vacancy with his conservative nominee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It changed the Court’s makeup from a slim 5-4 conservative majority to a solid 6-3 control by the conservative bloc.

    The Democrats, many have pointed out, have only slim control of the Senate, where judicial nominees are confirmed and Biden’s best chance of appointing a younger liberal to the court is now. If any changes to the makeup of the 50-50 Senate (where Vice President Kamala Harris casts the tie-breaking vote) happen in the near future, it could result in any nominees from President Joe Biden being blocked by Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has also publicly stated that his party would seek to block nominees from Biden if they win control of the chamber in the 2022 midterms.

    “Breyer’s health is not the only factor here. He is also gambling on the health of 50 Democratic senators over the next year,” tweeted Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, a progressive organization that advocates for court reforms.

    Breyer has shunned political thinking in recent months when it comes to whether he’ll stay or go. In his interview, it also appeared that he took great pride in being the senior member of the liberal bloc, and in that role he has been able to reduce political infighting within the Court’s chambers.

    That senior status, in the Court’s private discussions on cases, “has made a difference to me…. It is not a fight. It is not sarcasm. It is deliberation,” Breyer said.

    Some commentators noted that Breyer’s words seemed to suggest he was staying put in order to continue having the power to shape the High Court’s discussions.

    “[I]f nothing else, there should be term limits on the supreme court, if not the entire federal judiciary,” said New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie on Twitter. “[E]ven by the loose standards of U.S democracy, [it’s] untenable to have people with this much power serve this long without any check from the public.”

    Democrats in the Senate, including Majority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York), have suggested, sometimes subtly, that Breyer should step down. More than a few observers viewed a recent “Dear Colleague” letter from Schumer to Democratic lawmakers as hinting to Breyer that it’s time for him to retire.

    “The Senate will continue to confirm more of President Biden’s highly qualified judicial nominees. As always, Senate Democrats stand ready to expeditiously fill any potential vacancies on the Supreme Court should they arise,” Schumer wrote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats’ New Version of Infrastructure Bill Claws Back Trump Tax Cuts for Rich

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks during a news conference following the Senate Democrats policy luncheon in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 2021.

    The second half of President Biden’s combined $4.1 infrastructure plan has finally landed, after a long and often aggravating first half of summer. A number of the details still have to be worked out and then announced. It is less than half of what progressives in Congress wanted, far more than most Republicans can abide, and detailed enough that “moderates” like Joe Manchin, Jon Tester and Kyrsten Sinema will likely find places to gum up the works if they choose to.

    Who knows, maybe that makes it a good bill. Once the details come out in full, it may be revealed as a great bill, one of three offered by the Biden administration to save the country from COVID, rebuild our infrastructure and bring some humanity back into government after more than 40 years of trickle-down cruelty. A triple-shot like this has never been attempted in my lifetime, much less achieved. If passed, it’s the kind of thing that can change a country, and Lord knows this country could use some change.

    But it won’t be anything if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer fails to hold his caucus together when voting day arrives. All 50 Democratic and Dem-affiliated senators, plus Vice President Kamala Harris serving as President of the Senate, will be needed to pass this bill via reconciliation. They are aiming to get this done before the August recess, so buckle up.

    “We are very proud of this plan,” said Schumer after it was announced. “We know we have a long road to go. We’re going to get this done for the sake of making average Americans’ lives a whole lot better.” Bernie Sanders, who initially sought a $6 trillion bill, said, “This is, in our view, a pivotal moment in American history.”

    Despite the absence of key details such as how this legislation intends to confront climate change, what we do know of the bill so far is fairly impressive. It includes a large expansion of Medicare to include money for hearing, vision and dental coverage. House progressives wanted this in tandem with a lowering of the eligibility age, but that was left on the cutting room floor when Mark Warner warned the moderates would balk at the price, and the bill was pared down.

    Politically speaking, emphasizing an expansion of Medicare was a savvy move. Medicare is perhaps the most popular, well-run government program in existence. Making it even better also makes it easier to pass the larger legislation, and furthermore makes it virtually impossible for Republicans to roll it back at some future juncture.

    Manchin on Tuesday threw his first rock in the road, because of course he did. “I think everything should be paid for,” he told reporters. “We’ve put enough free money out.” While announcing the bill, both Schumer and Warner took pains to assuage Manchin’s complaints by saying the bill would be “robustly” paid for. That payment, according to Schumer, will be carried by the wealthiest among us; taxes for those making less than $400,000 a year will not be raised.

    The specter of a tax on the wealthy drew the ire of the Beast of Bedminster. “Republicans in the U.S. Senate must not in any way, shape, or form increase taxes that were won in the TRUMP TAX CUT, the largest in the history of our Country,” said Donald Trump in a Tuesday statement. “It’s what made our economy grow and great.”

    Speaking personally, clawing back some of the trillion-and-a-half Trump gave away to rich people back in 2017 is one of my favorite parts of this bill. Fixing that by way of taxes to fund these worthy public endeavors would go a long way toward scourging Trump’s fetid legacy from government.

    You’ve heard the saying about laws and sausages? You never want to see how either are made. We are entering that phase of the operation, and arms will be twisted up into the ceiling fans if this thing has a prayer of passing. We will see if Biden’s epoch in the Senate will serve him as a negotiator now that the rubber has met the road.

    “With no votes to spare in the Senate and only four in the House (soon to be three, with Republicans expected to win a runoff in Texas), President Joe Biden heads to the Senate today to begin the hard work of whipping the party in line behind the Democrat-only deal,” reports Politico. “He got a head start when Budget Chair Bernie Sanders endorsed the deal, even as the Vermont independent spent much of the first part of the Democrats’ presser looking at his shoes.”

    Cute snark there, Politico. Sanders sure didn’t sound like a sad little shoe-gazer at the presser. Calling the bill “the most significant piece of legislation since the Great Depression,” Sanders went on to say, “The wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fair share of taxes, so that we can protect the working families of this country. What this legislation does is says we’re going to create millions of good-paying union jobs rebuilding this country not only from physical infrastructure, but dealing with the human needs of our people which are many, and which have long been neglected.”

    I’ll buy that for $4 trillion. There is a lot of road between now and final passage of these bills, and notoriously terrible economist Larry Summers just met with Biden at the White House to bemoan the terrors of inflation. If Summers gets in Biden’s ear about that, it’s entirely possible the president himself could reach out to shave down his own bills. As I said, there’s a lot of road left.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dems Introduce Bill to Decriminalize Pot, “Restore Lives” Harmed by Prohibition

    Marijuana plants in a grow room at Canna Provisions in Sheffield, Massachusetts, on February 13, 2021.

    Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), are set to introduce a bill on Wednesday that would decriminalize marijuana at the federal level. The bill also attempts to remedy the harms done to those negatively impacted — disproportionately represented by people of color — by the prohibition of the drug over the decades.

    The 163-page bill, which is also sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), would call for bringing “common sense to the federal government” when it comes to cannabis, to “end prohibition and restore the lives of those hurt most and set them up for opportunity.”

    “Cannabis prohibition, a key pillar of the failed war on drugs, has caused substantial harm to our communities and small businesses, and especially for communities of color,” Wyden said in a statement about the bill.

    The bill would “finally turn the page on this dark chapter in American history and begin righting these wrongs,” Booker also said.

    Among a number of provisions in the bill, the Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act list of drugs that are barred for recreational use, and allow the government to regulate and tax marijuana as well. Businesses in In states where marijuana is already legalized, businesses would be able to sell the drug and users consume it without risk of federal criminal liability.

    The bill would not automatically decriminalize marijuana in every state — those that still ban its use would be allowed to keep those laws intact, to prohibit its use within their jurisdictions.

    The bill would, however, expunge federal nonviolent marijuana-related arrests and convictions from individuals’ records, and would use federal tax dollars generated from the sale of marijuana to create restorative justice programs to help communities harmed by years of prohibition. The bill would also transition regulatory authority of cannabis manufacturing and marketing to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

    While the bill is likely to garner praise, it faces steep challenges in passing within the deeply divided Senate where most of the 50 Democrats are largely in favor of decriminalization while most of the 50 Republicans are opposed to the idea. It’s more than likely that the bill will be blocked with the threat of a filibuster unless at least 10 Republicans, along with every single Democrat in the chamber, agree to pass it.

    The bill also only focuses on marijuana decriminalization, and not any other drugs on the controlled substances list, unlike the bill proposed in June by Representatives Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-New Jersey) called the Drug Policy Reform Act, which seeks to decriminalize all drugs that have fueled the war on drugs for decades.

    That legislation calls for a “refocus” on drug regulation, toward an approach that is “health-focused, evidence-based and respectful of self-determination.” It would expunge criminal records and provide for resentencing of convictions for all drugs, reinvest in alternative health approaches, and eliminate other consequences of past and future use of the drug, including denial of employment, refusal of public benefits, restriction of voting rights, and people’s immigration statuses.

    The “punitive approach” to drugs “creates more pain, increases substance use, and leaves millions of people to live in shame and isolation with limited support and healing,” Bush said in announcing the legislation, adding that “it’s time to put wellness and compassion ahead of trauma and punishment.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Calls $3.5 Trillion Reconciliation Bill a “Pivotal Moment” in History

    Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2021.

    The Senate Democratic leadership agreed late Tuesday to push for a $3.5 trillion legislative package that includes substantial investments in green energy, an expansion of Medicare benefits, universal pre-K, and other priorities, funded by tax hikes on the rich and large corporations.

    Speaking to reporters late Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — chair of the Senate Budget Committee — celebrated the spending framework as “a big deal” that will begin the process of addressing glaring inequities in the U.S. economy and transitioning the nation’s energy system away from planet-warming fossil fuels.

    “This is, in our view, a pivotal moment in American history,” said Sanders, who characterized the new agreement as “the most significant piece of legislation… since the Great Depression.”

    “The wealthy and large corporations are going to start paying their fair share of taxes, so that we can protect the working families of this country,” the Vermont senator continued. “What this legislation does is says we’re going to create millions of good-paying union jobs rebuilding this country not only from physical infrastructure, but dealing with the human needs of our people which are many, and which have long been neglected.”

    The deal outlined by Senate Democratic leaders on Tuesday sets the stage for the construction of a $3.5 trillion budget resolution, which will establish the spending boundaries for an eventual legislative package that Democrats intend to pass through reconciliation — an arcane process that requires just a simple-majority vote. Democrats in the House and Senate hope to pass a budget resolution before leaving town for August recess.

    Approval of a budget resolution will kick off a contentious fight over the details of the reconciliation package, which is aimed at addressing the major shortcomings of a $579 billion bipartisan infrastructure deal that the White House endorsed last month. Democrats plan to pursue passage of the reconciliation bill and the bipartisan package, which together amount to roughly $4 trillion in new spending, at the same time.

    While the new Senate agreement is expected to contain many progressive priorities, House Democrats and outside advocacy groups are unlikely to be satisfied with the top-line figure. Sanders himself indicated Monday that he was not happy with the $3.5 trillion ceiling, which falls well short of the $6 trillion package that he was advocating.

    Late last month, as Common Dreams reported, more than 200 progressive advocacy groups, think tanks, and labor unions said $6 trillion “should be the floor” of Democrats’ ambitions for the reconciliation bill. The youth-led Sunrise Movement, meanwhile, has been demanding at least $10 trillion in spending over the next decade to combat the climate crisis, whose impact is currently being felt across the U.S. and around the world in the form of record-shattering heatwaves, wildfires, and floods.

    The details of the forthcoming reconciliation package — including how much Democrats want to spend on climate and other priorities within the confines of the $3.5 trillion framework — remain up in the air.

    During a press conference Tuesday evening, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “every major program” in the package will be “funded in a robust way,” an apparent nod to Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), and other conservative deficit hawks in the Democratic caucus. It’s unclear whether the $3.5 trillion blueprint has the support of all 50 Senate Democrats, which will be necessary to push the package through reconciliation.

    As the New York Times reported late Tuesday, “rising concerns among centrist lawmakers had forced Democrats to rethink the scope of that package in recent days.”

    “Behind the scenes, centrists including Warner had privately warned Schumer and the White House that moderates are not likely to support a reconciliation measure as large as the $6 trillion package that Sanders initially sought,” the Times noted. “It became clear Tuesday evening that they were scaling the package back.”

    Schumer said Tuesday that the reconciliation bill will make “some additions” to the infrastructure and safety-net proposals that President Joe Biden unveiled earlier this year.

    “Most important, something that Sen. Sanders has led, and convinced America is so important, which is a robust expansion of Medicare, including money for dental, vision, and hearing,” said Schumer.

    However, Senate Democrats reportedly did not agree to lower the Medicare eligibility age, a priority for Sanders and other progressives in Congress. That omission is likely to draw pushback in the House.

    “When we say Medicare expansion, it’s not lowering the eligibility age OR expanding benefits. It’s BOTH — and it’s popular across America,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, tweeted last week.

    Ben Beachy, director of the Sierra Club’s Living Economy Program, said following Senate Democrats’ announcement that “now it’s on the House to go bolder and get us to the scale of our communities’ needs.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Schumer Puts Indirect Pressure on Justice Breyer to Retire in Letter to Dems

    Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer answers a question during an interview at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 2012.

    With the latest term of the Supreme Court having come to a close last week, Democrats appear anxious to know whether the Court’s current oldest justice, Stephen Breyer, plans to step down, a move that would allow them to confirm a replacement named by President Joe Biden in the near future.

    The anxiety is perhaps warranted, as Democrats do not want to see yet another Supreme Court seat fall to a judge nominated by a Republican president, especially after the death last fall of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enabled former President Donald Trump the opportunity to further cement the right-wing ideological composition of the High Court.

    Breyer is one of only three liberal members remaining on the nation’s highest Court.

    Writing to his fellow Democrats in a “Dear Colleague” letter on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) emphasized that he and other lawmakers were ready to confirm judicial appointments named by Biden in the coming months — including within the Supreme Court.

    Schumer did not mention Breyer by name in his comments, but it’s widely assumed that he was referring to the justice, who is 82 years old and the oldest member of the liberal bloc of justices.

    “The Senate will continue to confirm more of President Biden’s highly qualified judicial nominees,” Schumer wrote, adding that, “As always, Senate Democrats stand ready to expeditiously fill any potential vacancies on the Supreme Court should they arise.”

    Breyer hasn’t yet indicated whether he intends to remain on the Court or retire. He has time to do so, and his waiting for a few weeks after the Supreme Court term ends isn’t without precedent, as Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, did so in late July of that year.

    Still, with what happened in 2020 still fresh on the minds of Democrats, and with the narrow 50-50 lead they have in the Senate (with Vice President Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes, including those on judicial appointments), many are stressing the need for Breyer to make up his mind soon.

    MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan excoriated Breyer late last week, after the justice hadn’t announced his retirement at the end of the Court’s term.

    “Stephen Breyer didn’t retire yesterday,” Hasan wrote on Twitter. “Of course he didn’t, because like too many centrist Establishment liberal white folks in this country, he doesn’t think there really is a threat to democracy or minority rights, and even if he accepts there is, he ain’t gonna suffer from it.”

    Paul Campos, a professor of law of the University of Colorado in Boulder, also pilloried Breyer’s indecision on the matter, calling him “selfish.”

    With how the Court has been politicized in recent years, many have suggested that reforms to how justices are selected, and even how many seats should be on the bench altogether, need to be implemented. Earlier this year, however, Breyer himself indicated he was against such changes, stating that it’s “wrong to think of the court as another political institution.”

    A number of legal scholars have rejected this view, calling it naive.

    “These appointments come up so rarely and are not regularized so we have no idea when these opportunities will come up unless justices act strategically and retire under the same party president,” said Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College, in comments to The Washington Post.

    Schumer’s letter comes one day after a report from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) that detailed potential reforms to the Supreme Court that could be implemented in order to lessen the politicization and direness of each appointment process to the bench, such as tenure limits for how long justices could serve and screening committees to determine who should be nominated.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Schumer Puts Indirect Pressure on Justice Breyer to Retire in Letter to Dems

    Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer answers a question during an interview at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 17, 2012.

    With the latest term of the Supreme Court having come to a close last week, Democrats appear anxious to know whether the Court’s current oldest justice, Stephen Breyer, plans to step down, a move that would allow them to confirm a replacement named by President Joe Biden in the near future.

    The anxiety is perhaps warranted, as Democrats do not want to see yet another Supreme Court seat fall to a judge nominated by a Republican president, especially after the death last fall of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg enabled former President Donald Trump the opportunity to further cement the right-wing ideological composition of the High Court.

    Breyer is one of only three liberal members remaining on the nation’s highest Court.

    Writing to his fellow Democrats in a “Dear Colleague” letter on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) emphasized that he and other lawmakers were ready to confirm judicial appointments named by Biden in the coming months — including within the Supreme Court.

    Schumer did not mention Breyer by name in his comments, but it’s widely assumed that he was referring to the justice, who is 82 years old and the oldest member of the liberal bloc of justices.

    “The Senate will continue to confirm more of President Biden’s highly qualified judicial nominees,” Schumer wrote, adding that, “As always, Senate Democrats stand ready to expeditiously fill any potential vacancies on the Supreme Court should they arise.”

    Breyer hasn’t yet indicated whether he intends to remain on the Court or retire. He has time to do so, and his waiting for a few weeks after the Supreme Court term ends isn’t without precedent, as Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, did so in late July of that year.

    Still, with what happened in 2020 still fresh on the minds of Democrats, and with the narrow 50-50 lead they have in the Senate (with Vice President Kamala Harris casting tie-breaking votes, including those on judicial appointments), many are stressing the need for Breyer to make up his mind soon.

    MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan excoriated Breyer late last week, after the justice hadn’t announced his retirement at the end of the Court’s term.

    “Stephen Breyer didn’t retire yesterday,” Hasan wrote on Twitter. “Of course he didn’t, because like too many centrist Establishment liberal white folks in this country, he doesn’t think there really is a threat to democracy or minority rights, and even if he accepts there is, he ain’t gonna suffer from it.”

    Paul Campos, a professor of law of the University of Colorado in Boulder, also pilloried Breyer’s indecision on the matter, calling him “selfish.”

    With how the Court has been politicized in recent years, many have suggested that reforms to how justices are selected, and even how many seats should be on the bench altogether, need to be implemented. Earlier this year, however, Breyer himself indicated he was against such changes, stating that it’s “wrong to think of the court as another political institution.”

    A number of legal scholars have rejected this view, calling it naive.

    “These appointments come up so rarely and are not regularized so we have no idea when these opportunities will come up unless justices act strategically and retire under the same party president,” said Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College, in comments to The Washington Post.

    Schumer’s letter comes one day after a report from the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) that detailed potential reforms to the Supreme Court that could be implemented in order to lessen the politicization and direness of each appointment process to the bench, such as tenure limits for how long justices could serve and screening committees to determine who should be nominated.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Chuck Schumer Vows to Push for Creation of Civilian Climate Corps

    New Yorkers with The Sunrise Movement take action in Brooklyn for an economic recovery and infrastructure package prioritizing climate, care, jobs, and justice, on April 7, 2021, in New York City.

    After being targeted by progressive climate campaigners, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made clear on Wednesday that he will work to include the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps in evolving federal infrastructure legislation.

    Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued a lengthy statement outlining his support for the inclusion of a Civilian Climate Corps (CCC), which was inspired by a New Deal-era program and formally unveiled as legislation earlier this year by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on the same day they reintroduced the Green New Deal Resolution.

    The Sunrise Movement, whose New York City chapter took to the streets to push Schumer on the CCC proposal, celebrated his statement as a victory for local organizers and the youth-led movement more broadly.

    “In the upcoming American Jobs and Families Plans legislation, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to confront the climate crisis and create millions of middle-class, family-sustaining union jobs,” Schumer said. “Creating a new Civilian Climate Corps is a key step towards both goals.”

    The Senate majority leader vowed to “work tirelessly to achieve a big and bold Civilian Climate Corps that places justice at the center and urgently addresses the interlocking climate and economic crises.”

    “In the coming weeks, I look forward to working in New York with Sunrise Movement, community organizations, and unions on a shared vision for the CCC,” he added, thanking “the dedicated young organizers and activists who have brought the idea of a new Civilian Climate Corps this far.”

    In a tweet welcoming his promise that “together, we will work to make it a reality,” Sunrise NYC declared: “A monumental moment for the climate movement and beyond!”

    Thanking Schumer “for standing with us” and supporting a CCC, the chapter said that “we look forward to collaborating with you to win big and tackle economic and climate injustice through transformative change.”

    “This is a big deal,” tweeted Sunrise co-founder and political director Evan Weber, recognizing that it is not every day the Senate majority leader “backs your movement’s major demand in the midst of a high stakes, narrow-path-to-victory legislative fight.”

    Weber credited the NYC Sunrise members for “leading the push.”

    “Schumer’s statement shows us that he is listening to our generation and taking our demands seriously,” said Veekas Ashoka, an activist with Sunrise Movement NYC, in a statement. “The global pandemic, fatal heatwaves, and destructive storms have left New Yorkers with a 10% unemployment rate and with our communities struggling to survive. Young people are ready to get to work repairing our country, and we need good-paying, union jobs to do so.”

    “Schumer’s commitment means our organizing is working. Now, we work to ensure he follows through on his promises,” Ashoka added. “We will continue building the political mandate for Schumer to deliver on the full scope of climate action we need by any means necessary, with or without the GOP.”

    Markey also took to Twitter Wednesday to welcome Schumer’s statement.

    “Agreed,” he said. “We must go big and bold with a Civilian Climate Corps. If we do, we can employ one million+ with good-paying jobs to strengthen our union workforce, fight climate change, deliver justice to frontline communities, and transition America to a clean economy.”

    Markey and Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal envisions employing 1.5 million people to complete federally funded projects that help communities respond to the climate emergency. As Markey detailed for the Boston Globe in April:

    For example, corps members may work to help weatherize and electrify housing in low-income communities, or be part of a team preparing for and installing a community solar facility, receiving relevant training and credentials along the way. Natural climate resiliency improvements, like shoreline and wetlands restoration that protect against rising seas, or environmental remediation that protects from historic pollution would also be part of corps work, with crucial benefits to communities in Massachusetts and beyond. From Groundworks Lawrence to AmeriCorps Cape Cod to the Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation and programs all across the country, corps members would be part of the country’s transition to a clean economy.

    Schumer’s Wednesday statement increased pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and President Joe Biden to ensure a CCC measure is included in any approved infrastructure package.

    In a tweet urging them to join Schumer and “commit to a bold, visionary CCC,” Sunrise said that “this is our chance to build resilience in our communities [with] good-paying jobs. In the midst of worldwide economic and climate devastation, we need to invest in people and create jobs for our communities.”

    During a Wednesday speech near Chicago, Biden explained Democrats’ current two-track approach to infrastructure — a bipartisan agreement he reached with centrist lawmakers last month as well as using the budget reconciliation process to avoid a GOP filibuster and advance “human infrastructure” policies.

    “It’s a combination of parts of my American Jobs Plan that were essential and not included in the bipartisan infrastructure plan, as well as my American Families Plan,” said Biden, who later in his speech expressed support for establishing a new CCC.

    “I also want to enlist a new generation of climate, conservation, and… resilience workers, like FDR did… preserving our landscape with a Civilian Conservation Corps,” the president said. “It’s a similar thing.”

    “We can put Americans to work strengthening public lands and waters, and making our communities — rural and urban — more resilient against extreme weather,” he said. “And we can take on the long-overdue work of advancing environmental justice by addressing pollution.”

    As Common Dreams reported last week, although a CCC and other progressive priorities are included in a recent memo outlining the Biden administration climate and infrastructure goals, some of the document’s language has generated concerns.

    Climate journalist Kate Aronoff noted when the memo was made public that “the wording for the $10 billion CCC strongly suggests that it’s gonna be structured as some kind of Americorps expansion rather than, well, a CCC.”

    Wednesday afternoon, Politico reported on a possible timeline for infrastructure legislation, citing a White House official who noted in an email that “as Leader Schumer has said, he wants to move on both the bipartisan plan and the budget resolution during the upcoming July/August Senate session.”

    “Our understanding is that the process could begin as early as the week of 7/19, given that committees are still finalizing legislative text for both the budget resolution and the bipartisan bill,” the White House official said. “We of course support going forward as fast as possible, but it would be a mistake to think of July 19 as anything more than the opening of a window.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Dems to Fill in Blanks of Centrist Infrastructure Deal With Reconciliation Bill

    Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer talk to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on June 23, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    The White House reached a tentative agreement with a group of centrist senators over an infrastructure bill on Wednesday with only a quarter of the new spending that President Joe Biden had originally proposed. The group will meet with Biden Thursday to discuss the deal.

    The plan includes $559 billion in new spending, and $974 billion total over the next five years. Lawmakers say that all parties have agreed to mechanisms to pay for the entire bill. Though they have yet to release details, the White House says that the bill does not include proposals to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year, as Biden has promised.

    The deal is significantly smaller than Biden’s original proposal of a $2.25 trillion infrastructure package, and even significantly smaller than his pared down offer of $1.7 trillion. But Democrats and progressives aren’t giving up hope of passing an ambitious package.

    Democratic leaders are insistent that the infrastructure bill will be passed concurrently with the party’s next big reconciliation package. Valued at roughly $6 trillion, Democrats plan to include proposals cut from the bipartisan infrastructure deal in the package like climate action and add new provisions favored by progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) such as enhancing Medicare.

    Budget reconciliation allows Senate Democrats to bypass the filibuster and pass a budget-related package with a simple majority vote.

    “One can’t be done without the other,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, “[Democrats] all agree to that.”

    Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) say that they expect to begin hammering out details of the reconciliation bill next month for potential passage in the fall.

    Though the largest hurdles for the infrastructure bill early in the talks were its size and pay-fors, a more recent concern among progressives has been the concessions to Republicans and centrists.

    Over the past weeks, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) has been warning that progressives would withdraw their support for the infrastructure bill if a so-called bipartisan agreement excluded vital climate provisions and tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy. Markey had harsh words for the last bipartisan deal from earlier this month, saying that it was “climate denial masquerading as bipartisanship.”

    If progressives withdrew their support of the deal, it would threaten the delicate balance that Biden has to thread in order to reach the 60-vote threshold to advance the bill in the Senate. So far, 11 Senate Republicans have agreed to back the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which would still fall short of the votes needed to pass — as long as all 49 Democrats and Sanders also supported it.

    Now, it seems that progressive support hinges upon the concurrent passage of the reconciliation bill. Luckily for them, they seem to have Schumer and Pelosi’s ears on that package, as the $6 trillion package that the leaders are pushing was drafted by Sanders.

    This method of passing Democratic and progressive priorities takes some of the heat off of the filibuster — at least in this venue. But, as long as non-budget-related priorities like voting rights are still being blocked by minority-holding GOP, the pressure to end the archaic practice is still on.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Schumer Backs Sanders Plan to Expand Medicare Cover to Dental, Vision & Hearing

    Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders speaks during a hearing on June 8, 2020, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is embracing a push by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and other progressive lawmakers to add dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare.

    Schumer said he is “working with” the Vermont senator to include them “in the American Jobs and Families Plans,” President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure and relief bills.

    “There is a gaping hole in Medicare that leaves out dental, vision, and hearing coverage. This is a serious problem,” Schumer said on Twitter.

    Schumer reiterated his commitment to expanding items covered under Medicare while speaking during a news conference on Sunday, noting that such services would help reduce problems and costs for patients over time.

    “If you talk to family medicine or primary care doctors, they will tell you with certainty that ignoring medical issues related to dental, vision and hearing often devolves into far more serious medical problems for people — especially seniors — that cost more to treat and are harder to remedy,” Schumer said.

    Schumer recognized that the push to enhance coverage will be “an uphill legislative effort because there are some in the Senate who really don’t think this is a problem worth fixing.” Because of this, he said that it’s crucial to “galvanize support from the public” in order to pressure lawmakers to pass it.

    Earlier this year, Sanders, along with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), authored an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for Medicare to cover costs for those crucial needs.

    “It’s past time to fix the gaping holes that are the lack of coverage for dental, vision and hearing, which are so critical, especially as we age,” the two lawmakers said in their op-ed.

    Sanders and Jayapal added:

    [S]ince its inception in 1965, Medicare has not covered such basic health-care needs as hearing, dental care and vision. The result: Millions of senior citizens have teeth rotting in their mouths, are unable to hear what their children and grandchildren say or can’t read a newspaper because of failing eyesight. It is a cruel irony that older Americans do not have coverage for these benefits at the time when they need it the most.

    Schumer still has many disagreements with Sanders and other progressives on Medicare. Sanders, for example, has long been a supporter of Medicare for All, expanding the popular public health insurance program to every person living in the U.S. Schumer, meanwhile, opposes the measure.

    But the Senate Majority Leader has agreed with Sanders on other aspects of Medicare expansion, including lowering the eligibility age and supporting a public health insurance option to compete with private companies.

    Although it would be incredibly difficult to pass a Medicare for All bill in the presently divided Congress, such a plan has support from most Americans. A Morning Consult poll conducted in March found that only 32 percent of voters oppose Medicare for All, while 55 percent are in support of the idea, which would create a single-payer health insurance for everyone in the country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • House Passes Historic Bill Ending Military Authorization in Iraq

    U.S. soldiers fire a howitzer in Iraq, August 12, 2018, while supporting Iraqi forces as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.

    Legislation that would end the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq or in situations where U.S. interests are impacted in that region of the world, passed within the House of Representatives on Thursday.

    The vote on the bill was technically bipartisan, with 49 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in the House.

    The bill, which ends the AUMF that was originally passed in 2002 during the run-up to the war in Iraq, has the support of lawmakers in the Senate as well. The White House has also signaled that President Joe Biden would sign the bill into law if it reached his desk.

    “The administration supports the repeal of the 2002 AUMF, as the United States has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on the 2002 AUMF as a domestic legal basis,” the White House said in a statement earlier this week.

    “The Iraq War has been over for nearly a decade. The authorization passed in 2002 is no longer necessary in 2021,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York).

    Ending the AUMF would prevent future administrations from “reaching back into the legal dustbin to use it as a justification for military adventurism,” Schumer added. The AUMF from 2002 has been cited to justify actions by both the Obama and Trump administrations, with former President Donald Trump’s White House most recently using it to defend the military strikes that targeted Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani in January 2020.

    The White House has said it wants to go further, eliminating other authorizations that still exist and creating a new framework for how the U.S. military can act in the future. An earlier AUMF, passed just days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, still remains in force, and the authorization from the first war in Iraq in 1991 is still technically on the books.

    Activists, organizations and Congress members opposed to the endless wars are calling for those authorizations to be repealed, too.

    “Once we pass a repeal of the 2002 AUMF, we must keep up our fight to repeal the 2001 AUMF so that no future president has the unilateral power to plunge us into endless wars,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) said.

    “Congress must repeal not only the 2002 but also the more important and even more disastrous 2001 #AUMF, end the #WarOnTerror and repeal the #PatriotAct, and impose strict limits on Presidential authority to make war,” Massachusetts Peace Action tweeted out earlier this year.

    The 2002 AUMF, passed months before the U.S. began its military operations in Iraq in 2003, gives the president broad and generalized power to “use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to — (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.” Biden, who is now calling for its repeal, had originally voted in favor of the AUMF.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Schumer and Pelosi Are Urging Fellow Democrats to Go Easy on Joe Manchin

    Sen. Joe Manchin departs a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on June 9, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

    With frustration against Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) mounting among a wide swath of the Democratic party and the left, Democratic leadership is evidently asking advocates and fellow lawmakers to lay off the senator.

    Manchin has come under fire over the past months for his opposition to filibuster abolition and, more recently, his opposition to the Democrats’ landmark voting rights bill, the For the People Act. Progressives have had strong words for the senator, calling him “the new [Sen.] Mitch McConnell,” and suggesting that Manchin is “intertwined” with right-wing Koch-funded dark money organizations.

    But Democratic leadership is evidently defending Manchin, despite the fact that he is one of the largest and most stubborn roadblocks to passing their agenda.

    According to Politico, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) is telling advocacy groups to lay off criticism of the senator ahead of a Senate vote on the For the People Act, or S.1. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) told lawmakers in a meeting on Monday night to not go after individual senators on voting rights legislation — without overtly naming Manchin, though he is the only Democratic senator to publicly announce his opposition to the bill.

    Progressives, increasingly frustrated with congressional Democrats and their failure to pass legislation, have suggested that Democratic leaders are actually using Manchin as a scapegoat for blocking voting rights. Both leaders have been pushing for the legislation, yet are reluctant to whip votes within their own party for it.

    Schumer and Pelosi’s push for Democrats to lay off Manchin, however, may end up working against them. As progressives have pointed out, Manchin is already facing pressure from the right to oppose proposals like S.1 and climate bills.

    Last week, CNBC uncovered campaigns from Koch-affiliated organizations like Americans for Prosperity, a Koch advocacy group, that are aimed at pushing Manchin to continue obstructing the Democratic agenda and upholding right-wing values. Sans pressure from Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who recently panned Manchin for his ties with “corporate money,” the only pressure left on Manchin would be that from the right.

    Regardless, Manchin already seems ready to ignore the advice of his own party on voting rights.

    On Tuesday, Texas Democrats held a lunch with Senate Democrats to emphasize the importance of passing S.1 to stop the wave of voter suppression bills that Republicans are filing across the country. Last month, Democratic lawmakers in Texas had walked off the State House floor to kill a voter suppression bill their Republican colleagues were trying to jam through.

    Though state Democratic lawmakers are fighting their hardest against these bills, “we need federal intervention,” one Texas representative told reporters. “We came here because the future of Texas voting depends on action from Congress.”

    But Manchin, the person whom Democrats most need to persuade on the issue, didn’t bother to attend the luncheon. Neither did Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona), who like Manchin is also deeply opposed to reforming or abolishing the filibuster.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Fed Up With GOP Games, Democrats Say They’re Ready to Move Ahead on Legislation

    Democrats are getting more vocal about their disdain for Republicans, especially with regards to GOP lawmakers’ demands for bipartisanship, the absurdity of the conditions they have laid down and the constantly moving goalpost in negotiations.

    If Republicans don’t get serious about making deals soon, several Democratic leaders have said, the party will go it alone on a number of legislative goals.

    “We always hope that our Republican friends will work with us on things,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said on Tuesday, referencing President Joe Biden’s “build back better” agenda and the formation of a commission to study the January 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol building.

    But Schumer also noted that the GOP’s refusal to negotiate may just be another means to obstruct the legislative process.

    “We hope to move forward with Republicans, but we’re not going to let them, saying no, stand in our way.”

    Several other Democrats have voiced similar sentiments. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said it’s “close” to time for Democrats to move away from attempts at bipartisanship, while Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the party whip in the Senate, said he’s “not happy with the progress that we’ve made.”

    “I think we need to do better,” Durbin said.

    Weeks of talks have so far resulted in zero agreements on a number of issues, including on infrastructure. On that topic, Schumer said that Democrats plan to “move forward in July,” with or without the support of Republicans on a final bill.

    The Biden administration has already dropped the price tag on their own infrastructure proposal by around $600 billion in an effort to court more Republican support for the plan. But a group of Republicans, proposing their own counteroffers on the issue, refused to budge, and expressed dismay after meeting with officials in the administration on Friday.

    In fact, it appears that the meeting on Friday may have had the opposite effect of what was intended by a bipartisanship-seeking President Biden.

    “Based on [Friday’s] meeting, the groups seem further apart after two meetings with White House staff than they were after one meeting with President Biden,” said Kelley Moore, communications director for Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia).

    The insistence that Democrats negotiate with Republicans has been criticized by several progressive organizations. Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn, encouraged the administration to stop trying to create deals when Republicans are clearly not interested in doing so.

    “Republicans are not a serious governing party,” Epting recently said, “and the Biden administration should stop treating them like one…. Republicans have shown they are more interested in lying about the last election than in solving today’s crises.”

    William Rivers Pitt, senior editor and lead columnist at Truthout, wrote on Tuesday that believing Republican lawmakers will somehow decide that they are going to change their intention of 100 percent obstruction is not a worthwhile endeavor.

    “[Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell (R-Kentucky) will never allow his Senate caucus to support a major Biden initiative,” Pitt wrote. “If the Democrats returned to the table with an offer to cut the spending on that bill down to 19 cents and an eraserless pencil, McConnell would take to the floor and announce he was studying the proposal. Days would go by as he laughed into his sleeve, until he’d finally fling the whole thing back at the Democrats because the 19 cents weren’t budget-neutral and the pencil was made in China.”

    Instead, Democrats should move forward on bills, without Republicans intent on obstructing them, using a little-known device called Senate Rule 304, which allows lawmakers to use amendments on reconciliation-passed laws to bypass potential filibusters.

    “The Senate parliamentarian has approved the use of Rule 304 on as many as six additional pieces of legislation,” Pitt noted, “all of which can be amendments to the [American Rescue Plan]. Not one single Republican vote would be required.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden Removes Student Loan Forgiveness From Budget Proposal

    President Joe Biden departs after holding a press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2021.

    The White House has reportedly removed several key provisions from the administration’s upcoming budget plan, one of which was a student debt forgiveness proposal that progressives say is already several months overdue.

    The Washington Post reported on Friday that the White House has also removed several proposals that President Joe Biden had promised to address on the campaign trail, like reducing the cost of prescription drugs and raising the estate tax.

    Progressives have been especially frustrated with Biden, however, for having discussed but not followed through on the prospect of forgiving student loans for months. The left began advocating for Biden to cancel student debt weeks before his presidency started — but, despite making some moves indicating he might do so, Biden is now stepping back previous pledges on the matter.

    During his presidential campaign, Biden supported canceling up to $10,000 in student loan debt per borrower. After taking office, Biden made a couple of moves earlier in the year signalling that he may go even bigger, with his chief of staff hinting in April that forgiveness of up to $50,000 could be on the table.

    Biden’s recent selection of Richard Cordray, an ally of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), to head the federal student loan program in the Department of Education also seemed to signal that Biden might be listening to progressives on the subject.

    For months, the Biden administration has said that it is exploring the legality of canceling student debt via executive order — a matter of great exasperation for advocates of debt cancellation who have repeatedly pointed out that it’s something the president could do with the stroke of a pen.

    But the fact that Biden has postponed action on the proposal for so long and has now removed it from the upcoming budget proposal implies that Biden may be skeptical of the proposal altogether.

    “[Biden]’s suspicious of the generous college debt forgiveness plans that have sprung up on the left,” read a recent New York Times article and interview with the president. Democrats, in efforts led largely by Warren, have proposed canceling $50,000 of student debt per borrower. Advocates like the Debt Collective have said that Biden could cancel all student debt for all borrowers.

    “The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree,” Biden told the New York Times. As advocates have pointed out, this line of reasoning is flawed. Many students who go to prestigious schools like Harvard and Yale don’t graduate with debt — and many of the ones who do are people of color, who disproportionately carry more student loan debt than their white counterparts.

    For some Democratic and progressive lawmakers, student loan forgiveness is about equity and fueling a healthy economy during the pandemic and beyond. “Student debt is holding back New Yorkers and millions of Americans from buying homes, saving for retirement, and more,” tweeted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) last week. “[President Biden] can #CancelStudentDebt through executive action.”

    Now, after months of reserved praise from the left for some of his actions as president, Biden appears to be exposing more of his centrist/moderate roots. On the same day that the Post reported on the removal of key budget proposals, the administration announced that it was slashing the size of the White House’s infrastructure proposal from $2.25 trillion to $1.7 trillion in order to appease Republicans — the same Republicans who have stated that their only goal is obstruction.

    Meanwhile, the administration had a host of progressive and Democratic proposals to incorporate into the infrastructure bill that would have made it bolder and that the lawmakers said would meet the moment more sufficiently. Last month, for instance, progressives introduced a $10 trillion green infrastructure and climate justice bill called the THRIVE Act that goes further than Biden’s plan with investing in climate resilience and jobs creation.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Centrist Lawmakers Join Progressives in Urging Biden to Support Gaza Ceasefire

    Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, right, replaces his surgical mask after yielding the lectern to Sen. Tim Kaine during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on November 17, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

    An increasing number of Democrats are pressuring the White House to support a ceasefire in Gaza and potentially stop a planned weapons sale to Israel after Israel ramped up its attacks on Palestinians in Gaza over the past week.

    On Monday, Biden’s administration blocked a United Nations Security Council statement calling for an immediate ceasefire in the area for the third time — though, several hours later, Biden said in a statement that he supports a ceasefire.

    However, The Washington Post also reported on Monday that the administration would be going ahead with a $735 million weapons sale to Israel that had been planned before the recent escalation in violence.

    Health authorities in Gaza say that Israel has killed over 200 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip over the past week or so, including at least 61 children. Reports also say that Israel has leveled 132 buildings, rendering over 2,500 Palestinians homeless.

    Now a growing number of moderate Democrats have joined progressives in Congress in speaking out against the White House’s recent statements and actions regarding Israeli attacks on Gaza.

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), traditionally a moderate, endorsed calls for a ceasefire this week. “I want to see a ceasefire reached quickly and mourn the loss of life,” he told reporters, per Politico.

    Schumer has long maintained the attitude that Israel has a right to defend itself — a flawed concept that completely ignores the history of Israeli colonization of Palestine and apartheid rule over Palestinians. Still, Schumer’s call for a ceasefire represents a small shift away from uncritically supporting Israel, which has thanked the Biden administration for blocking the UN Security Council’s call for a ceasefire.

    Another centrist Democrat, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia also came out in support of the ceasefire recently, and told Politico that he was “troubled” by the U.S.’s rejection of the UN statement.

    “I just can’t remember a shooting war where kids are being killed on both sides where the U.S. hasn’t aggressively pushed for a ceasefire,” said Kaine. While it’s unclear whether this statement is historically accurate, the implication that kids are being killed on both sides does not hold up to what’s being reported — Israel’s actions have killed dozens of Palestinian children but there have been no reports of Israeli children being killed.

    On Monday, a group of 29 senators from a wide spectrum of the Democratic Party led by freshman Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia), signed a statement calling for an “immediate ceasefire.” Signatories included more progressive lawmakers like Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), as well as moderates like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota).

    Progressives in the House have also been vocal recently about supporting Palestinians’ rights and opposing Israeli violence. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) praised Biden for his statement supporting the ceasefire on Monday and urged him to go further. “Finally!! Our delay in supporting a ceasefire has caused the slaughter of children and destruction of lives,” she tweeted. “Now Biden has to push for an end to the occupation.”

    Progressive representatives held a special order hour on the House floor last week to testify about the horrors of Israeli apartheid and to urge the U.S. to stop funding the Israeli government. “We cannot remain silent when our government sends $3.8 billion of military aid to Israel that is used to demolish Palestinian homes, imprison Palestinian children and displace Palestinian families,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) during the special order hour.

    Indeed, though the tide in Washington, D.C., may be shifting ever so slightly, Democrats still have a long way to go on the issue. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), a top member of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island) defended Biden’s somewhat tepid approach to the ceasefire issue, with Cardin saying that Hamas, not Israel, would act in bad faith in a ceasefire order.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Nearly 100 House Democrats Send Letter to Schumer Demanding End to Filibuster

    Rep. Cori Bush speaks during a news conference to advocate for ending the Senate filibuster, outside the U.S. Capitol on April 22, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Representatives Cori Bush (D-Missouri) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) are leading an effort with nearly 100 of their fellow House members to end the Senate filibuster. The lawmakers join many progressive and Democratic advocates in saying that the filibuster is a roadblock to progress.

    “In today’s hyper-partisan climate, there is simply no avenue for bold legislation that meets the needs of everyday Americans without ending the filibuster,” the representatives wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York). “We must end the gridlock that has become common practice in Washington and govern boldly and transformatively to improve the lives of millions of people, children, and families all across the country.”

    The lawmakers say that getting rid of the filibuster, which forces bills to have 60 votes to be able to pass, is essential to passing things like a $15 federal minimum wage, voting rights bills like the For the People Act, climate bills, and reforms on immigration and gun rights, among other proposals.

    “For too many people in our communities, their very survival is at stake. Republicans are well aware that removing barriers to passing legislation will have a transformational impact on these communities,” the lawmakers write. “It is why they are passing legislation at the state level across the country in an attempt to suppress the votes of Black, brown and Indigenous people. It is also why they are preventing the Senate from advancing critical legislation that can meet the needs of the people we represent.”

    The letter notes that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have tried to get rid of the filibuster before. In fact, lawmakers got rid of the House’s filibuster 130 years ago because it was preventing progress.

    The Senate filibuster, as the lawmakers point out, is a relic of the Jim Crow era and has a history of being used to block civil rights. Advocates have said that filibuster abolition is thus an issue of racial equality and justice.

    “Filibuster reform is critical for advancing racial justice,” said Senior Director of Democracy and Criminal Justice for Color of Change Scott Roberts in a statement. “Democratic Senators who defend the filibuster are protecting a legacy of racism, and are choosing to let an outdated rule block progress that would begin to address the challenges facing Black communities across the country.”

    In more recent times, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has made himself an expert in wielding the filibuster as a weapon against Democrats, as he did under Barack Obama.

    McConnell knows that he can continue to wield that power in his newfound minority; at the beginning of this congressional session, McConnell held up the Senate by insisting on protecting the filibuster. Last month, he threatened to go “scorched earth” if Democrats got rid of the filibuster, saying that he’d make the Senate look like a “100-car pileup.”

    But filibuster abolition faces opposition from both sides of the Senate. Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) have opposed getting rid of the filibuster even though it is a significant roadblock to progress. Though Democrats, including President Joe Biden to a small extent, and progressives have been working on changing the minds of Sinema, Manchin and other Democrats about holding on to the arcane rule, they have so far not been very successful in their efforts.

    Bush and Jayapal, along with fellow letter leaders Representatives Jason Crow (D-Colorado) and Sean Casten (D-Illinois), hope that highlighting Democratic policies that are held up by the filibuster can help sway the Senate their way.

    “It’s LGBTQ+ equality or the filibuster. It’s DC Statehood or the filibuster. It’s voting rights or the filibuster. It’s the Dream Act, gun safety reforms, campaign finance reform, and equal pay or the filibuster,” tweeted Jayapal on Thursday. “The choice is clear. We must eliminate the filibuster.”

    Casten highlighted the urgency and timeliness of the matter as Republicans attempt to pass hundreds of voter suppression laws at the state level. “Republicans proposed at least 250 voting restriction laws at the state level. Georgia has already passed a voter suppression bill. H.R. 1 is waiting to be passed in the Senate and it would protect our right to vote,” he wrote. “This is an urgent crisis. We must end the filibuster and pass it.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • AOC, Sanders Are Reintroducing Their Green New Deal for Public Housing Bill

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attends a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., April 15, 2021.

    Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) are set to unveil new legislation on Monday focusing on improving public housing and making it more climate friendly.

    The bill is called the Green New Deal of Public Housing and is an arm of the larger Green New Deal (GND) package. It’s an updated version of the bill of the same name that the lawmakers introduced in 2019 to create jobs, retrofit public housing to be more energy-efficient and use clean energy to power the buildings.

    “We’re here to make sure the Democratic Party upholds its values and keeps its promises, and to also push and expand the scope and the ambition of the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez told The New York Times.

    This year’s bill, which is estimated to cost between $119 billion and $172 billion over the next decade, will stand in contrast to President Joe Biden’s proposal for public housing in his infrastructure bill. Biden calls for only $40 billion for public housing, and many Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), have called on Biden to spend more.

    Ocasio-Cortez promoted the bill on Twitter, saying, “Today, we’re reintroducing the Green New Deal for Public Housing because — with millions on the brink of eviction, millions under/unemployed, and with a coming climate crisis — investing in our housing infrastructure has never been more important.”

    “The Green New Deal for Public Housing was one of the first bills to take the three core elements of the GND resolution — jobs, justice, and decarbonization — and put it into bill text,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. The lawmaker says she, along with progressive allies like Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) will be introducing two more bills related to the GND this week.

    Advocates of the progressives’ public housing bill say that the bill’s investments are a necessary step toward dismantling racism and preventing the worst effects of the climate crisis.

    “We need a massive federal investment that would finally provide American public housing communities with healthy, comfortable, energy-efficient homes — fighting racism, unemployment, the housing crisis, and the climate emergency at the same time and in the same places, and building out badly needed green community infrastructure,” wrote the Climate and Community Project, which released a report on the bill.

    The bill seeks to electrify and generally repair the over 1 million public housing units in the country, as well as remove environmental toxins like mold and lead from dwellings. It would also remove limitations on building more public housing as set by the Faircloth Amendment, which sets strict limits on how much affordable housing can be built.

    The proposal also seeks to stimulate the economy. According to the report by the Climate and Community Project, the bill would create 166,000 to 241,000 jobs per year, many of them being high-quality union jobs.

    The organization argues that the size of the investment is crucial to the bill and to any proposed improvements to public housing, as smaller investments would create more problems than they would solve for the residents of these homes and for the government, which has to continually spend money on replacing and fixing appliances and on building materials bought on tight budgets that are “obsolete on delivery.”

    “Today, public housing residents are exhausted and despairing at the low quality of work and materials used in the (extremely slow) maintenance of their homes,” the report’s authors write.

    Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders’s proposal, on the other hand, would not only improve the quality of life of the people living in public housing but also help improve health outcomes. Eliminating mold and other toxins in these buildings would cut the rate of asthma among New York’s public housing residents by 18 to 30 percent, the report finds.

    The bill’s introduction comes a day after other Democrats from New York have called on Biden to spend at least twice as much as the proposed $40 billion for public housing in his infrastructure bill. “Public housing has been neglected, left to get worse, and we’re not going to stand for it anymore,” said Schumer on Sunday.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Little-Known Senate Rule That Could Change Everything

    Chuck Schumer's face, really close up

    If the reports hold true and the rug doesn’t get jerked out from under us, it appears Chuck Schumer and his slim Senate Democratic majority have located a tool that will pull most of Mitch McConnell’s filibuster fangs right out of his frowny mouth… and maybe, just maybe, bring some of the changes we most desperately need.

    “Elizabeth MacDonough, who serves as the parliamentarian, is reportedly willing to accept an interpretation of an obscure budget rule to let Democrats use previously passed legislation, enacted through the reconciliation process, to bypass the standard 60-vote filibuster threshold that Republicans were threatening to use to block future legislation,” wrote Chris Walker for Truthout. “That rule, Section 304 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, allows lawmakers to make amendments to reconciliation bills that have already passed and become law.”

    Genius, no? A trick of the language, some deft lawyer’s sleight-of-hand, and voilà! All sorts of great stuff can be passed with a simple majority under the auspices of reconciliation. President Biden and Schumer got the first one across the goal line — the American Rescue Plan — and going forward, so long as they affect the budget somehow and stay within parliamentary lines, vast new pieces of legislation can be passed simply by labeling them as “amendments” to the bill that’s already done.

    The key number in that report is “1974,” the year this rule was made law. That makes it 47 years old, a comfortably middle-aged rule, much like myself. How, after decades of ruthless Republican interference in basic good government by way of the filibuster, did I/we/Chuck/Obama/Joe/Every Democrat since Watergate miss Rule 304? It is the sword in the stone, legislatively speaking, and if the Democrats don’t mess it up, it could become the biggest political game-changer of our lifetime.

    “It’s as if the Senate has discovered water,” former Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin told CNN. “We have known about it for years. It’s anybody’s guess why it hasn’t been utilized for years.”

    Thanks, buddy. You could have dropped a note.

    The very idea gets me to giggling like a titmouse in a tree. Take Biden’s pending massive multitrillion-dollar proposal for infrastructure reform and repair, called Build Back Better (BBB). Before the advent of Rule 304, and after the passage of the American Rescue Plan, getting infrastructure through this Senate was going to be like rolling blood up a sandy hill in the rain pretty much forever. Beyond the fact that 10 Republicans would leap from the Capitol dome before voting to give Biden a legislative win, “centrist” Democrats like Joe Manchin would be ever circling, like sharks looking to take bites out of the prize.

    With 304? All they have to worry about is Manchin and his cohort, and they are manageable.

    I have a vision of Schumer oozing ersatz courtesy as he says, “Pardon me a moment, Mitch, I just want to make some… revisions to that… bill we passed already… yeah, revisions… hang on… nip here, tuck there… 51 votes… and yeah, HOWYA LIKE ME NOW, MITCH? INFRASTRUCTURE, CLIMATE LEGISLATION, GUN REFORM, ANOTHER STIMULUS, RIGHT IN YOUR BITTER FACE!” At which point Chuck will start doing the Floss with giddy gusto, and I will fall down dead and smiling at the glory of it all.

    Preposterous? Probably the Floss bit, yeah, but the rest is well within reach. The possibilities here, while not endless, are pretty damned dramatic. It’s not just Build Back Better we’re talking about here. The parliamentarian has strongly suggested Democrats could move as many as six pieces of legislation under Rule 304 before the end of this Congress. What six policy initiatives are most dear to you? Call your Democratic senator if you have one and let them know. If you don’t have one, call them anyway.

    Rule 304 is not a silver bullet, however. Whatever goes into the proposed legislation must adhere to the rules of reconciliation as interpreted by the parliamentarian. MacDonough already struck the $15 minimum wage hike from the seedcorn American Rescue Plan, so that vital initiative will have to fight it out over the longer, and far more perilous, way home.

    Biden and the Democrats have to decide to use the thing first, and if you listen to them talk, that decision has not yet been made. “Democrats insist that they have made no decisions about how to use the tool,” reports The New York Times. “‘It is always good to have a series of insurance policies,’ Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said about the possibility that Democrats could repeatedly duplicate last month’s party-line passage of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief legislation should they not be able to work out deals with Republicans.”

    We shun predictions here at Truthout, so I am not saying the use of 304 is a done deal. I’m not not saying it, either. I am saying that they’d be a pack of kick-me-sign folks if they don’t deploy this thing with fireworks and a parade. Build Back Better by itself has the potential of being transformative on a generational level, and the White House knows this full well. That alone is worth the reach.

    “President Joe Biden’s sprawling infrastructure plan doesn’t just attempt to turn decades-old progressive policy pursuits into law,” reports Politico. “Aides and operatives inside and out of the White House are coming to view it as an ambitious political play to cement, and even expand, the coalition of voters that delivered Democrats to power in November.”

    If and when this does go down, there is one large concern to encompass. If progressive legislation starts flying out of the Senate like it’s a fire sale at a Frisbee factory, and if Rule 304 blocks all Republican obstruction, the GOP could still reach for the last bloody club in its bag.

    The Capitol has already been sacked once by the same people McConnell will exhort into a frothing rage once he is fully thwarted… and never forget Donald Trump squatting down in Florida waiting for a new chance at relevance. What better way to recapture the spotlight than to call for an insurrection against the egghead libs trying to steal our cows and cars and Jesus? He did it once, and this would be fertile tinder for him to try again.

    All that is filed under “maybe,” and no reason at all to stop. The pieces are still moving, but if they fall into place just so, this could be a summer and fall beyond many of our wildest dreams.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden May Be Exploring $50K Student Loan Cancellation, Hints His Chief of Staff

    President-elect Joe Biden announces Miguel Cardona as his nominee for Education Secretary at the Queen theatre on December 23, 2020, in Wilmington, Delaware.

    President Joe Biden is exploring the possibility of canceling student loan debt of up to $50,000 per debtor, his chief of staff Ron Klain said on Thursday. Biden has asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to compile a memo detailing how he could legally do so as president.

    “He asked his secretary of education — just put on the job a few weeks — once he got on the job to have his department prepare a memo on the president’s legal authority. Hopefully, we’ll see that in the next few weeks,” said Klain in an interview with Politico’s Ryan Lizza. “And then he’ll look at that legal authority, he’ll look at the policy issues around that, and he’ll make a decision.”

    Though Biden has previously come out against canceling $50,000 worth of student debt, Klain did not confirm the amount Biden is considering when Lizza asked about the $50,000 figure specifically.

    Biden has also previously asked the Justice Department to examine the legality of canceling student debt with an executive order. Betsy DeVos, former head of the Education Department under Donald Trump, advised against canceling student loans when she left her post in January. DeVos was infamous for substantially weakening student loan forgiveness programs and rejecting borrowers who rightfully applied for forgiveness.

    On Monday, Cardona issued a waiver to make it easier for people with disabilities to have their student loans canceled. Previously, people with disabilities looking to have their student loans canceled were subject to a three-year monitoring period in which they would have to submit paperwork proving that their income is below or at the poverty line every year.

    The department has now waived the requirement for that paperwork for the duration of the pandemic and made it retroactive to when Trump first declared a national emergency in March of last year.

    The department says that this will help over 230,000 borrowers. More than 41,000 borrowers who had a combined $1.3 billion in loans reinstated due to a failure to report their earnings will get their loans canceled and get refunds for the payments they made during the pandemic; the other 190,000 won’t have to submit income documentation.

    The Biden administration also on Tuesday announced an expansion of a pause on student loan interest for more than a million borrowers who are in default of their loan payments. It protects those with loans made as part of the Federal Family Education Loan Program from having their tax refunds seized, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

    Biden has previously said that he is in favor of Congress canceling $10,000 worth of student loan debt per borrower and that any relief of up to $50,000 should be targeted. Biden has previously said that he doesn’t want forgiveness to be going toward people who went to “Harvard and Yale and Penn.”

    But progressives and Democrats have been pushing him to cancel more, which lawmakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) say he can do with the “stroke of a pen” via an executive order.

    The lawmakers, alongside education law experts, argue that it’s perfectly legal to do so. Senators Schumer and Warren announced a proposal in February calling on Biden to cancel up to $50,000 for all borrowers. They say that it is not only the morally correct thing to do, but it would also help kick-start the economy in a time of great need.

    Advocates for canceling student debt say that it would result in dramatically better economic outcomes for people who either took on their own debt or took on the debt of their child. “Data show that canceling the student loan debt would result in greater homeownership rates, more housing stability, improved credit scores, higher incomes, higher GDP, more small business formation and more jobs,” Warren said in February.

    Since the idea to cancel student debt first gained mainstream political purchase over the past years, Democrats and activists have continually called upon Congress and the president to use their powers to free members of the public from student loans. Student loans can take decades to pay off and are an oppressive force in the lives of many people who took on debt for something that loan cancellation activists say is a basic right.

    Warren, Schumer and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) tucked a provision into last month’s stimulus bill to help pave the way for Biden to cancel student loans. The provision makes it so that loan forgiveness would be tax-free through 2025, eliminating the possibility of a surprise tax bill for those whose loans are forgiven.

    Labor unions representing teachers, firefighters and health care workers have recently also called on Biden to cancel student debt for people working in public service via an executive order. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program promises that those who have kept up with loan payments and worked in public service for 10 years can get the rest of their loans forgiven. But the program is deeply broken and mismanaged, and more than 98 percent of people who apply are rejected.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.