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  • Texas Advances Voter Suppression Law That Makes It Easier to Overturn Elections

    Governor of Texas Greg Abbott looks on prior to Game One of the 2020 MLB World Series at Globe Life Field between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Tampa Bay Rays on October 20, 2020, in Arlington, Texas.

    After reaching a deal less than a day earlier, overnight Sunday Texas state senators debated then passed along party lines a GOP voter suppression bill that was condemned by rights advocates and political figures across the United States — including President Joe Biden — and has sparked calls for Congress to urgently combat Republican attacks on democracy.

    “Today, Texas legislators put forth a bill that joins Georgia and Florida in advancing a state law that attacks the sacred right to vote,” Biden said Saturday. “It’s part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year — and often disproportionately targeting Black and Brown Americans. It’s wrong and un-American. In the 21st century, we should be making it easier, not harder, for every eligible voter to vote.”

    Sarah Labowitz, policy and advocacy director of the ACLU of Texas, also slammed the state GOP’s Senate Bill 7 in a statement Saturday, declaring that “S.B. 7 is a ruthless piece of legislation.”

    “It targets voters of color and voters with disabilities, in a state that’s already the most difficult place to vote in the country. The defining message of the 2021 Texas Legislature is clear: Political leaders chose to punish their constituents instead of fixing the electrical grid or providing pandemic or blackout relief,” said Labowitz, referencing power issues that impacted the state earlier this year.

    “The bill, which was hashed out in a closed-door panel of lawmakers over the past week, was rushed to the State Senate floor late Saturday. In a legislative power play orchestrated by Republican lawmakers and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate moved to suspend rules that required a bill to be public for 24 hours before a final vote,” the New York Times reported. “The Texas House did not move to suspend the rules, and is likely to vote on the bill on Sunday.”

    The Republican-controlled Texas Legislature is set to adjourn on Monday. The Washington Post noted that GOP Gov. Greg Abbott “threatened lawmakers with a special session if they did not pass a voting bill this week” and is expected to sign S.B. 7. Abbott is a potential 2024 presidential candidate and a major supporter of former President Trump — who, despite his definitive loss, claimed repeatedly that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, which a majority of recently polled Republicans still believe.

    Critics have called S.B. 7 a clear effort to limit electoral participation in the largely Democratic Harris County because it would outlaw drive-thru and 24-hour voting, which nearly 140,000 county voters used in the 2020 election. Other provisions include barring election officials from sending absentee ballots to all voters, implementing new identification requirements for Texans who request mail ballots, allowing partisan poll watchers additional access, and imposing harsher punishments on election officials who violate state rules.

    According to the Post, “In a last-minute addition, language was inserted in the bill making it easier to overturn an election, no longer requiring evidence that fraud actually altered an outcome of a race — but rather only that enough ballots were illegally cast that could have made a difference.”

    “S.B. 7 remains a racist voter suppression bill that belongs in the Jim Crow era,” Common Cause Texas executive director Anthony Gutierrez said Saturday after a conference committee of state House and Senate members released the final version.

    “The choice to push this legislation forward in the dark, despite overwhelming opposition from the people of Texas, is about the politicians in power doing everything they can to manipulate the outcome of future elections to keep themselves in power,” he continued.

    MOVE Texas communications director Charlie Bonner echoed that critique Saturday in comments to The Texas Tribune.

    “It is fitting that the final push to get anti-voter Senate Bill 7 to the governor’s desk would take place behind closed doors, hidden from public scrutiny,” said Bonner. “This bill does nothing to improve the security of our elections — it only makes our democracy weaker by limiting access for young, disabled, Black, and Brown Texans.”

    Gutierrez asserted that “the intent of this bill is now and has always been to make it harder for certain Texans to vote or simply discourage others from even trying to take part in our democracy. Nowhere is that made more clear than in this version that cruelly removes an amendment that would have simply made it easier for high schools to register students. There is literally no reason to do that other than the politicians in power being afraid of too many young people voting.”

    “New voting procedures implemented by innovative county officials like drive-thru voting and after-hours voting were a resounding success and deserve to be celebrated,” he added. “Instead, supporters of S.B. 7 decided to end those practices simply because they enabled more people to make their voices heard in our elections.”

    The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund on Saturday sent a letter to Texas legislators urging them to vote down the final version of S.B. 7, writing that the bill “includes out-of-bound amendments and was surrounded by procedural irregularities,” and “may evince the Legislature’s intent to discriminate against Black voters, in violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal law.”

    The developments in Texas fueled fresh calls for the U.S. Senate to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping House-approved election reform package that voting rights advocates say would thwart many of the hundreds of state bills that Republicans across the country have introduced — and, in some cases, enacted — this year.

    “I call again on Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,” said Biden. “And I continue to call on all Americans, of every party and persuasion, to stand up for our democracy and protect the right to vote and the integrity of our elections.”

    Former Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke — who battled Biden in the 2020 presidential primary and is reportedly considering a run to serve as the Lone Star State’s governor — tweeted Saturday that “Texas lawmakers would dismantle our democracy in order to keep themselves in power. We’re doing all we can to stop this bill from becoming law. But we can’t do it alone. We need help. The U.S. Senate must pass the For the People Act.”

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Friday committed to forcing a vote on the For the People Act next month. In a letter to the Democratic caucus, he said the bill is “essential to defending our democracy, reducing the influence of dark money and powerful special interests, and stopping the wave of Republican voter suppression happening in the states across the country in service of President Trump’s Big Lie.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP-Led Legislatures May Pass Voter Suppression Laws With Help of Trump Judges

    The State Capitol Building in downtown Austin, Texas.

    Republican-led legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Texas, and other states are passing laws that make it harder to vote. Many of these bills, which have been drafted with help from an offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, will have a disproportionate impact on voters of color and are being challenged in court.

    While judges could strike down some provisions for violating a state constitution or discriminating against voters with disabilities, the appellate courts that will make the final decision include mostly Republican appointees.

    The GOP is defending the legislation as a response to voter fraud, though there is no evidence of widespread fraud. Jessica Anderson of Heritage Action, which helped with the drafting, said the bills would help “right the wrongs of November.” Heritage has long advocated voting restrictions, such as voter ID laws; as founder Paul Weyrich said in 1980, “Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” The group has pledged to spend millions defending the new laws in court.

    Voter suppression laws have faced difficulty passing the scrutiny of courts in recent years. For example, North Carolina’s 2013 voting law, which included a strict voter ID mandate, cuts to early voting, and the end of Election Day registration, was struck down by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia in 2016. The court found that legislators had targeted Black voters “with almost surgical precision.”

    North Carolina went on to pass another voter ID law that was also blocked by a federal judge in late 2019. The 4th Circuit overturned that decision, but in February 2020 the state Court of Appeals blocked the law after finding it likely violated the state constitution by disenfranchising Black voters. The case went to trial last month. The North Carolina Supreme Court, which has the final say on state law, has a 4-3 Democratic majority, but Republicans could take control after next year’s election.

    In Texas, Florida, and Georgia, the state supreme courts are composed entirely of Republican justices. Most of them are affiliated with the conservative Federalist Society, which helped both former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis choose appointees.

    Trump appointed more than a quarter of active federal judges, and last year his appointees shot down efforts to ease voting rules during the pandemic. The U.S. Supreme Court, which now has a 6-3 majority of Republican appointees including three put there by Trump, is unlikely to rule that the new Southern voter suppression laws discriminate against voters of color. In the run-up to last year’s election, the high court ruled against voters several times, including a ruling in favor of Alabama officials who were seeking to bar local election boards from offering curbside voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    These judges are unlikely to rule that the new voter suppression bills are racially discriminatory, but some courts could strike them down for violating the state constitution or the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

    Citing the ADA in Georgia

    Georgia’s new voting law incorporated several recommendations from Heritage, including strict limits on ballot drop boxes and mail-in ballot request forms, as well as bans on counties raising money from nonprofits for election administration. It also allows state officials to overturn decisions by local elections officials.

    Civil rights groups immediately filed lawsuits challenging the new rules. A federal lawsuit from several voting rights groups argues the law will have a greater impact on voters of color, who face much longer wait times.

    Any ruling to strike down the law would be reviewed by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. Republicans have radically reshaped the court in recent years, and Trump’s appointees included lawyers who had defended voter suppression. For example, Judge Andrew Brasher in his previous role as Alabama’s solicitor general had filed a brief defending a Florida law that had been struck down as an unconstitutional “poll tax.” The court agreed and restored the restrictive Florida law.

    Though federal courts probably won’t strike down the new Georgia voter suppression bill as racially discriminatory, the lawsuits argue that some provisions — including the ban on giving food and water to voters waiting in line — violate the ADA. The 11th Circuit previously issued groundbreaking rulings that broadly interpreted the ADA. But last year, in addition to upholding Alabama’s restrictions on curbside voting, the court ruled that a grocery store’s website wasn’t subject to the ADA.

    The law could eventually face challenges in state court as well, because the Georgia Constitution includes strict limits on the legislature’s power. The state Supreme Court has had a conservative majority since the legislature packed the court in 2016. Six of the seven justices are Republican appointees.

    Multiple Challenges in Florida

    Gov. DeSantis signed a bill on May 3 that also bans giving food and water to waiting voters and sharply limits drop boxes for mail-in ballots. After last year’s election, DeSantis praised election administration in his state and held it up as a model. But the bill he signed makes big changes and was opposed by local election administrators.

    The new law makes it nearly impossible for voter registration groups to help voters return their ballots, and it requires those groups to recite a misleading “warning” to people they help register to vote. Now election boards must post an employee to constantly monitor drop boxes, which can be open only during early voting hours.

    Civil rights groups immediately filed multiple challenges against the law in federal court. They argued, among other things, that it violates the ADA by making voting inaccessible to many voters with limited mobility, who are more likely to use drop boxes that are “placed outdoors and are easily accessible.” One lawsuit argues the penalties for giving voters food and water “exposes family members, caregivers, and volunteers to potential criminal liability.”

    Another federal lawsuit says the bill “purports to solve problems that do not exist” and “caters to a dangerous lie about the 2020 election that threatens our most basic democratic values.” It argues the bill was intended to keep senior citizens, young people, and voters of color from casting their ballots.

    Like Georgia’s, Florida’s new voter suppression law would likely be reviewed by the conservative 11th Circuit. And any state case would be headed for the Florida Supreme Court, which is one of the most conservative courts in the country. All of the justices are Republican appointees.

    A Pledge to Sue in Texas

    The Texas House passed a bill on May 7 that bans election officials from sending out unsolicited mail-in ballot request forms, empowers partisan poll watchers, and creates criminal penalties for election officials who violate limits on helping voters. A similar measure had already passed the Senate and the bill is now being finalized in conference.

    Republicans removed some of the bill’s more onerous restrictions last week, as well as controversial “purity of the ballot box” language that was added to the state constitution when white supremacist politicians established Jim Crow.

    Democrats said they would sue over the law in federal court, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, is arguably the most conservative appellate court in the country. Trump’s appointees included Judge Kyle Duncan, who signed a brief defending the 2013 North Carolina voter suppression bill.

    The 5th Circuit struck down a Texas voter ID law as violating the Voting Rights Act in 2016. But the court upheld a subsequent voter ID bill two years later. The court has also issued several rulings to throw out ADA lawsuits in recent years.

    If the new law is challenged under the state constitution, the case would be tried in the state capital of Austin. Most of the judges there are Democrats, but the legislature is considering a bill that would take the decision out of the hands of Austin’s appellate judges. The bill would create a new appellate court, elected in statewide partisan races, to review rulings in cases challenging state laws.

    In 2020, the all-GOP Texas Supreme Court sided with state officials seeking to block a county official from sending mail-in ballot request forms to all registered voters.

    Arkansas Sued in State Court

    Unlike in the other states, Arkansas’ legislature didn’t pass a single bill with multiple restrictions on voting rights. But it did pass a series of bills that included many of the same Heritage Foundation suggestions. Legislators also toughened Arkansas’ voter ID law and gave county commissioners authority over polling places. Holly Dixon of the state ACLU said this legislative session saw “the most dangerous assault on the right to vote since the Jim Crow era.”

    The state League of Women Voters and Arkansas United, an immigrant advocacy group, challenged the bills in state court. The groups argue that the new voting restrictions violate the rights to equal protection, a “free and equal election,” and free speech guaranteed by the Arkansas Constitution.

    Lawmakers defended the bills as a response to fraud. But the lawsuit argues that “if there is a threat to the integrity of Arkansas’s elections, it is the state’s consistently low voter turnout, particularly among Black voters.”

    The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down a voter ID law in 2014, construing it as a new “qualification” for voters, beyond those laid out in the state constitution. In 2018, though, the court upheld a similar law.

    Voters elected a conservative justice to the state Supreme Court last year, after a GOP group in Washington, D.C., spent big in the nonpartisan race. The new justice created a narrow conservative majority. Recent conservative high court candidates have been closely tied to the Republican Party.

    A bill introduced in the Arkansas legislature in February would have shifted the state to partisan judicial races, a move that only one state — North Carolina — has made in the past century. However, that bill stalled in committee.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Arizona Republicans Move to Strip Powers From Democratic Secretary of State

    View of the Arizona State Capitol building on January 17, 2021, in Phoenix, Arizona.

    Republicans in Arizona’s state legislature approved a bill on Tuesday designed to prevent Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, from influencing election lawsuits. The apparent goal of this latest Republican power grab is to keep the unofficial “audit” of 2020 votes in Maricopa County — the state’s major population center — intact following bitter criticism from Hobbs.

    The bill, HB 2891, strips all authority to act on behalf of state governments in election lawsuits from the secretary of state and transfers it to the attorney general, who is currently Mark Brnovich, a Republican. Notably, this measure, passed by the Appropriations committees in both houses of the Arizona legislature, is not permanent, but would apply only through Jan. 2, 2023 — the beginning of new terms for both officials.

    “The legislature intends that the attorney general make all strategic decisions regarding election litigation and be allowed to intervene on behalf of this state if the attorney general determines, in the attorney general’s sole discretion, that the intervention is appropriate,” the bill reads.

    It also adds that “the attorney general has sole authority in all election litigation to direct the defense of election laws, to appeal or petition any decision and to intervene on behalf of this state at any stage, regardless of whether any state agency, any political subdivision or any officer or employee of this state or any state agency or political subdivision is, or seeks to become, a party.”

    The bill would bar Brnovich from providing legal advice to Hobbs until June 20, 2023. While the bill grants Hobbs the option of hiring one full-time legal adviser to represent both them, she would be prohibited from “spending or incurring indebtedness to employ outside or private attorneys to provide representation or services.” These provisions are meant to remain in force through the end of Brnovich and Hobbs’ current terms in office.

    Arizona Democrats have described the Republican-backed bill as a blatant “power-grab” in the context of the agonizingly slow Maricopa County audit ordered by the state Senate, which is widely viewed as an effort to boost Donald Trump’s false claims that Arizona’s election system is flawed or corrupt.

    “It’s troubling and disturbing,” Democratic state Rep. Randy Friese told The Arizona Republic. “It’s quite nefarious that it only lasts through 2022.”

    Hobbs herself called the measure a clear effort to undermine confidence in Arizona’s election system. “All year our legislature has worked to undermine our elections — from a wave of bills to make it harder to vote to the ridiculous ‘audit’ taking place at the Coliseum,” she tweeted. “It appears the next step is an attempt to undermine Arizona’s Chief Elections Officer and prevent me from doing the job Arizonans elected me to do.”

    Hobbs specifically singled out Brnovich, saying he had “engaged in a pattern of behavior … that violated his duties as an attorney.” Hobbs also revealed that she had filed a confidential complaint against Brnovich in October.

    “He frequently sought to substitute his judgment for my own and allowed his political preferences to interfere with this obligation to represent me as a client, in my pursuit of the best interests of Arizona voters,” Hobbs said.

    Though the bill has yet to pass a full vote in the state legislature, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who has tried to straddle pro- and anti-Trump forces within his party, has indicated he is likely to sign it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • January 6 Commission Vote Likely to be Blocked by Senate Republicans Thursday

    Pro-Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol following a rally with then-President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Republicans in the Senate are expected to block a bill that would create a bipartisan commission to examine the January 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol building.

    The House passed a bill last week to create the commission, with 35 Republican members joining every Democratic lawmaker in support of its formation. But even with some Republican support in the Senate (Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska), Democrats are unlikely to pass it due to the filibuster.

    On January 6, hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump broke into the Capitol and forced their way to the floor of the Senate, disrupting the certification of the Electoral College. Dozens chanted for lawmakers to be harmed, and at the end of the day five individuals had lost their lives.

    With 50 senators in the Democratic Party caucus, at least 10 Republicans would be needed to force cloture of a filibuster. Some Democrats have called for the filibuster to be abolished in order to create the commission.

    “There are Democrats in the Senate who say that we need the filibuster for ‘bipartisanship’ while Republicans are literally filibustering an investigation into the insurrection that could have killed them,” said Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri). “We don’t compromise with white supremacy. End the filibuster.”

    Centrist Democrats who favor keeping the filibuster intact have voiced deep dissatisfaction with Republicans blocking the formation of the commission.

    “There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission since Democrats have agreed to everything [Republicans] asked for,” said Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia). “[Mitch] McConnell has made this his political position, thinking it will help his 2022 elections. They do not believe the truth will set you free, so they continue to live in fear.”

    Debate on the formation of the commission has been ongoing for several months, but a bipartisan deal in the House led to an agreement this month. The proposed commission would have both parties represented equally, with congressional leaders from both sides choosing five members each to serve on a 10-member commission.

    The commission would also have subpoena power to conduct its investigation, which could only be used if a majority of the commission or the co-chairs (one Democrat and one Republican) agrees to it.

    Polls show most Americans support the creation of a commission. An Axios/SurveyMonkey poll conducted last week found that nearly two-thirds of voters (65 percent) think a bipartisan commission to investigate the events of January 6 should be formed, while only 29 percent oppose it being created.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Took Weeks to Create an Infrastructure Plan That’s Mostly Baseline Spending

    Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, left, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell attend the Senate Rules and Administration Committee markup of the For the People Act in Russell Building on May 11, 2021.

    Senate Republicans have officially released their infrastructure proposal that they’ve been teasing for the past weeks — but it’s less than the $1 trillion they had pledged, and the amount of new spending is nowhere near that of the Democrats’ proposal.

    The Republicans released their $928 billion counteroffer Thursday. But buried in the fine print is the fact that the vast majority of their plan is baseline spending; the new spending in their offer totals to only $257 billion, which falls far short of President Joe Biden’s proposal.

    Biden’s proposal, by contrast, is entirely new spending on top of the baseline that advocates say is sorely needed for repairing and upgrading the country’s poorly-rated, crumbling infrastructure. The president had originally proposed a $2.25 trillion plan, but downgraded it to $1.7 trillion to the chagrin of many Democrats and progressives.

    Still, a $1.7 trillion investment is far larger than the paltry Republican offer, which is funded with leftover coronavirus spending. Even Biden’s roughly $600 billion cut to his original offer is more than two times larger than the Republicans’ entire new spending proposal.

    The Republican plan is limited to funding what many Democrats have said is an antiquated definition of infrastructure, with more than half of the spending going towards roads and bridges and the rest going towards projects like water infrastructure and trains.

    The counteroffer notably doesn’t include any of the critical climate investments that the White House has included in its plan. The GOP’s proposal also doesn’t have elder care provisions that Biden had proposed.

    Democrats immediately dismissed the Republican’s plan.

    “I don’t really think this is a serious counteroffer,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) on MSNBC. “First of all, they don’t have pay-fors for this. It’s not real. They have this illusory notion of how we’re going to take money that’s already been committed to other places and other spending. Second part is I’m not hearing about the green infrastructure.”

    Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania) said on CNN that the offer was a “non-starter.”

    The fact that the GOP offer is this small after weeks of negotiations is proof to some Democrats that they should forge ahead with passing Biden’s plan without Republican support.

    “This is not a serious counter-proposal,” wrote MSNBC’s Steve Benen. “When a group of lawmakers effectively declare that they’re not serious about reaching a compromise, perhaps it’s best to believe them.”

    The Biden administration, meanwhile, has been insistent on continuing to negotiate with conservatives. White House officials have suggested that Biden is willing to give up on a previous Memorial Day deadline for talks on the bill, meaning that the talks could drag on ever longer.

    Democrats and progressives have warned Biden against trying too hard for bipartisanship with Republicans. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said earlier this month that he doesn’t think that Democrats should prioritize reaching an agreement with the GOP on infrastructure. “The bottom line is the American people want results,” he said.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said earlier this month the GOP’s only goal on infrastructure is to stop Biden — so even if Biden cuts his plan further, it’s unclear if Democrats could ever get 10 Republicans in the Senate to vote for it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Talks Between Biden, GOP on Infrastructure Could Go Past Memorial Day Deadline

    President Joe Biden answers questions from members of the press before departing from the White House on May 25, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    The Biden administration has abandoned its deadline of Memorial Day weekend to finish negotiations on an infrastructure package in the hopes of reaching a bipartisan deal with Republicans.

    Citing three sources in the White House, Politico reported on Thursday that Biden is willing to allow another week or two of negotiations and counter proposals from Republicans on the American Jobs Plan. The original plan provided $2 trillion in funding for the country’s infrastructure needs, but Biden has already dropped that price tag by around $600 billion in an effort to court Republican support — to no avail.

    If the two sides cannot reach a deal, the White House will move forward without GOP support, those sources indicated, and focus on passing the bill with a little-known Senate reconciliation rule that allows lawmakers to bypass the filibuster.

    Republicans presented a new proposal on Thursday, which offered less than $1 trillion in spending and funds infrastructure projects by redirecting money intended for COVID-19 relief. Biden and the Democrats have insisted on funding the American Jobs Plan by raising taxes on corporations.

    But many Democrats are getting impatient, recalling how negotiations over the Affordable Care Act led to several months of delay and weaker legislation but no Republican support.

    A growing number of Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), have signaled that they are willing to pass an infrastructure package on their own if necessary.

    “We always hope that our Republican friends will work with us on things. … We hope to move forward with Republicans, but we’re not going to let them, saying no, stand in our way,” Schumer said earlier this week.

    Biden may not have to worry too much about political fallout for not working with Republicans. A Data for Progress poll conducted from May 14-17 found that 58 percent of Americans want the American Jobs Plan (and the American Families Plan) to pass through the reconciliation process, which would allow the Democrats to pass both bills without Republican support and suffer very little politically for doing so.

    The same poll found that most Americans rejected the Republicans proposal for funding infrastructure projects. Only 22 percent in the Data for Progress survey said they wanted projects funded by using unspent pandemic relief, while 63 percent agreed the best way to fund infrastructure was through raising taxes and cutting tax loopholes for corporations.

    The poll also indicated that Republicans should be more cooperative when it comes to negotiations, with 55 percent of respondents saying Republicans should “find ways to work” with the president, versus just 40 percent that said they wanted GOP lawmakers to “keep Biden in check.”

    “The American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan are overwhelmingly popular and voters support passing both, together through reconciliation,” Ethan Winter, a senior analyst at Data for Progress, told Truthout. “A majority of voters also want Republicans to work with Biden on passing these bills, rather than simply trying to impede the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda.

    “From a public opinion standpoint, there’s little reason for Democrats to jettison some of the most popular provisions of the American Jobs Plan,” like extending high-speed internet to all Americans, Winter added.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Environmentalists Warn Biden Not to Abandon Climate Plans to Appease Republicans

    Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, lead Republican negotiator with the Biden administration on infrastructure, speaks during a news conference with Sen. Pat Toomey, left, and Sen. John Barrasso at the U.S. Capitol on May 27, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Environmentalists are warning President Joe Biden against ditching critical green energy investments and other climate policies in his effort to strike an infrastructure deal with congressional Republicans, many of whom continue to deny the scientific reality of human-caused planetary heating.

    The Washington Post reported Wednesday that “in multiple rounds of talks, Republican lawmakers have held firm in opposition against key White House plans to address the changing climate, add $400 billion in funding for elder care, and a slew of other domestic priorities the administration is pushing for families and children.”

    “A second bipartisan group of lawmakers, meanwhile, is readying its own backup plan that is also likely to jettison some key climate and elder-care policies pushed by the White House,” the Post continued. “If centrists in both parties strike a deal, Biden probably would be forced to choose between accepting a compromise that leaves out these proposals, or rejecting a bipartisan infrastructure deal aides have long sought as a political triumph.”

    Likely left on the cutting room floor under such a scenario, according to the Post’s Jeff Stein, would be Biden’s proposals to end federal fossil fuel subsidies, fund the retrofitting of buildings and homes, establish hundreds of thousands of new electric vehicle charging stations, bolster the aging U.S. electric grid, and invest in climate resilience.

    Progressive activists were quick to argue that abandoning such commitments in the interest of reaching a deal with the GOP would be both politically disastrous and damaging to the fight against the global climate crisis, which Biden has dubbed an “existential threat” that requires immediate and bold action.

    “This right here is how the White House loses the majority, gives up on progress, forfeits the midterms, and abandons all hope and change,” said Drew Hudson, an organizer with Friends of the Earth Action.

    Evan Weber, political director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, pointed to a survey conducted just prior to the 2020 election showing that Democratic voters view climate change as the “most important” issue.

    Led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) — an ally of the fossil fuel industry — Republicans are set Thursday to send the White House an infrastructure counteroffer that is expected to confirm the GOP’s opposition to including key climate plans in the package. The Republican proposal is likely to be around $1 trillion in size, down from the roughly $2.2 trillion in spending Biden proposed in the initial version of his American Jobs Plan.

    “Our future depends on immediate and aggressive climate action,” tweeted NextGen America, a climate-focused advocacy organization. “We again urge the president to move ahead with the original American Jobs Plan. We can’t afford to wait on science-denying Republicans.”

    Imploring Democrats to use their control of Congress and the White House to press ahead on infrastructure and climate, Devyn Powell of Evergreen Action argued that “Republicans aren’t going to vote for this bill in any form” and are not “negotiating in good faith.”

    “Why are Dems trying to give up what could be our last and only chance to go big on climate?” Powell asked. “What is wrong with you?”

    The Post reported Wednesday that some top Democrats believe they will be able to “come back after the bipartisan deal and pass an additional package with the remaining priorities” left out of the infrastructure package. But one unnamed White House adviser warned that is a risky strategy given time constraints, Democrats’ vanishingly narrow majority, and other factors.

    “They’re going to try to sell us on the idea that they’ll do the leftovers as part of a bigger package, but the truth is that there’s an enormous amount of speculation and nobody really knows what they’ll be able to do,” the adviser said.

    Duncan Meisel, campaign director at Clean Creatives, noted on Twitter that “Democrats were elected on a wave of energy from young people demanding climate action.”

    “If Democrats decide that climate priorities can be put off for later,” Meisel added, “don’t be surprised if young people put off voting for them again.”

    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.

  • Democrats Call for End of Filibuster as GOP Threatens to Block Jan. 6 Commission

    Security forces clash with Trump supporters after they breached the U.S. Capitol security in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.

    As top Senate Republicans are indicating that they’ll employ their first filibuster of this Congress on the proposal to form a commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol breach, progressives and Democrats are re-upping calls to abolish the filibuster.

    Republicans like Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-South Dakota) and Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) have come out against the commission, and others have indicated a general distaste for the idea, fearing it would hurt their party. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) are the only GOP senators who have said they’d vote to end a filibuster on the issue.

    In other words, all signs point toward an oncoming filibuster, which would effectively kill the legislation. It’s incredibly unlikely that Democrats would be able to get nine more Republicans on board with the commission to end the filibuster; even Sen. Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), who voted to convict former President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, has come out against the idea. The legislation could get a vote as early as this week.

    To some Democrats and progressives, the fact that Republicans — the party responsible for the Capitol attack in January — could stop the proposal despite being the minority in the Senate is further proof that the filibuster needs to be abolished.

    Filibustering the bipartisan commission on the attack, tweeted Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), “is a three dimensional way to make the point that the filibuster is primarily a destructive force in American politics.”

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) told HuffPost that the potential filibuster is “one more reminder that McConnell thinks he has a veto over anything that he wants to stop. That’s not what the founders thought when they wrote the constitution and it’s sure not what a Democratic majority should go along with now.”

    Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin told Politico that he thinks the very use of the filibuster is an example of how archaic the procedure is. “When the filibuster is actually used, it becomes an exhibit in the case against continuing it,” he said. Durbin has previously come out in favor of filibuster reform.

    The legislation establishing the commission, which passed the House last week, would create a bipartisan body of 10 — five members from each major party — tasked with investigating the January 6 Capitol attack. Both party members would have equal subpoena power, and its bipartisan setup is already a Democratic compromise from the previous Democrat-favoring structure.

    Progressive House Rep. Cori Bush (Missouri) joined Democratic colleagues in calls for the end to the filibuster, saying, “There are Democrats in the Senate who say that we need the filibuster for ‘bipartisanship’ while Republicans are literally filibustering an investigation into the insurrection that could have killed them. We don’t compromise with white supremacy. End the filibuster.”

    Progressive advocates also echoed the calls for ending the outdated practice. Berkeley professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said, “Does anyone seriously think the Framers would be okay with a minority of senators using the filibuster to block an investigation into a deadly attack on the U.S. government?”

    The potential filibuster even got the ire of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who is one of the Democrats’ biggest roadblocks to filibuster abolition. “So disheartening. It makes you really concerned about our country,” he told Politico.

    Still, despite his disappointment with the GOP, Manchin is reportedly holding strong to his support of the filibuster. CNN’s Manu Raju reported on Tuesday that Manchin said he wouldn’t favor abolishing the practice even if it means that it would kill the January 6 commission. “I can’t take the fallout,” said Manchin.

    He instead put out a statement with fellow filibuster proponent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) asking his Republican colleagues to support the commission — though a statement is unlikely to change the minds of the party dead set on sabotaging the Democratic agenda.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • It’s Time for Democrats to Go It Alone on Infrastructure

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell makes his way to a Senate Republican Policy luncheon at the U.S. Capitol on May 18, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Come, friends, let us step inside the moldy brain bucket of Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr. Here in the gloom is a table, and upon that table a single sheet of paper carrying three short words: GIVE BIDEN NOTHING.

    Nothing shocking, really — merely the 2.0 upgrade of the plan McConnell established after President Barack Obama was sworn into office twelve years ago. This age of unreason was not born then, but it fed well on the years of lies and distortions necessarily conjured to obstruct and derail all progress for anyone not included in the GOP’s priorities. Our modern crop of “theories” about stolen elections, phantom Capitol riots and satanic pedophilic Democrats and their Hollywood allies in the pizza shops was well fertilized by McConnell’s fueling of anti-Obama rumors and conspiracies on the right.

    There is nothing, absolutely nothing new here. The press kept waiting for Donald Trump to “grow” into the job of president, failing time and again to realize this was it: He did it like this yesterday, he did it again today, and he will do it again tomorrow. McConnell is a parallel phenomenon.

    The minority leader, as majority leader, was institutionally devoted to elevating the fringe and violent right if it disrupted Democratic governance. He helped turn the mayhem of the Tea Party into a congressional caucus that could throw weight, assisted in several government shutdowns and other acts of disastrous political disruption, and made the use of the filibuster a permanent daily event.

    It didn’t take four years to realize Trump wasn’t going to change. What in the last 13 years, has McConnell done to disabuse anyone of the notion that he is precisely the same wrecker he was in 2008, and even well before? Answer: Nothing. Yet here sit the Democrats, “negotiating” with a man who sees negotiation only as an opportunity to run down the clock … and to fundraise on how he and his people are standing against socialism, or whatever the slogan happens to be this week.

    McConnell will never allow his Senate caucus to support a major Biden initiative. 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 the whole thing back at the Democrats because the 19 cents weren’t budget-neutral and the pencil was made in China.

    The cost doesn’t matter. McConnell will not permit Biden any further victories after the American Rescue Plan if he can possibly help it, and so long as the filibuster exists, he has a powerful tool to thwart it.

    Bundled up in all this, as ever, is Trump. McConnell wants his majority seat back, and he wants a compliant GOP majority in the House. He cannot have these things without Trump, or more specifically, if he gets crossways with Trump and becomes the newest target for the 45th president’s sustained wrath. After January 6, McConnell was about as harsh as he could manage regarding Trump’s complicity, and was called “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” for his trouble, before being warned by Trump that “they will not win again” without him.

    McConnell heard that loud and clear, and while the Cold War between the minority leader and the 45th president continues, it has not gotten worse. If McConnell starts cutting deals with Biden and the Democrats, Trump will come down the mountain to make war on “Republicans In Name Only,” and a great many people will follow him. It will be Gettysburg and Krakatoa at once, but louder, for the GOP.

    Signs that the Biden administration realizes McConnell is merely playing out the string have begun to emerge. “We’re too far apart. Because I think Mitch’s ultimate purpose is not compromise but delay and mischief,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse this week. The Democratic senator from Rhode Island went on to say that the president is “entitled to his judgment on this. but if I were in a room with him, I’d say it’s time to move on.”

    “White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the next move is up to Republicans and the White House is ‘not quite there’ at bailing on the talks,” reports Politico. “The main holdups are moderate Democrats, who are signaling they still aren’t quite ready to go it alone on a massive new spending bill, ensuring the plodding talks continue for at least a few more days.”

    A few days. OK, then, that should leave Biden and the Democrats plenty of time to brush up on Rule 304, which I described in detail back in early April:

    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.

    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 love theater as much as anyone else, and these infrastructure “negotiations” have been fine grist for the press mill. The clock is running, however, and President Biden’s dance card is filling rapidly with issues far more dire and pressing than how grateful everyone is that he isn’t Trump. So long as the minority leader is allowed to keep “negotiating,” the American people and the country will keep losing.

    “Senate Ds are now unlikely to try using the FY 2021 budget resolution to put together another reconciliation package, according to three sources close to the issue,” the Punchbowl political blog reported on Tuesday morning. According to InfoWire, “Democratic leaders privately say they don’t believe they can finish work by the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30.”

    That is not “a few more days,” and would represent yet another calamitous retreat on the part of Democrats. The Senate parliamentarian has approved the use of Rule 304 on as many as six additional pieces of legislation, all of which can be amendments to the ARP. Not one single Republican vote would be required, and if even some of Biden’s major agenda pieces are realized, the tea leaves for 2022 would be blowin’ in the wind. It’s time to step on the gas.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Florida Becomes 23rd GOP-Led State to Slash Jobless Benefits

    Protesters join together asking senators to support the continuation of unemployment benefits on July 16, 2020, in Miami Springs, Florida.

    Florida’s Republican-led government announced Monday that it will soon cut off a $300-per-week federal boost to unemployment benefits, the 23rd GOP state to take such a step in recent weeks as the Biden Labor Department faces pressure to ensure the lifeline continues reaching jobless workers.

    The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, estimates that four million people across the nation will be harmed by the Republican benefit cuts, which GOP leaders have falsely claimed are necessary to push people back into the labor force.

    But economists and Democratic lawmakers have argued there is no good evidence behind the narrative that enhanced jobless aid — which, in states such as Florida, is notoriously difficult to obtain — is dissuading people from seeking or accepting work. Progressive analysts and members of Congress have pointed to the myriad other factors at play, such as lack of child care, low wages, and pandemic-related health fears.

    “There’s no worker shortage — just an excess of corporate greed,” tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “Florida is the 23rd state to cut the unemployment lifeline, forcing people to go without or go back to minimum wage jobs without child care. This callousness is why we need an urgent investment in the care economy.”

    While Florida — unlike 19 other Republican states — is not ending its participation in two federal programs that provide unemployment aid to jobless gig workers and those who have exhausted their eligibility for state-level benefits, critics warned that halting the $300 weekly plus-up alone will have a major impact on Floridians struggling to cover basic expenses amid the ongoing economic downturn.

    Observers have also stressed the damage that slashing unemployment benefits will do to the still-ailing U.S. economy. According to The Century Foundation, cutting off the aid will deprive the economy of $23.3 billion.

    “Florida is the latest state to pull the rug out from under jobless workers as Republican governors nationwide sabotage the economic recovery,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement Monday. “By design, Florida has one of the stingiest unemployment insurance systems in the country. Jobless workers will receive just $235 per week on average, and it’s impossible to make ends meet with $235 per week.”

    “No one should face financial ruin for living in states run by Republicans,” added Wyden, who has called on the Biden administration to “explore all options” to prevent workers from losing the key benefits.

    The Labor Department, however, has insisted it is powerless to stop the GOP cuts, claiming there is no legal way to compel states to keep distributing the benefits or to send the assistance itself.

    “There is nothing we can do,” one anonymous administration official told CNN last week.

    But the National Employment Law Project — a worker advocacy group — and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have argued that under the terms of a coronavirus relief law enacted last March, the Biden administration has a legal obligation to continue providing the unemployment aid regardless of GOP governors’ actions.

    “Workers who lack access to childcare, have lost employer-sponsored health insurance, and fear for their health and safety as we work to get every American vaccinated are entitled to these benefits,” Sanders wrote in a letter (pdf) to Labor Secretary Marty Walsh earlier this month.

    In recent interviews with media outlets, jobless workers who have relied on the emergency unemployment aid to weather the nationwide economic crisis have voiced fear that they soon won’t be able to afford adequate food, medication, rent, and other needs. The benefit cuts are set to begin taking effect next month.

    “I’m definitely getting less on unemployment compared to when I was working. I’ve had to cut back a lot and just make do with what we got,” Gabrielle Mcginnis, a San Antonio resident, told the Texas Tribune last week. “We’re not starving, but our quality of life has gone down for sure. Next month, it’s gonna be really bad because my partner just got laid off from his job, too. I’m not really sure what we’re gonna do.”

    As HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney reported Monday, “Florida, Ohio, Alaska, and Arizona are only dropping the $300 benefit, while the other states taking action are also canceling federal benefits for gig workers and the long-term jobless.”

    “About half of the four million workers will continue receiving state benefits, which average less than $400 per week,” Delaney noted. “The other half will be left with nothing.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney and the Rule of Law

    One could not accuse US Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of having a sense of irony. For some time, she has felt her party to be the hostage of a ghoulish monster who refuses to be slayed.  And she fears her party has fallen out of love for the rule of law.

    In being ousted from the third spot in the leadership of the Republican Conference in the House, Cheney has found a new morality. In her floor speech, she called Donald Trump’s canard of a stolen election a “threat America has never seen before.”  Opposing Trump’s interpretation of the result was a “duty”. “I will not sit back and watch in silence, while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins in the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”  After her speech, she told reporters that she would “do everything” she could “to ensure that the former president never gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

    Cheney’s seemingly shabby treatment led such papers as the Washington Post to remark that truth was again under assault. “Truth is the issue upon which Cheney has made her stand – truth and her unwillingness to be silent for the supposed good of the team.”  Peter Wehner, who served in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes, saw the event as a “confirmation that the Republican party is diseased and dangerous, increasingly subversive and illiberal”.  Eric Lutz, writing in Vanity Fair, called the Cheney display “defiant”, laying “bare the cowardice of her colleagues who, with their vote on Wednesday, affirmed what had long been clear: The GOP is the cult of Trump now, and fealty the price of admission.”

    This is gruesomely fascinating on a few levels, given that Cheney comes from a family rather snotty about such concepts as the rule of law, verisimilitude and the Constitution.  Her father Dick Cheney, the Vice Presidential dark operator in the administration of George W. Bush, was not exactly strong on such ideas, and proved rather subversive and illiberal in a number of ways. Old Dick, along with his lawyer David Addington and John Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, did much to read executive power in a manner most imperial in nature.

    For Dick Cheney, US executive power needed to be restored after the damaging effects of Watergate and the Vietnam War.  The time that followed, he lamented to reporters on Air Force Two in 2005, proved to be “the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy”.

    It is true to say that Trump also preferred a broad reading of executive power, one all too readily articulated by former Attorney General William Barr. But Cheney, Addington and Yoo were responsible for views that justified the bypassing and defanging of Congress, wiretapping of US citizens, torture of terrorist suspects, the establishment of military commissions, the breaching of international treaties and the waging of illegal wars.  Such conduct has caused more than a smattering of commentary urging the prosecution of both Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush for a range of offences in both domestic and international law.

    It would be churlish to claim that a father’s blackened record should somehow compromise that of his daughter’s.  But the co-authored father and daughter work Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America repeats the old neoconservative interventionist sins that were so important in laying the ground for a Trump victory in 2016.  Father Dick and Daughter Liz supply an apologia for such murderous disasters as Iraq while piling into President Barack Obama whom they stop short of accusing of treason.  “The touchstone of his ideology – that America is to blame, and her power must be restrained – requires a wilful blindness about what America has done in the world.”

    In 2009, Liz Cheney, along with fellow neoconservative Bill Kristol, co-founded Keep America Safe, an outfit steeped in a tattered worldview that proceeded to leave many Americans behind.  As Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic noted in a battering piece on Liz Cheney in 2013, “Most Americans understand that investing trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives in Iraq was a historic blunder.”  Not for Liz, who finds wars stirringly necessary.

    Over the years, Rep. Cheney barely warranted a mention after securing the seat her father once occupied. As the third-ranking member of minority party leadership, she was a middleweight power with exaggerated expectations.  Then came President Trump.  The neoconservatives were outflanked.  Fires were lit, casting light upon her cause.  That cause, simple as ever, was an anti-Trump, using truth and democracy as crutches of polemical convenience.

    To date, Rep. Cheney is pursuing a cause of martyrdom that is, like many such causes, futile.  It was a martyrdom that was “well-planned”, as Republican political consultant Keith Naughton noted in The Hill.  “There are no reports she actually worked the GOP caucus, canvassing and counting heads.  Cheney didn’t fight back, she planned to lose.”  In losing, she hopes to rebuild a neoconservative base that has withered into oblivion.

    The post Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney and the Rule of Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Only half of rural voters know that Democrats voted to send them stimulus checks, new poll finds

    While not a single Republican voted in favor of the third stimulus check, only half of rural voters in a new poll gave Democrats any credit.

    By: Ayelet Sheffey | Business Insider

    Americans have so far received three direct payments from the federal government in response to the coronavirus. The first two were distributed under President Donald Trump’s watch, but while not a single Republican voted in favor of the third round, only half of rural voters in a new poll gave Democrats any credit.

    A poll conducted by Rural Objective PAC — a super PAC that works to build support for Democrats in rural areas — found that 50% of voters in rural areas associated providing COVID-19 stimulus checks to American families with the Democratic Party, while 32% associated the payments with Republicans, 11% associated them with neither party, and 7% weren’t sure.

    “We’re not connecting with these voters, even if we have great policy,” JD Scholten, the executive director of the Rural Objective PAC, told Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman of The Washington Post, which previously reported on the poll’s findings.

    The poll surveyed 2,149 voters in nine battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin — and while 68% of those voters supported stimulus checks, it’s clear Democrats weren’t getting credit for a cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan.

    Most rural voters did associate Democrats with extended unemployment benefits and state aid, though. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan passed using a mechanism known as budget reconciliation without a single Republican vote.

    The first two payments occurred under Trump, who signed payments topping out at $1,400 and $600 into law during the pandemic, but even then Democrats controlled the House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

    Some Democratic lawmakers are also calling to make stimulus checks permanent — something that has received broad support from both Republican and Democratic voters and by some estimates would cut the number of Americans in poverty in 2021 to 16 million from 44 million.

    Twenty-one Democratic senators urged Biden in a letter to include recurring direct payments in his $4 trillion infrastructure plan and said “a single direct payment will not last long for most families, and we are worried about the cliff facing unemployed workers when the unemployment insurance extensions expire on September 6.”

    But voters not knowing whom to credit for certain policies is nothing new.

    When President Barack Obama was attempting to expand healthcare access over a decade ago, many voters didn’t want the government to interfere with their Medicare when Medicare was already a government-run program.

    “I got a letter the other day from a woman. She said: ‘I don’t want government-run healthcare. I don’t want socialized medicine. And don’t touch my Medicare,’” President Barack Obama said at an AARP-hosted town hall on healthcare in 2009. “I wanted to say, you know, that’s what Medicare is: a government-run healthcare plan that people are very happy with.”

    The Washington Post separately reported in 2009 that a rural voter told Rep. Robert Inglis of South Carolina to “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” prompting Inglis to explain that the voter’s healthcare was already provided by the government.

    Scholten, of the Rural Objective PAC, told The Post that if there’s one thing Democrats could use to win support of rural America, it would be direct payments.

    “This was one of the biggest investments we’ve seen in rural America since the New Deal,” Scholten told Sargent and Waldman. “It’s good policy. It should be good politics, too, but right now Democrats aren’t taking advantage of it.”

    The post Only half of rural voters know that Democrats voted to send them stimulus checks, new poll finds appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • New Texas Bill Reduces Polling Locations in Blue and Nonwhite Districts

    With an hour left to vote, people wait in line at Manor ISD Administration building on November 3, 2020, in Manor, Texas.

    A voter suppression bill currently being considered by the Texas legislature would decrease the number of polling locations in districts that are traditionally Democratic and nonwhite while increasing the locations in Republican and predominantly white districts.

    The state experienced high turnout for the 2020 election, especially in more heavily populated areas like Houston. Now, Republicans are targeting those very places in an elections bill, SB 7, applying a formula to redistribute polling locations in the state’s five most populous counties that the Texas Tribune has found would disproportionately affect voters in Democratic communities.

    In Harris county, which houses Houston, all but two of the area’s 15 Democratic districts would see a decrease in polling locations thanks to the new formula. District 141, which is also home to the largest portion of nonwhite people of voting age of any other district in the county — white people make up only 10.6 percent of the population of voting age there — would be hit the hardest, losing 11 polling places.

    All of the districts in Harris county that would be losing polling places are represented by Democrats. Meanwhile, every district represented by a Republican would either not see a change or would gain polling locations. All of those districts have white voting age populations of 45 percent or more, according to census data.

    The Texas Tribune analysis also finds similar trends in other counties. In Tarrant County’s district 90, which is represented by a Democrat and where 77 percent of the population is either Latino or Black, voters would lose half of the polling locations they had in 2020.

    SB 7 would also implement a number of other voting restrictions, such as limiting the distribution of absentee ballots, allowing for more voter roll purges, and limiting early voting with provisions like banning drive-through voting. The bill, if signed into law, would make Texas one of the hardest states in the country for citizens to exercise their right to vote.

    State lawmakers are currently ironing out the final details of the bill, after which it will have to clear a vote again in the Senate and the House. The GOP controls both chambers of the legislature and the governor, Greg Abbott, is a Republican.

    Though the election bill will affect millions of voters in the state, Republicans have shrouded the process of writing and amending the bill in secrecy. The committee currently making amendments to the bill is doing so behind closed doors, much to the dismay of many voting rights advocates.

    Republican Rep. Briscoe Cain also previously tried to rush the voting restriction bill out of committee without listing it on the committee’s agenda, giving journalists no notice of the bill’s movement and the public no chance to comment on it.

    Cain has said that the bill isn’t about voter suppression in his opinion. “I believe it is voter enhancement,” he said this month of the bill that would make it harder for people of color to vote. The bill, which Cain has sponsored, also has language plucked straight out of Jim Crow, including phrases that suggest it is necessary to “preserve the purity of the ballot box.”

    Republicans have been quite open with their goals in this year’s wave of voter suppression laws: they are trying to engineer situations so that Republicans can’t lose elections again. In March, an Arizona lawmaker said that the GOP is passing such laws because “everybody shouldn’t be voting.”

    The GOP has been passing voter suppression laws at record pace, introducing hundreds over the course of just a few months. Democrats — both at the state and federal level — have been trying to stem the tide, but Republicans are forging ahead, especially in states where they control the governorship and the legislature.

    Before the Texas House passed a version of SB 7 earlier this month, Democrats fought the legislation through the night, introducing 130 amendments to the bill. And, at the federal level, Democrats are trying to pass the For the People Act, which would drastically expand voting access — but the Senate filibuster stands in its way.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP States Spurn Unemployment Funding to Force Workers Back Into Low-Paying Jobs

    A man exits a store with a "NOW HIRING" sign in front of it

    As the pandemic raged in 2020, tens of millions of U.S. families were kept economically afloat by expanded unemployment benefits — which lasted longer, were of higher value, and were accessible by more categories of workers (in particular freelancers or independent contractors) than was the case in non-pandemic moments.

    In the first terrifying days of the pandemic and the accompanying public health-informed shutdowns, the economy nose-dived, seemingly with no bottom in sight. Within a month of the initial shut-down orders, unemployment had increased to roughly 15 percent. In states like California, with particularly strict shutdowns, that number was far higher still. Moreover, millions more were likely jobless but statistically invisible, as unemployment offices around the country struggled to keep up with the surge of applicants.

    Going into the summer of 2020, even as some parts of the economy began to cautiously reopen, and even as new business models — such as DoorDash and other delivery services — started to pick up some of the employment slack, unemployment remained at over 11 percent, three times what it had been before COVID.

    Now, however, as we head into another summer, with the pandemic in the U.S. receding in the face of the country’s largely successful vaccination rollout, and with the economy growing again, the GOP has come out swinging against keeping those expanded benefits in place.

    The economy is still 2.8 million jobs south of where it was prior to COVID, the official unemployment rate is still 6.1 percent, and the tepid April jobs report showed the economy only added 266,000 jobs. But Republicans are now arguing those numbers are mediocre because generous benefits are providing a disincentive for people to work. Conservative economists and politicians on the right argue that sufficient quantities of jobs aren’t being generated, and a portion of those that are being generated aren’t being filled, largely because many of the out-of-work are perfectly happy sitting at home and living high off the hog on government assistance. It’s an updated but equally unpleasant version of the 1980s “welfare queens” cliché.

    Even as President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to dramatically expand the federal social safety net, and even as many Democratic-run states have embarked on largescale expansions and reimagining of their own programs, nine GOP-led states, starting with Montana, Arkansas and South Carolina, and followed in quick succession by Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and North Dakota, have recently rejected federal funds for $300 per week supplemental benefits. In this, they join South Dakota, which as early as last summer rejected the expanded benefits for unemployed workers and instead opted to fully open its economy in the face of escalating COVID numbers. (By November of last year, South Dakota had one of the highest rates of infection in the world.)

    The GOP’s alleged rationale, building on anti-benefits arguments that go back as far as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, is that high-value government benefits lead to sloth and thus artificially keep a lid on economic expansion. As state-level political leaders fall into line with this ideological policy stance, it looks increasingly likely that in the coming weeks many more GOP states will also opt to reject billions of dollars in unemployment assistance from the federal government. In doing so, they will essentially be signing off on the consolidation of two entirely different employment social safety nets in the country, one a minimalist red state version based around low wages and deeply inadequate safety net protections; the other an expansionist blue state model.

    Last year, anti-immigrant voices in the GOP, such as Senators Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley, urged ever more restrictions on the numbers of immigrants legally admitted into the U.S., arguing that the labor market was so weak that all available jobs should be kept for red-blooded Americans. Now, just months later, they are arguing, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that the labor market is currently so strong that benefits should be slashed for those same red-blooded Americans.

    Each argument is disingenuous. Admitting large numbers of immigrants has always helped rather than hindered U.S. job creation. Restricting benefits doesn’t turbo-charge the labor market; rather it immiserates those already struggling to find a place within that market, and creates a huge incentive for unscrupulous employers to pay bargain-basement wages, knowing that workers don’t have any safety-net alternatives to fall back on.

    If the GOP were serious about drawing people back into the workforce, the party would support living wage legislation. But instead, it has consistently opposed raising the minimum wage, including most recently when Biden made his rather half-hearted, and rapidly abandoned, effort to include the $15 per hour minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

    The Republican position on all of this is quintessentially Victorian: Keep wages low at the bottom of the economy, but keep benefits even lower. Force people into the workforce, even if wages are no better than subsistence, and make the process of accessing benefits as humiliating as possible (think of the 19th-century Work House).

    For the GOP base, this might make for good “red-meat politics,” pandering to the views and the biases of dyed-in-the-wool Republican voters. But red-meat politics doesn’t often make for good public policy making. Before limiting benefits to people who are out of work, the GOP should think carefully about the ongoing economic misery unleashed by the public health calamity.

    The peculiarities of the pandemic, and the scale of the economic dislocation it resulted in, have made it particularly difficult to get a comprehensive read on the scale of joblessness and unemployment in the United States; but estimates in recent months have ranged from a low of just over 10 million to a high of about 18 million.

    That’s an awful lot of workers — and their families — still reliant on government assistance to keep above water. And, in consequence, notwithstanding self-serving rhetoric about how tight the labor market is, that’s an awful lot of stacked-up pain waiting to be unleashed on those workers as the GOP uses its state-level power to curtail unemployment benefits over the coming weeks and months.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pelosi Says Masks to Remain, Since Most GOP Lawmakers Aren’t Vaccinated

    Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi checks out the mask of Rep. Jason Crow during a news conference outside the Capitol on May 13, 2021.

    Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced new guidelines on Thursday that gave fully vaccinated Americans the go-ahead to remove masks in almost every situation, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) said that the House of Representatives would not be relaxing its rules anytime soon due to Republican members’ refusal to get vaccinated.

    The new guidance from the CDC states that individuals who are fully vaccinated — that is, they have received two shots of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, or the single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and it has been two weeks since their final injection — do not have to wear masks outdoors or indoors, except when they are in highly-crowded areas.

    “If you are fully vaccinated, you can resume activities that you did prior to the pandemic,” the CDC website says, while noting that people still have to follow rules and regulations that are in place within their local jurisdictions.

    After the CDC issued the updated guidance, reporters asked Pelosi whether mask rules would be eased within the House of Representatives. “No,” Pelosi said. House members are currently required to wear a mask on the House floor.

    “Are they all vaccinated?” she added, referring to lawmakers in the House.

    Seventy-two percent of House members are currently vaccinated, but there is a wide discrepancy between both parties on their separate rates of vaccination. While every member of the Democratic Party’s 219-member delegation is fully vaccinated, only 95 out of 212 Republicans are the same, amounting to just 44.8 percent of their caucus.

    It isn’t as if lawmakers aren’t at risk of the virus. Earlier this year, Rep. Ron Wright, a Republican from Texas, passed away after being diagnosed with coronavirus. Wright was not vaccinated.

    The rate at which Republicans have received their vaccinations is comparable to the number of Americans overall who have received at least one shot (47 percent) to protect against the virus. But while lawmakers in Washington D.C. have been able to get vaccinated for several months now, most adults in the U.S. have only been eligible to get their shots since mid-April.

    The vaccinations so far appear to be effective in suppressing the virus. Since April 14, a month ago, the seven-day average of new cases of coronavirus being reported per day has dropped by around 45.3 percent. The seven-day average death rate has also decreased by close to 18.4 percent.

    Most Americans have either received one or two doses of vaccines, but there remains a large segment that says they will absolutely not get vaccinated (17 percent), and a comparable portion who aren’t sure yet (14 percent), according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll.

    Much like in Congress, hesitancy against the vaccines in the U.S. is strongest among those on the right. Within that same poll, 42 percent who identify as conservatives said they are either unsure about getting their shots or won’t do so, compared to just 13 percent of self-identified liberals and 26 percent of moderates who say the same.

    Conservatives are less likely to get vaccinated, some medical observers have opined, because they view it as a way to show their loyalty to former President Donald Trump. Indeed, data appears to show that states with higher rates of Trump voters also have lower vaccination rates.

    While the vast majority of Americans have received or are planning to get vaccinated, the rate at which people are refusing to get their shots is troubling. It’s estimated that between 70 to 90 percent of the population must gain antibody resistance to COVID-19 in order to reach herd immunity. If every person who is hesitant in the Economist/YouGov poll’s findings decided against getting the vaccine, that would mean the U.S. would be on the lower end of or slightly below that suggested threshold.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Republicans Oppose Kristen Clarke for DOJ Job in Latest Attack on Voting Rights

    Republicans Oppose Kristen Clarke for DOJ Job in Latest Attack on Voting Rights

    Republican senators in Washington are attempting to block Kristen Clarke, a prominent voting rights advocate, from a top Justice Department position. The Senate Judiciary Committee has deadlocked on an 11-11 vote on whether to move Clarke’s nomination for assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to the Senate floor for a full vote. If she wins the vote, Clarke, who has served as the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and is a longtime champion of voting rights, a defender against hate and violent extremism, would be the first Black woman to hold the position. Ben Jealous, president of People for the American Way and former president of the NAACP, says the campaign against Clarke’s nomination is based on falsehoods, including baseless claims of anti-Semitism. “The way that they’ve lied about her really is a new low,” Jealous says, who links Republican obstruction to the party’s larger assault on voting rights.

    Please check back later for full transcript.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Wants Tax on Middle Class Instead of Rich for Infrastructure, Sanders Says

    Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally at the Las Vegas Academy of the Arts on October 25, 2018, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

    Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said on Wednesday that Republicans are “insistent” upon taxing the working class in order to pay for the upcoming infrastructure bill in lieu of raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations.

    In an interview on CNN, Sanders said that Republicans’ infrastructure pay-fors would disproportionately affect the working class, which has been hit hard by recent economic crises.

    “For too, too long, the average American has seen government work for the 1 percent, for large corporations,” Sanders said to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “What some of us are trying to do with the president is have government start paying attention to the needs of the working class, which is struggling economically in a way we have not seen for a long, long time.”

    “In terms of paying for it, what the Republicans are very insistent upon, is they want the middle class and working families to pay for it,” the senator continued. “The president, correctly, is saying he wants wealthiest people, who are doing very, very well, large corporations, who, in some cases, are not paying a nickel in federal income taxes, to pay for it. The president is right, and we have got to move in the direction of progressive taxation.”

    Republicans have been recalcitrant in negotiations for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill. They have proposed cutting it to nearly an eighth of its original size with a spending cap of $800 billion as opposed to the $4 trillion that Biden has proposed.

    The GOP congress members are also unbending in their absolute refusal to hike taxes for wealthy people and corporations, instead clutching on to Donald Trump-era tax breaks that resulted in an estimated $1.9 trillion in lost revenue for the government. Despite weeks of negotiations on the issue, top Republicans are still refusing to allow higher tax rates on corporations and the wealthy, even though Biden’s corporate tax hike is already a compromise from what it could be.

    While Biden has proposed raising the corporate tax from 21 percent to 28 percent to help pay for the infrastructure bill, Sanders has proposed raising it back to what it was before Trump took office: 35 percent.

    Instead, Republicans have proposed a regressive tax to pay for the bill — favoring user fees over taxes, which would disproportionately affect the middle and lower classes.

    “They do want to raise taxes, but they want to raise regressive taxes — taxes on working families,” said Sanders. “I come from a very rural state; people drive long distances to get to work. Apparently, [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell wants those folks — working people — to pay more in taxes.” Sanders says he prefers that rich people and corporations pay their “fair share” instead.

    The senator went to say that the split between Republicans and progressive Democrats on taxation and what constitutes infrastructure is a “fundamental divide” that will be hard to reconcile.

    Sanders has not shied away from warning the president about the futility of trying to negotiate with Republicans despite their stated goal to block all of Biden’s proposals. Democrats should make every effort to make bills bipartisan, Sanders said, but they should not water down their proposals in the process. “The bottom line is, the American people want results,” he said on Axios on HBO earlier this week.

    Progressives have been learning that ignoring bipartisanship — at least, the Republican version of it, which is largely just capitulation and obstruction — can be a winning strategy for the left. After all, Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-Kentucky) made it clear last week that his party’s only focus is to block the Biden administration, no matter what.

    Despite McConnell’s insistence on obstructing the Democratic agenda, however, many Democratic policies are widely popular among the electorate. Case in point: A poll last month found that support for Biden’s infrastructure plan, which is popular in itself, goes up when the corporate tax is mentioned as a means of financing it.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • McConnell Reportedly Assures GOP That He Thinks Sinema Will Kill Biden Tax Hike

    Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Bill Cassidy conduct a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on December 4, 2019.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has privately assured his Republican colleagues that centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is likely to block President Joe Biden’s proposed tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations, according to The Washington Post.

    Biden has introduced a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan that would be paid for with tax increases on corporations and a $1.8 trillion “American Families Plan” that would be funded with higher taxes on the wealthy and investors and increased IRS enforcement. Republicans are pushing a much smaller infrastructure counterproposal that would shift the tax burden from corporations to workers, and have loudly objected to the proposed tax increases. McConnell, however, does not seem worried about the hikes clearing the 50-50 Senate where a single Democrat can block any party-line vote.

    McConnell has privately “reassured allies of Democrats’ long odds in approving tax hikes, pointing in particular to the voting record of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema,” according to the Post.

    That suggests McConnell sees Sinema as a bigger impediment to Biden’s proposals than Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who has called for raising taxes to pay for an infrastructure proposal as large as $4 trillion but wants a smaller increase on corporate taxes. Manchin has also rejected gas taxes and user fees proposed by Republicans as a tax on workers and commuters.

    It’s not the first time McConnell has touted the record of Sinema, who has angered many Democrats by opposing Biden’s proposed minimum wage increase and calls from her party to eliminate the filibuster.

    McConnell told Senate Republicans at a party meeting last month to “publicly praise” Sinema and Manchin for their opposition to Biden’s proposals, according to Politico. “It’s nice that there are Democrats left who respect the institution and don’t want to destroy the very essence of the Senate,” he told the outlet.

    Economists have argued that Biden’s proposed corporate tax increases would ultimately help corporations by improving critical infrastructure. A group of five former IRS commissioners last week wrote an op-ed backing Biden’s proposal to boost IRS enforcement after the cash-strapped agency estimated it loses $1 trillion each year to unpaid taxes.

    The IRS workforce has shrunk dramatically over the past decade due to repeated budget cuts and as a result “audit rates for millionaires have fallen more than 70 percent since 2011; audits of large corporations decreased from essentially 100 percent a decade ago to less than 50 percent,” the former commissioners wrote in a Washington Post editorial.

    “President Biden’s proposal would restore our tax administration system to make it far fairer and more effective. This would benefit everyone who pays their taxes. It would produce a great deal of revenue by reducing the enormous gap between taxes legally owed and taxes actually paid,” they added.

    In fact, Sinema and Manchin are not the only Democrats who may stand in the way of Biden’s tax proposals. Some Democrats worry that the IRS enforcement measure could result in “political backlash,” according to the Washington Post, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has privately warned that the tax plans could hurt vulnerable Democrats up for re-election next year. Although Democrats generally support a corporate tax increase, a “handful” of Democrats have balked at Biden’s proposed 28% rate even though that would not even fully reverse former President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%.

    Senate Finance Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., have released their own plan to tax multinational corporations, which is at odds with Biden’s proposal. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., has balked at Biden’s proposed tax increase on capital gains and investment income for those who earn more than $1 million per year. A group of about a dozen Democrats in farm states have expressed concerns about Biden’s proposed increase on assets passed down to heirs.

    Meanwhile, a growing coalition of Democrats in high-tax states like New York, California and New Jersey have called for Biden to use the proposals to repeal the $10,000 cap on the State and Local Tax deduction, a move that research strongly suggests would primarily benefit the wealthy.

    Biden has signaled that he is open to compromise and is scheduled to meet with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle this week, insisting he wants a bipartisan agreement — a prospect that seems out of reach. But the lack of a deadline on negotiations and numerous competing proposals show that Biden and his own party are also “worlds apart,” Republican economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin told the Post.

    “Biden deserves some credit for trying to pay for permanent programs, but congressional Democrats do not want the politics of these tax hikes on their record in the midterms,” he said. “There’s a major disagreement here.”

    Some Democrats have urged the administration not to fund the proposals completely and finance them instead through deficit spending, as with the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package passed in March.

    “The whole point is that we are making generational investments that will provide value for 30 or 50 or 100 years,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told the Post. “With interest rates at a historic low, it makes sense to pay for these initiatives over a longer period of time.”

    But Biden insisted last week that he is “not willing to not pay for what we’re talking about. I’m not willing to deficit-spend.”

    Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser, sent a memo to fellow Democrats last month seeking to tamp down concerns that the party may face political backlash next November if it supports tax increases, pointing to polls showing that the public supports tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy. Some polls even show that voters are more likely to support the infrastructure package if it is funded with higher corporate taxes than without a tax increase.

    “We need to restore basic fairness to the tax code, and in the process generate revenues to invest in our competitiveness, children, and economy,” Dunn wrote. “And, the American people agree.”

    “If critics want to turn this into a debate over taxing the wealthy and big corporations to pay for investments in the middle class, we’re happy to have that fight,” a White House official told Politico, which obtained the memo. “The American public is squarely on our side — it’s not even close.”

    Now it’s largely a matter of Biden convincing his own party.

    “This is a puzzle, and it’s a very personal puzzle to a lot of people who have parochial investment agendas trying to get their own things stuffed into these plans,” Frank Clemente, executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told the Post.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • GOP Votes to Oust Liz Cheney for Not Peddling Trump’s Big Lie

    Rep. Liz Cheney talks to reporters after House Republicans voted to remove her as conference chair in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center on May 12, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    House Republicans voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) from her leadership position on Wednesday, in a move that cemented the right’s unending fealty to former President Donald Trump.

    Cheney had refused to continue perpetuating Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen, which many Republicans viewed as a sort of betrayal of their values — though Cheney herself has been a loyal rank-and-file GOP member over the years, often pushing the worst elements of conservative ideology.

    The lawmakers ousted her by a voice vote in a brief closed-door meeting. House Republicans booed Cheney as she made her final speech on Wednesday morning.

    In her speech from the House floor on Tuesday night, Cheney condemned her colleagues for being “at war with the Constitution” and “embolden[ing] the liar.” All but one of her fellow Republicans left the chamber during her speech.

    Republicans have chosen Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) to replace Cheney. Stefanik had previously branded herself as a moderate, which only got her dismissed by fellow Republicans. In recent months, however, Stefanik has pledged her allegiance to Trump — a move that, clearly, has been a boon to her career.

    Cheney’s ousting is largely viewed as the definitive move by the Republican Party to vow total loyalty to Trump and the authoritarian movement he created. They have especially doubled down on that stance in the past months; back in February, despite the fact that Cheney had just voted to impeach Trump, Republicans had voted 145 to 61 to keep her in her leadership position.

    Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) have come to her defense in saying that she is being ousted for refusing to lie about the election.

    Indeed, in her final days as the third highest ranking Republican in the House, Cheney embraced a martyr-like status as moderate Republicans and even Democrats praised her for doing the bare minimum of recognizing that Joe Biden won the election.

    But that praise, progressives point out, is misplaced. As Truthout’s Will Pitt points out, Cheney was previously a leader in pushing Islamophobia during former President Barack Obama years and was instrumental in helping to send her party down the path to extremism that it is on now.

    “Now that her entire political career is trembling on the verge of extinction, Liz Cheney has recast herself as a sort of Joan of Arc character, a doomed victim of nefarious forces she has vowed to keep fighting,” wrote Pitt. “Train a pack of dogs with violence, ignorance and hunger, and they will turn and tear you to pieces sooner or later. For Cheney, it is sooner, and the ice beckons.”

    Even in the op-ed Cheney wrote for The Washington Post last week, she couldn’t help but condemn activists in the movement for Black lives while also criticizing her party for defending the Capitol attack on January 6.

    “We Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles,” she wrote. “There is much at stake now, including the ridiculous wokeness of our political rivals,” she said, and then went on to hail former President Ronald Reagan as the gold standard in conservatism.

    Cheney is correct in observing that the Republican Party of today has been moving further away from “principles” and more toward a supposed ideology of following Trump and opposing Democrats — no matter what. But that doesn’t mean she deserves praise, as progressives have written.

    “To complain about ‘wokeness’ in this moment is more than a right-wing racist dog whistle. It is an air raid siren,” wrote Chauncy DeVega for Salon. Indeed, while Cheney purports to stand up for democracy, she has ignored the fact that her own party is hard at work at the state level trying to steal elections in plain sight. She has chosen instead to save her criticism for the progressives and activists standing up for racial justice.

    By contrast, recent moves by the Republican Party — such as pushing the big lie about the election — have led people like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) to brand the GOP an “authoritarian cult.”

    “There is one issue, in my view, that is more important than any other issue and impacts every concern that we have, and that is the struggle to maintain democracy in the United States of America,” said Sanders in a video posted to Twitter on Wednesday. “Sadly, it is not a secret that over the last number of years, the Republican Party has ceased to be a conservative party, and has rather become an authoritarian cult which propagates big lies and conspiracy theories.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Second Stage Terror Wars

    We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

    – William Casey, CIA Director, February. 1981

    It is well known that the endless U.S. war on terror was overtly launched following the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the linked anthrax attacks.   The invasion of Afghanistan and the Patriot Act were immediately justified by those insider murders, and subsequently the wars against Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.  So too the terrorizing of the American people with constant fear-mongering about imminent Islamic terrorist attacks from abroad that never came.

    It is less well known that the executive director of the U.S. cover story – the fictional 9/11 Commission Report – was Philip Zelikow, who controlled and shaped the report from start to finish.

    It is even less well known that Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia, was closely associated with Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Dickey Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Brent Scowcroft, et al. and had served in various key intelligence positions in both the George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. In 2011 President Obama named him to his President’s Intelligence Advisory Board as befits bi-partisan elite rule and coverup compensation across political parties.

    Perhaps it’s unknown or just forgotten that The Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission repeatedly called for Zelikow’s removal, claiming that his appointment made a farce of the claim that the Commission was independent.

    Zelikow said that for the Commission to consider alternative theories to the government’s claims about Osama bin Laden was akin to whacking moles.  This is the man, who at the request of his colleague Condoleezza Rice, became the primary author of (NSS 2002) The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, that declared that the U.S. would no longer abide by international law but was adopting a policy of preemptive war, as declared by George W. Bush at West Point in June 2002.  This was used as justification for the attack on Iraq in 2003 and was a rejection of the charter of the United Nations.

    So, based on Zelikow’s work creating a magic mountain of deception while disregarding so-called molehills, we have had twenty years of American terror wars around the world in which U.S. forces have murdered millions of innocent people.  Wars that will be continuing for years to come despite rhetoric to the contrary.  The rhetoric is simply propaganda to cover up the increasingly technological and space-based nature of these wars and the use of mercenaries and special forces.

    Simultaneously, in a quasi-volte-face, the Biden administration has directed its resources inward toward domestic “terrorists”: that is, anyone who disagrees with its policies.  This is especially aimed at those who question the COVID-19 story.

    Now Zelikow has been named to head a COVID Commission Planning Group based at the University of Virginia that is said to prepare the way for a National COVID Commission.  The group is funded by the Schmidt Futures, the Skoll Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Stand Together, with more expected to join in.  Zelikow, a member of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program Advisory Panel, will lead the group that will work in conjunction with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.  Stand together indeed: Charles Koch, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, the Rockefellers, et al. funders of disinterested truth.

    So once again the fox is in the hen house.

    If you wistfully think the corona crisis will soon come to an end, I suggest you alter your perspective.  Zelikow’s involvement, among other things, suggests we are in the second phase of a long war of terror waged with two weapons – military and medical – whose propaganda messaging is carried out by the corporate mainstream media in the pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. Part one has so far lasted twenty years; part two may last longer. You can be certain it won’t end soon and that the new terrorists are domestic dissidents.

    Did anyone think the freedoms lost with The Patriot Act were coming back some day?  Does anyone think the freedoms lost with the corona virus propaganda are coming back?  Many people probably have no idea what freedoms they lost with the Patriot Act, and many don’t even care.

    And today?  Lockdowns, mandatory mask wearing, travel restrictions, requirements to be guinea pigs for vaccines that are not vaccines, etc.?

    Who remembers the Nuremberg Codes?

    And they thought they were free, as Milton Mayer wrote about the Germans under Hitler.  Like frogs in a pot of cold water, we need to feel the temperature rising before it’s too late.  The dial is turned to high heat now.

    But that was so long ago and far away, right?  Don’t exaggerate, you say.  Hitler and all that crap.

    Are you thankful now that government spokespeople are blatantly saying that they will so kindly give us back some freedoms if we only do what they’re told and get “vaccinated” with an experimental biological agent, wear our masks, etc.? Hoi polloi are supposed to be grateful to their masters, who will grant some summer fun until they slam the door shut again.

    Pfizer raked in $3.5 billion from vaccine sales in the first quarter of 2021, the first three months of the vaccine rollouts, and the company projects $26 billion for the year.  That’s one vaccine manufacturer.  Chump change?  Only a chump would not realize that Pfizer is the company that paid $2.3 billion in Federal criminal fines in 2009 – the largest ever paid by a drug company – for being a repeat offender in the marketing of 13 different drugs.

    Meanwhile, the commission justifying the government’s claims about COVID-19 and injections (aka “vaccines”) will be hard at work writing their fictive report that will justify ex post facto the terrible damage that has occurred and that will continue to occur for many years.  Censorship and threats against dissidents will increase.  The disinformation that dominates the corporate mainstream media will of course continue, but this will be supplemented by alternative media that are already buckling under the pressure to conform.

    The fact that there has been massive censorship of dissenting voices by Google/ YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc., and equally massive disinformation by commission and omission across media platforms, should make everyone ask why.  Why repress dissent?  The answer should be obvious but is not.

    The fact that so many refuse to see the significance of this censorship clearly shows the hypnotic effects of a massive mind control operation.

    Name calling and censorship are sufficient.  Perfectly healthy people have now become a danger to others.  So mask up, get your experimental shot, and shut up!

    Your body is no longer inviolable.  You must submit to medical procedures on your body whether you want them or not.  Do not object or question. If you do, you will be punished and will become a pariah.  The authorities will call you crazy, deviant, selfish. They will take away your rights to travel and engage in normal activities, such as attend college, etc.

    Please do not recall The Nuremberg Code.  Especially number 7: “Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability or death.” (my emphasis)

    “Now is the time to just do what you are told,” as Anthony Fauci so benevolently declared.

    I am not making a prediction.  The authorities have told us what’s coming. Pay attention.  Don’t be fooled.  It’s a game they have devised.  Keep people guessing.  On edge.  Relieved.  Tense.  Relaxed.  Shocked.  Confused.  That’s the game.  One day this, the next that.  You’re on, you’re off.  You’re in, you’re out.  We are allowing you this freedom, but be good children or we will have to retract it.  If you misbehave, you will get a time out.  Time to contemplate your sins.

    If you once thought that COVID-19 would be a thing of the past by now, or ever, think again.  On May 3, 2021 The New York Times reported that the virus is here to stay.  This was again reported on May 10.  Hopes Fade for Global Herd Immunity.  You may recall that we were told such immunity would be achieved once enough people got the “vaccine” or enough people contracted the virus and developed antibodies.

    On May 9, on ABC News, Dr. Fauci, when asked about indoor mask requirements being relaxed, said, “I think so, and I think you’re going to probably be seeing that as we go along, and as more people get vaccinated.”  Then he added: “We do need to start being more liberal, as we get more people vaccinated.”

    But then, in what CNN reported as a Mother’s Day prediction, he pushed the date for “normality” out another year, saying, “I hope that [by] next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.  We’ve got to make sure that we get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated. When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. You’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.”

    He said this with a straight face even though the experimental “vaccines,” by their makers own admissions, do not prevent the vaccinated from getting the virus or passing it on.  They allege it only mitigates the severity of the virus if you contract it.

    Notice the language and the vaccination meme repeated three times: “We get more people vaccinated.” (my emphasis) Not that more people choose to get vaccinated, but “we get” them vaccinated.  Thank you, Big Daddy. And now we have another year to go until “we will be about as close to back to normal as we can.”  Interesting phrase: as we can.  It other words: we will never return to normality but will have to settle for the new normal that will involve fewer freedoms.  Life will be reset, a great reset.  Great for the few and terrible for the many.

    Once two vaccines were enough; then, no, maybe one is sufficient; no, you will need annual or semi-annual booster shots to counteract the new strains that they say are coming.  It’s a never-ending story with never-ending new strains in a massive never-ending medical experiment.  The virus is changing so quickly and herd immunity is now a mystical idea, we are told, that it will never be achieved.  We will have to be eternally vigilant.

    But wait.  Don’t despair.  It looks like restrictions are easing up for the coming summer in the northern hemisphere. Lockdowns will be loosened.  If you felt like a prisoner for the past year plus, now you will be paroled for a while. But don’t dispose of those masks just yet.  Fauci says that wearing masks could become seasonal following the pandemic because people have become accustomed to wearing them and that’s why the flu has disappeared. The masks didn’t prevent COVID-19 but eliminated the flu.  Are you laughing yet?

    Censorship and lockdowns and masks and mandatory injections are like padded cells in a madhouse and hospital world where free-association doesn’t lead to repressed truths because free association isn’t allowed, neither in word nor deed.  Speaking freely and associating with others are too democratic. Yes, we thought we were free.  False consciousness is pandemic.  Exploitation is seen as benevolence. Silence reigns.  And the veiled glances signify the ongoing terror that has spread like a virus.

    We are now in a long war with two faces.  As with the one justified by the mass murders of September 11, 2001, this viral one isn’t going away.

    The question is: Do we have to wait twenty years to grasp the obvious and fight for our freedoms?

    We can be assured that Zelikow and his many associates at Covid Collaborative, including General Stanley McChrystal, Robert Gates, Arnie Duncan, Deval Patrick, Tom Ridge, et al. – a whole host of Republicans and Democrats backed by great wealth and institutional support, will not be “whacking moles” in their search for truth.  Their agenda is quite different.

    But then again, you may recall where they stood on the mass murders of September 11, 2001 and the endless wars that have followed.

    The post Second Stage Terror Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • GOP Lawmaker Claims Only 5 Republicans in the House Actually Buy Trump’s Lies

    Former President Donald Trump speaks during the final day of the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Hyatt Regency Orlando on February 28, 2021, in Orlando, Florida.

    Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois and an anomaly within his party for his frequent criticisms of former President Donald Trump, said this week that most GOP members within the House of Representatives don’t actually believe the election fraud lies that Trump has pushed since losing the presidential race last fall.

    Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the issue, Kinzinger explained that most Republicans in Congress who peddle Trump’s falsehoods (in which the former president claims election fraud cost him the election to President Joe Biden) only do so out of a desire for self-preservation.

    The number of true believers in the party, Kinzinger added, is actually quite small.

    “How many actually believe it? Five, probably, if that, maybe?” Kinzinger said on the program. “I don’t know, but it’s in the single, it’s low.”

    But because Trump’s base of supporters so ardently believe the former president’s lies about the election, it behooves lawmakers in Washington, whether they themselves believe it or not, to act like they do.

    “People don’t believe it,” Kinzinger maintained. “But what they are doing is they’re sitting around saying, ‘I need to continue to exist in this job so that I can make an impact. I don’t have the courage or the strength or the ability to swing this party, so I’m going to just kinda put my head down and go along.’”

    Kinzinger’s comments come as members of the GOP in the House are caught up in a battle among themselves over whether they should remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), who has also publicly stated that she doesn’t believe Trump’s election fraud lies, from her leadership position in the House GOP caucus. Cheney, who herself has put forward alarming and questionable claims criticizing the Obama administration, also voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting a mob of his loyalists to attack the Capitol on January 6.

    Kinzinger said he wasn’t sure if backing Trump’s lies now would help Republicans in the 2022 midterms, but he was certain it wouldn’t help his party in the long term.

    “I guarantee you in the long arc of history, this is not going to bode well for Republicans,” he said.

    Kinzinger’s rhetoric matches similar comments recently made by veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who also believes that pushing Trump’s lies is detrimental to the party. But while Kinzinger sees it as damaging to the image of the GOP, Luntz believes pushing false claims of election fraud will foment distrust among the party’s base of voters.

    “This could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022. What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” Luntz said during a New York Times podcast. “Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats’ arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022.”

    Although alarm bells like these are being rung by some in the party, others, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), have noted that Trump’s popularity among Republican voters makes it difficult to stand up to him and his lies.

    “The most popular Republican in America — it’s not Lindsey Graham, is not Liz Cheney; it’s Donald Trump,” Graham said during an appearance on Fox News Monday night.

    “To try to erase Donald Trump from the Republican Party is insane. And the people who try to erase him are going to wind up getting erased,” Graham added.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Liz Cheney Plays the Martyr — But She Helped Build the Monster That Is the GOP

    Liz Cheney

    While rewatching the third installment of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Night Batman series this weekend, a moment jumped out with palpable familiarity. A well-armed junta under the command of arch-fiend Bane had taken control of the city of Gotham, setting up kangaroo courts where everyone is guilty the moment they set foot in the room. Even some of the bad guys find themselves facing judgment, with one sputtering, “But… but I’m one of you!”

    Only two sentences were available in this court: death or exile. Death was straightforward. Exile involved being forced to cross the thin river ice that surrounded the winter-bound city. None survived exile; the ice devoured all comers. When Police Commissioner Jim Gordon is presented before this court, he defiantly chooses death rather than face the elongated humiliation of the river. The judge was nonplussed. “Death,” he pronounced as he brought down the gavel, “by exile.”

    The parallel was instantly evident: Rep. Liz Cheney! A once-prominent member of the junta formerly known as the Republican Party, which is now controlled by a cult leader with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance against whomever and whatever presents itself, Cheney has found herself on the far side of those who once championed her squalid family name.

    Her father, one of the more obvious war criminals in U.S. history and a force for decades within the party, has been equally excommunicated from the hearth of the faithful. Former Vice President Dick Cheney no longer holds elected office, however, while his daughter is currently the third-ranking GOP official in the House.

    For now.

    “The top Republican in the House on Sunday publicly endorsed the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from the party’s leadership team,” reports The Washington Post, “paving the way for Cheney’s removal as early as this week and sending a clear message that allegiance to former president Donald Trump is a requirement to hold power in the GOP. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy threw his support behind Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) to become the new Republican conference chair, the No. 3 job in GOP leadership.”

    Why? What would motivate the GOP to immolate the political career of one of its more prominent up-and-comers? Cheney has faithfully adhered to the ghastly codex of modern Republican morality with grim enthusiasm over the years, but in the age of Trump, the only loyalty that matters is your loyalty to him.

    Because Cheney voted to impeach Trump after he incited his supporters to sack the Capitol, and because she refuses to peddle the fiction of a stolen 2020 election, Trump has commanded she tread the ice. She is not the only one who has aroused his ire, but at present, she is the entrée in this festival of retribution.

    If the reporting holds, Cheney’s moment of “death or exile” is coming on Wednesday, when the House returns to session. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, one of the more astonishing lickspittles in the annals of this age, is using Cheney as a meat shield to protect himself from the fact that he also denounced Trump after January 6, though he did not vote to impeach. That fact may be the only reason he still has a job.

    Imagine living every day in fear that Trump might remember something about you, or be reminded of something about you by some aide with an ax to grind or a friend to promote. That’s McCarthy’s whole existence today, and it is altogether pathetic.

    McCarthy hopes he will become speaker if the GOP retakes the House in ’22, but 40 miles of bad road lie between this moment and that outcome. “Some advisers are urging Donald Trump not to support McCarthy for Speaker if Republicans flip control of the House next year,” reports Politico. “Trump, who has been angry McCarthy helped defend Cheney’s role as conference chair in late February, is interested by the idea.”

    Cheney’s current plight stands as one of the more bizarre transmogrifications in the history of modern politics. For years, she was relentless in her pursuit of the worst elements of Republican “ideology:”

    During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat.

    Unfortunately, Cheney and her allies won their earlier fight for the soul of the party. During the Obama era, the Republican Party became ever more hostile to the fundamental rights of religious and ethnic minorities, and ultimately chose Donald Trump, a man who attacked those rights as an existential threat to the nation, as its leader.

    Cheney’s courageous stand against the party of Trump is a stand against a party she helped build, a monster she helped create. The tragedy is not that she might suffer for her folly, but that American democracy will. Her latter-day epiphany is welcome, but it also comes far too late.

    Even Maureen Dowd, The New York Times champion of D.C. insider snark, laid Cheney low in a blistering Saturday column: “Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it’s done.” Boom, thanks for playing, turn out the lights when you leave.

    Now that her entire political career is trembling on the verge of extinction, Liz Cheney has recast herself as a sort of Joan of Arc character, a doomed victim of nefarious forces she has vowed to keep fighting. The fact that those forces have “Made By The Cheney Family” stamped on their bootheels is but an accent in the symphony of hypocrisy that is consuming the GOP.

    The loss of her position within the party is all but a foregone conclusion. Cheney’s next task will be to see if her district in Wyoming, long a Cheney-GOP stronghold, will vote her out of office entirely next year. By every indication, Trump intends to make retaining her seat as difficult as possible, as he moves to purge the ranks of any and all who dare to offer less than seamless fealty to the scattered, violent nihilism that is now his brand.

    “History is watching,” Cheney wrote in a recent opinion piece that still managed to single out “wokeness” as a threat commensurate to Trump. “Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”

    History has been watching for a while, Liz, and you are no hero. Train a pack of dogs with violence, ignorance and hunger, and they will turn and tear you to pieces sooner or later. For Cheney, it is sooner, and the ice beckons. Nothing on Earth can compel me to root for a Cheney, but I will be watching to see what she can do to prevent the monstrous party she helped make from eating itself.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Oklahoma Bill Bans Teaching About Racism Because It Causes “Discomfort”

    Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt speaks during a roundtable discussion in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on June 18, 2020.

    Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill into law on Friday barring grade schools from teaching lessons about race or sex that may make students uncomfortable.

    Schools in the state can no longer teach lessons about race that may cause “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress” to students. The bills passed the House and the Senate by wide margins. Both chambers are overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans, none of whom voted against the bill.

    HB 1775 also bars educators from teaching students that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex” and the Republicans sponsoring the bill claim that they’re concerned about the teaching of critical race theory — though the implicit claim that educators were teaching either of the aforementioned concepts is dubious at best.

    Critical race theory does not teach that any races are superior to others; rather, it simply holds that racism is deeply rooted in the country and is encoded in laws today, which the U.S. education system already largely fails to teach anyway. In trying to remove education on systemic racism in the country, Republicans have further embedded systemic racism into law, thus proving the point put forth by critical race theory.

    “It’s a law that protects white students from white fragility by banning any subject that forces them to think critically about American racism past, present or future,” wrote Zack Linly for The Root. “This isn’t about education, it’s about racism…. Banning [critical race theory] does just as much to further the divide as teaching it apparently does. Black feelings are being disregarded while white feelings are being catered to.”

    Many advocates and educators were appalled at the passage of the bill.

    The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission wrote, “We are extremely disappointed that Oklahoma Legislators, including Governor Stitt, chose to support HB1775 which diametrically opposes the work of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.” The group was created with the aim of educating people about the white mob that killed hundreds in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Tulsa 100 years ago. Stitt is a commissioner in the group.

    “The intention of the bill clearly aims to limit teaching the racial implications of America’s history. The bill serves no purpose than to fuel the racism and denial that afflicts our communities and our nation,” writes the commission. “It is a sad day and a stain on Oklahoma.” The Black Wall Street Times has called on Stitt’s removal from the commission in light of his signing of the bill.

    Education officials in the state have also spoken out against the bill. Paula Lewis, the chairwoman of the Oklahoma City School Board, called HB 1775 “an outright racist and oppressive piece of legislation” on Twitter.

    “I am appalled at the flagrant attempt to erase factual, incomprehensible history that has occurred in the United States,” Lewis wrote in a Twitter thread. “Our history as a country and as a state, if told accurately, is uncomfortable and should be heartbreaking for Americans that look like me, white.”

    As with attacks on protesting, voting and trans people, Republicans in state legislatures have launched initiatives in half a dozen states to try and ban the teaching of critical race theory or their approximation of the subject, which is often flawed or outright wrong. The use of the term “critical race theory” is likely a distraction from their true aim of keeping white supremacy front and center in all curricula.

    “The term critical race theory is being used by Republicans in a loose way to capture all sorts of critical thought about the histories and legacies of racism in this country,” Amna Akbar, an associate law professor at Ohio State University, told The Hill. “It’s a bogeyman that they’re constructing around critical attention to the history of the country.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Warns Biden Against Pushing Too Hard for Bipartisanship With Republicans

    Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a Senate Committee on the Budget hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2021.

    Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders rejected the idea of waiting for Republicans to come around to accept President Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure package, noting that voters don’t care about bipartisanship as much as people in Washington think they do.

    Speaking during an interview on the program “Axios on HBO,” Sanders was questioned about comments from Steve Ricchetti, who currently serves as counselor to the president in the Biden administration. Ricchetti has suggested that there’s still time for Democrats and Republicans to strike a deal on the infrastructure package, a notion that Sanders contended with.

    “In general I don’t agree with that. The bottom line is the American people want results,” Sanders pointed out.

    The Vermont senator used recent events to prove his point, noting there wasn’t much outrage over the COVID economic relief bill, which passed without a single Republican vote and among other things, provided stimulus checks for most American adults.

    “Frankly, when people got a, you know, $1,400 check or $5,600 check for their family, they didn’t say, ‘Oh, I can’t cash this check because it was done without any Republican votes,’” Sanders quipped.

    Compared to the economic stimulus bill, the White House has acted with less urgency on its proposed infrastructure package, which has been split into two distinct parts: one dealing primarily with what many view as “traditional” infrastructure policy (such as funding for repairing roads, rail, broadband internet, and more), and another bill providing much needed aid to American workers and their families, in the form of free preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds, two years of free community college, and a paid leave program for every worker in the U.S.

    In taking its time with the infrastructure package, the Biden administration is hoping to strike a deal with Republicans to give the appearance of a cooperative spirit, a move that will likely water down many of the proposals Biden has made, especially those put forth by progressives.

    “I’m prepared to negotiate as to the extent of my infrastructure project as well as how we pay for it,” the president said in April.

    But while Biden is hoping to have bipartisan support for the bills he has proposed, he also seems wary of waiting too long, and has suggested he will move forward without Republicans if all they can offer him is obstruction. There appears to be a timeline for how long Biden will wait, as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has said the president wants to see bipartisan progress on the bill by Memorial Day so that the infrastructure bills can get passed sometime this summer.

    The Biden administration has also tried to redefine what bipartisanship really means, seeing it less as lawmakers from two parties in Washington coming together to pass a bill and more as getting a wide coalition of voters to support the proposals.

    Polling has shown that Biden’s plans on infrastructure do appeal to most Americans, with nearly three-in-five voters (58 percent) in a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll supporting the part of the package that deals with improvements to child care, paid leave and education.

    There is also significant bipartisan support among Americans when it comes to funding the other half of the administration’s infrastructure package. Indeed, a majority of both Democrats and Independents, as well as nearly one-third of Republicans (32 percent), voiced support for how physical infrastructure projects across the country are to get funded — through raising taxes on those earning over $400,000 per year and making modest increases on taxes for corporations.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s “Big Lie” Could Hurt Republicans in 2022, GOP Pollster Says

    Paul Roblyer of Portland holds a flag with the face of former President Donald Trump during a 2nd Amendment rally on May 1, 2021, in Salem, Oregon.

    A veteran pollster for Republican candidates and officials over the past several decades has a warning for his party: pushing President Donald Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud may cause a GOP midterm election loss.

    Midterm elections usually go badly for the political party associated with the president currently in office. Only two presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have seen gains in Congress for their own political party in a midterm race after winning a presidential election: Bill Clinton in 1998 and George W. Bush in 2002.

    On average, presidents can expect their party to lose 25 congressional seats in the first midterm after their inauguration. f this holds true in 2022, Democrats could lose control of the House, and perhaps the Senate as well. But there’s a wild card in all of this: Trump, and his influence on conservative voters next year.

    Frank Luntz, a pollster famous for teaching Republicans how to use language in the 1990s to win elections in arguably Orwellian ways, commented on the possible outcome of GOP lawmakers and candidates pushing Trump-fueled election fraud myths into the 2022 midterm races. Doing so, he said in an interview with The New York Times’ “Sway” podcast, could cause supporters to view the voting process with distrust, resulting in losses across the board for the party.

    “This could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022. What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” Luntz said. “Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats’ arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022.”

    Luntz added that GOP losses in the midterm races could also cause a Republican backlash against Trump.

    “If the Republicans lose the majority in the House, they will lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump for telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” the pollster said.

    Luntz’s fears for the GOP echo similar concerns that were raised earlier this year by Republicans, who warned that Trump’s insistence on spreading baseless claims about fraud in the presidential election played a significant part in reducing voter turnout in the runoffs for Georgia’s Senate seats, particularly damaging Republican incumbent candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. More than 752,000 voters that participated in the first round of their races in November failed to show up in the January runoffs, according to reporting from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which noted that most of those voters were white and from rural areas, constituencies that typically favor the GOP.

    Trump’s insistent and baseless voter fraud claims are not the only factor threatening the GOP’s chances in the midterm elections: recent NBC News survey finds that a plurality of voters, 47 percent, currently want Democrats to retain control of Congress, while 42 percent say they want Republicans to run things halfway through Biden’s first term.

    For comparison, at the same time in Trump’s first term (in April 2017), that same NBC News Survey showed similar numbers, with 47 percent saying they wanted Democrats to run Congress (which was then controlled by Republicans) and 43 percent saying they wanted the GOP to do so.

    The midterms are a long way away, so it’s still anyone’s guess what will happen a year and a half from now. But beyond Trump’s influence in the race (and his potential to depress turnout for Republican candidates across the country with his continued pushing of the “big lie”), experts are also saying outcomes will depend heavily on how successful the Democrats are in delivering what Biden promised to the American people during the 2020 campaign.

    “The last four or five months of next year will be key, especially evaluating Biden’s performance, Democratic enthusiasm (which will help determine turnout), and the degree of lingering Republican disillusionment (which will determine their participation rate),” veteran analyst Charlie Cook wrote in February.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Democrats Fought GOP Voter Suppression Bill Through the Night

    Voters approach the door at a polling location on October 13, 2020, in Austin, Texas.

    Texas House Republicans passed a voter suppression bill early Friday morning despite a tough fight put up by Democrats, who offered over 130 amendments from late Thursday into the night.

    Democrats were able to water down the bill, SB 7, and cut into some of the most punitive proposals, but the final vision retained restrictive proposals like limiting ballot drop boxes and prohibiting counties from sending unsolicited absentee ballots.

    The House voted at 3 am to advance the bill, which contained 20 of the provisions proposed by Democrats, who had slim chances of outright stopping the bill. Texas’ House is controlled by Republicans by a wide margin; the bill passed 81-64.

    The bill will head to committee to reconcile the differences with the version passed by the Texas Senate and clear another vote in both chambers before it goes to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. Abbott, a Republican, is expected to sign the bill.

    Previous versions of SB 7 had many restrictions that raised alarms for racial justice and disability advocates, including a ban on drive-through voting, restrictions on early voting hours, and limits on polling places in areas with larger populations of Black and Latinx residents.

    It also contained language plucked straight out of Jim Crow which was eventually removed from the bill. The original text written by Republicans stated that the bill’s purpose was to “preserve the purity of the ballot box,” which Democratic Rep. Rafael Anchía pointed out was explicitly racist.

    “You may have missed it then — and this would’ve been very obvious I think to anyone who looked at that language — that provision was drafted specifically to disenfranchise Black people, Black voters in fact, following the Civil War,” Anchia said, per the Texas Tribune. “Did you know that this purity of the ballot box justification was used during the Jim Crow era to prevent Black people from voting?”

    Unfortunately, reconciliation in committee could end up removing the Democrats’ amendments, and much of the restrictions could be put back in place in the final bill. Former federal Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), through Twitter, encouraged Texans to call their representatives and urge them to vote down the ultimate version of the bill.

    He also encouraged residents to call their federal senator and voice their support for Democrats’ For the People Act, which could help undo some of the harmful voter suppression legislation that Republicans have been putting forth in states across the country.

    “This bill would not only stop voter suppression efforts in Texas, but would do so in Georgia, Arizona, Kansas, etc,” tweeted O’Rourke. “This is the most important thing we can do for voting rights in America.”

    Florida was the latest state to pass Republican-led restrictions on elections, joining Georgia in imposing racist voter suppression laws. On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) signed a bill acutely limiting ballot drop boxes, banning handing out food and water in voting lines, and empowering partisan poll watchers to challenge ballots.

    DeSantis locked out all media except for Fox News when he signed the bill that would affect the millions of voters in his state. Democrats balked at the decision.

    “The bill signing of a voter suppression bill by our Governor is a ‘Fox Exclusive’ — when did public policy become an exclusive to any media company, let alone a hyper conservative one?!” wrote Florida Democratic State Rep. Anna Eskamani on Twitter. “This is how fascism works y’all — and if you’re proud about the bill let people see you sign it!”

    Several groups have filed lawsuits over the Florida bill. The League of Women Voters of Florida and Black Voters Matters Fund have alleged that the bill is unconstitutional. The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Common Cause soon followed with a lawsuit against the Florida secretary of state, saying that the bill causes undue restrictions on voting. And the League of United Latin American Citizens is suing the state and asking the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the Republicans who sponsored the bill.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rand Paul and ALEC Are Working Together to Suppress the Vote

    Senator Rand Paul walks through the Senate subway without a face covering on February 13, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) last month said he has spoken with state legislators through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) about passing state bills that restrict voting rights and impose greater legislative control over how elections are run.

    In a live-streamed video on April 19, Paul told Kevin Roberts, executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an affiliate of the right-wing State Policy Network, that he has “been speaking to legislators through ALEC” about conservative electoral reform priorities since the November 2020 election.

    Paul’s statement comes on the heels of the revelation that ALEC and the State Policy Network are working with Heritage Action for America on its $24 million plan to push new voting restrictions in eight states.

    While admitting that challenges to the 2020 election results — many filed by former President Donald Trump and his allies — failed to convince courts of voter fraud or unlawful conduct by local or state elections officials, Paul insisted state legislatures must forge ahead with his proposals to curtail mail-in voting and politicize the administration of elections.

    ALEC, registered as a nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization, claimed to have suspended its work on voting and elections in 2012 when it disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force in the wake of public outcry and the departure of corporate members seeking to distance themselves from ALEC’s role in pushing controversial voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” legislation.

    However, ALEC revived a secret Political Process Working Group in 2019, which has actively pushed voter fraud myths and partisan gerrymandering strategies to a receptive audience of GOP lawmakers.

    A Center for Media and Democracy examination of voter suppression bills in six battleground states found more than 100 Republican politicians listed as lead sponsors or co-sponsors of 2021 legislation are connected to ALEC. In the first three months of 2021, lawmakers in 47 states introduced more than 360 bills that would restrict voting access, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

    Rand Paul’s Voter Suppression Checklist

    In addition to repeating lies about “election fraud” in Wisconsin and elsewhere during the 2020 general election, Paul outlined three policy reforms, which have already been introduced in various iterations in state legislatures across the country:

    • Suppressing the vote. “Absentee voting needs to be individualized,” Paul said, repeating Trump’s unfounded claims linking absentee voting to voter fraud to third-party ballot collection of absentee ballots. “Vote harvesting,” or “ballot harvesting,” is a pejorative term for the practice of third parties collecting completed ballots from voters’ homes and delivering them in bulk to polling places or election offices. Paul and other right-wing individuals and groups including the Heritage Foundation claim it is “a recipe for coercion and election fraud,” but election experts say it is good for democracy.
    • Enacting state control over local electoral policy. Local election officials developed a variety of approaches last year for managing a national election in the midst of a sweeping pandemic. Paul and ALEC take the hard line that only legislatures have that authority and are pushing legislation to prevent local and county elections officials from altering election protocols in the future.
    • Giving state legislatures authority over governors and secretaries of state. Paul argued that secretaries of state were “basically soliciting voters” when some chose to send mail-in ballots to all voters for the 2020 general election due to public health and safety concerns during the Covid-19 pandemic. “You may even have to put into law what they can’t do, instead of putting into law what they can do,” Paul said, having seen fellow Republicans repeatedly fail in legal challenges to states’ voting practices.

    Paul recycled falsehoods about voter fraud that Trump and many GOP politicians perpetuated after the 2020 election, alleging that in states where many voters vote by mail, “drip by drip, [Democrats] keep finding votes. They keep harvesting the votes until they get it.”

    The reality is that mail-in ballots take longer to count, and in some GOP-led states, lawmakers prevented election officials from beginning the mail-in vote count until Election Day. Thus, there were huge backlogs of ballots for officials to carefully count, and results trickled in after much of the Election Day votes were already tabulated. Republicans cynically used the vote counting delays to falsely allege the election was rigged against Trump.

    Paul called Travis County, Texas, which is home to the state capital of Austin, “a communist oasis in the middle of conservative Texas.” He said that “rebellious” election officials in Travis County and Harris County, which set records for voter participation by instituting 24-hour voting, should not have the ability to set their own voting practices, claiming they overruled state law. Republican state lawmakers are currently attempting to outlaw some of the voter access methods that Harris County used in its hugely successful elections last year.

    Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Election Protection Project

    The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing think tanks and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom that works to “defund and defang” unions, oppose climate change regulations, lower wages, cut taxes and business regulations, tighten voter restrictions, privatize education, and hide the identities of political donors.

    Not surprisingly, CMD found one of largest state delegations to ALEC in Texas, with 31 percent of the state’s House and 35 percent of its Senate having documented ties to ALEC.

    During its 2021 Policy Orientation in January, which was scheduled to coincide with the start of the legislative session, Texas Public Policy Foundation announced a national Election Protection Project led by Congressman Michael McCaul (TX-10). In a press release, TPPF said the project would seek to restore “election integrity” by “working with state officials and organizations to propose legislative measures to enhance and bolster the security and integrity of our nation’s election system.” These measures include pursuing voter ID requirements for in-person and mail-in voting and monitoring voter rolls.

    The 2021 Policy Orientation also featured two panels dedicated to voter suppression. ALEC-tied Texas state Reps. Stephanie Klick (R) and Valoree Swanson (R) and voter suppression expert J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation participated in the Election Protection: Securing the People’s Voice and Choice at the Ballot Box panel. The panel discussion centered around unfounded fears of voter fraud with mail-in balloting.

    The second panel, Election 2020: What Happened and What Does it Mean for the Future?, included Rachel Bovard, senior policy director with the Trump administration-tied Conservative Partnership Institute; The Federalist’s political editor, John Davidson; and Matt Braynard, executive director of the Trump-tied voter suppression group Look Ahead America.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • McConnell Says Republicans’ Only Priority Is to Block Biden Administration

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell walks through the Senate Subway at the U.S. Capitol on April 29, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

    Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, when asked about the direction of the Republican Party and the right’s attacks on Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), said on Wednesday that he and his party are “100 percent” focused on blocking the Biden administration.

    “One-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” McConnell said. “I think the best way to look at what this new administration is: The president may have won the nomination, but [Sen.] Bernie Sanders won the argument.”

    The senator has said before that he plans to fight Democrats and progressives on their agenda, though the recent comment was a more direct representation of his stated goals. Ironically, within the same press conference, McConnell also said that he wanted to pass an infrastructure package on a bipartisan basis — as long it was based on the Republicans’ plan.

    While McConnell has declared that Republicans will stand united in opposition to the Democrats’ infrastructure plan, he claimed Wednesday that the massively watered-down plan offered by his party could garner Democratic support and would thus be a “bipartisan” offer that his party could go for.

    In reality, many political commentators have noted that the people acting as a roadblock to bipartisanship are the Republicans, and McConnell’s own comments are reflective of that. As columnist Eugene Robinson noted in February for The Washington Post, “Bipartisanship is nice, but you can’t negotiate with fantasy and lies.”

    Though President Joe Biden has only been in office for a few months, Republicans have already put the absurdity of their cries of “bipartisanship” on display multiple times. They stand opposed to the pay-fors offered by Democrats for the infrastructure package, for instance, but refuse to pass a bill that isn’t paid for; and so far, their only offering toward dealing with the fallout from the pandemic have been more tax cuts — ones that even the usually staid Politico calls “mostly unrealistic.”

    President Biden immediately dismissed McConnell’s comments on Wednesday, saying, “[McConnell] said that about the last administration — about Barack [Obama], that [McConnell] was going to stop everything — and I was able to get a lot done with him.”

    Indeed, McConnell gained a reputation while he was Senate majority leader during the Obama administration for blocking everything that Obama and the Democrats put forth with a legislative weapon: the Senate filibuster. Use of the filibuster has skyrocketed in modern times, partially thanks to McConnell’s repeated and skillful use of it.

    The knowledge that the filibuster is one of McConnell’s only tools left in a Democratically controlled Congress and White House is likely why he has threatened to go “scorched earth” on the Senate if Democrats get rid of the archaic rule.

    Meanwhile, many of the Democrats’ proposals, like the $15 minimum wage, infrastructure plan and coronavirus relief checks, poll well with a wide swath of the public, including Republicans — a fact that throws a wrench into GOP lawmakers’ cries for “unity.”

    This is perhaps part of why political commentators say that, while Republicans might say their stated purpose is to block Democrats, in reality, they’re fighting against democracy itself; Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) said as much on Wednesday.

    “Mitch McConnell just admitted that 100 percent of his focus is on obstruction. And with the filibuster, he can exercise a veto over the will of the majority,” tweeted Padilla. “We can’t keep letting one person who’s hell-bent on standing in the way of progress also stand in the way of democracy.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Florida’s DeSantis Bars All Media Except Fox at Voter Suppression Bill Signing

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responds to a question from the media at a press conference at the Eau Gallie High School aviation hangar in Melbourne, Florida, on March 22, 2021.

    Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law on Thursday imposing new restrictions on voting, such as making it harder to vote by mail and criminalizing the handing out of food and water to people in voting lines.

    The governor made the signing of the bill, which would affect millions of voters in his state, a “Fox exclusive,” as a spokesperson said, according to South Florida Sun-Sentinel columnist Steve Bousquet, allowing only the conservative media outlet to show the signing. DeSantis claimed in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that the bill was about “integrity and transparency” even though voting rights advocates have decried the measures that make it harder to vote, especially for nonwhite voters.

    The bill, SB 90, adds new ID requirements for those requesting an absentee ballot and requires those requesting an absentee ballot to file a request before each election, rather than allowing them to remain on an absentee voter list. It also limits the number of ballot drop boxes, places restrictions on who can drop off ballots and requires drop boxes to be monitored by an election official.

    Democrats and voting advocates have criticized the law, saying that it places undue restrictions on a voting process that had shown no evidence of widespread fraud.

    The League of Women Voters of Florida, Black Voters Matters Fund and Florida Alliance for Retired Americans filed a lawsuit against SB 90 on Thursday, saying that multiple elements of the bill, such as banning the handing out of food and water, are unconstitutional and a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Voters from every county in the state also joined the suit.

    “SB 90 is a bill that purports to solve problems that do not exist, caters to a dangerous lie about the 2020 election that threatens our most basic democratic values, and, in the end, makes it harder to vote without adequate justification for doing so,” reads the groups’ complaint. “SB 90 does not impede all of Florida’s voters equally. It is crafted to and will operate to make it more difficult for certain types of voters to participate in the state’s elections” — especially nonwhite, older and young or first-time voters.

    The bill isn’t about election integrity for Republicans, say the bill’s opponents, but about the continuation of an attack on voting started by former President Donald Trump.

    “We are not here because we have a problem with our elections,” said Democratic State Rep. Omari Hardy. “We are here because the Republican former president lost his re-election in November, and, rather than admitting his defeat, he spun a web of lies, radicalized those lies, in an attempt to explain away the loss.” Hardy also described the bill as “the revival of Jim Crow in this state.”

    The oppressive nature of the bill was underscored by the fact that the governor wouldn’t allow local news outlets to show the bill’s signing.

    “It’s extremely telling that DeSantis claims new Florida voter suppression law intended to boost ‘election integrity’ but barred all media except Fox News from covering bill signing,” wrote Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman on Twitter.

    “This isn’t a story about the press being locked out of an event. It’s about Floridians who had their eyes and ears in that room cut off,” wrote Jay O’Brien, a reporter for CBS 12 in West Palm Beach. “Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law today that will impact ALL Floridians. And only some viewers were allowed to see it. That’s not normal.”

    Texas is up next for voter suppression bills. The Republican-led HB 6, which would make it a felony for election officials to mail an absentee ballot to a voter who didn’t request one, among other restrictive provisions, advanced to a floor vote on Thursday. Republicans control the House in the state by a wide margin.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.