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carolinehayter

'Set the standard': Cuomo allegations test Democrats' commitment to #MeToo | Andrew Cuo... - 0 views

  • New York Democrats have called for the governor to resign over sexual harassment allegations, but no national figures have joined the chorus
  • But no other national Democrats have joined the chorus. The Axios website branded it the party’s “hypocrisy moment”, arguing: “Governor Andrew Cuomo should be facing explicit calls to resign from President Biden on down, if you apply the standard that Democrats set for similar allegations against Republicans. And it’s not a close call.”
  • But in 2017, as the #MeToo movement held powerful men accountable, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator who holds Hillary Clinton’s former seat in New York, argued that the former president should have resigned over the affair.
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  • The charge of double standards points to a steep learning curve for a party that has struggled to keep pace with shifting public attitudes towards gender roles, power dynamics and sexual boundaries.
  • That same year, Gillibrand became the first Democratic senator to call for her Minnesota colleague Al Franken to quit over allegations of sexual misconduct. She was joined by others including Kamala Harris, who tweeted: “Sexual harassment and misconduct should not be allowed by anyone and should not occur anywhere. I believe the best thing for Senator Franken to do is step down.”Franken did just that, but some critics now believe that he was the victim of a rush to judgment and should have been allowed to wait for the results of an investigation.
  • This time, although Gillibrand said Cuomo’s alleged conduct was “completely unacceptable”, she stopped short of demanding he resign before the investigation is done
  • “The vice-president’s view is that she believes all women should be treated with respect. Their voices should be heard. They should tell their story. There’s an independent investigation that is happening now, being overseen by the New York attorney general, and she certainly supports that.”
  • But this puts Democratic leaders out of step with groups such as Women’s March, which was born out of the January 2017 protests against Donald Trump, who faced numerous allegations of sexual assault and harassment
  • “We share the view that there should be an independent investigation but Cuomo himself has not even denied many of the harassment allegations and, for us, it’s about behaviour that is disqualifying. It could be illegal, but it also could not be illegal.”
  • Just as the instant deification then instant demonisation of Cuomo has left many crying out for nuance and complexity, so it can be said that no two cases of sexual harassment in politics are quite the same.
  • In 2018 Eric Schneiderman, an attorney general of New York lauded as a liberal advocate of women’s rights, resigned after being accused of physically abusing four women. Cuomo was among those who were quick to call for him to step down.
  • Trump’s nominee to the supreme court, Brett Kavanaugh, was nearly derailed by allegations from Dr Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her
  • In 2019 several women accused Biden of making unwanted physical contact.
  • Last year Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer, alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993. He vehemently denied the claim, which remained unsubstantiated and faded from the election race. Biden picked a woman – Harris – as his running mate and often highlighted his work as lead sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act.
  • Larry Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “In hindsight, a number of the Democrats in the Senate who had pushed him to step down later expressed regret. They realised they moved too quickly, they didn’t know enough and the punishment didn’t really fit what they later learnt to be the misbehaviour.”
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  • “I don’t think the Republican party is in any position to be lecturing anyone about how to handle sexual harassment. They seem to have actually gotten real expertise on how to evade it.”
  • “Just because we fire Andrew Cuomo and Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, that doesn’t alone solve the problem. The bigger problem is still there, which is that harassment is seen as an acceptable part of our culture. That’s why so many of these people in power are doing it. So yes, we need to respond and uproot harassment wherever it lies but we also need to keep our eye on the ball.”
carolinehayter

Gillibrand calls on Schumer to bring vote on bill to change how military sexual assault... - 0 views

  • Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Sunday called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to bring to the floor a vote on a bipartisan bill that would overhaul the way the US military responds to sexual assault cases.
  • The legislation, which was introduced last month by a bipartisan group of senators, would make significant changes to how sexual assault cases are handled, moving the decision-making power on whether to bring felony-level charges from the chain of command
  • The bill, which was originally introduced by Gillibrand, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa and others, would also take preventatives measures, including increasing training for all members of the military from ROTC to enlisted officers, as well as criminal investigators and military prosecutors, so they have the tools they need to work on sexual assault and domestic violence cases.
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  • "His insistence on narrowing this bill to one crime -- the crime of sexual assault -- you're going to basically break apart the criminal justice system within the military. You're going to create one set of justice for one set of plaintiffs and defendants and the rest for everybody else. It's not fair," she told Tapper.
  • In 2014, Gillibrand led the fight to remove the decision to prosecute military sexual assault cases from commanders. The effort didn't fall along party lines, as she gained Republican supporters like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to her effort. But the bill ultimately fell short and failed to get 60 votes, in part because of Democratic opposition
  • "To take biases out of the system across the board, you need a trained military prosecutor to make these decisions about whether it should go to trial. That takes it out of the chain of command. The chain of command has bias because they may know the perpetrator, the accused," she said.
  • "They may know the survivor and they may have a certain lens about which service member's better for fighting a war or better for good order and discipline within the ranks. That bias is inappropriate when it comes to serious felonies," the senator added.
katherineharron

Pelosi says women should be believed but stops short of calling for Cuomo resignation -... - 0 views

  • House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in an interview Sunday morning that women should be believed but stopped short of calling for New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo's resignation amid sexual harassment allegations against him.
  • "The governor should look inside his heart, he loves New York, to see if he can govern effectively," Pelosi said
  • Cuomo, facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment and unwanted advances, is also the subject of an impeachment investigation after the speaker of the New York State Assembly authorized the judiciary committee to begin the probe this week.
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  • I said what these women have said must be treated with respect. They are credible and serious charges, and then I called for an investigation. I have confidence in the Attorney General of New York,
  • Pushed by ABC's George Stephanopoulos about whether she was calling for Cuomo to resign, the California Democrat responded: "I think we should see the results (of the investigation), but he may decide -- and hopefully this result will be soon -- and what I'm saying is the governor should look inside his heart, he loves New York, to see if he can govern effectively."
  • While Cuomo has apologized for "making anyone feel uncomfortable," the Democrat has maintained that he "never touched anyone inappropriately."
  • A majority of New York's congressional Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, have called on Cuomo to resign in the wake of the sexual harassment allegations and his handling of Covid-19 deaths at nursing homes.
  • "I salute the brave women who came forward," Schumer said Sunday morning. "There are multiple, serious, credible allegations of abuse so that Gov. Cuomo has lost the confidence of his governing partners and so many New Yorkers, so for the good of the state, he should resign." When asked whom Cuomo would listen to within the New York delegation, Schumer responded: "Look, I'm not going to speculate on the future, he should resign, he should resign."
  • Asked if her decision to call for Cuomo's resignation is "reminiscent" of her move to call for then-Sen. Al Franken to step down in 2017, when the Minnesota Democrat faced sexual harassment allegations, the New York senator pointed to the pandemic. "The thing that is very different about this moment in time is we are in the middle of the worst crisis of our lifetimes... and focused leadership is needed, and you need the support of your governing partners."
  • "I am not going to resign. I was not elected by the politicians, I was elected by the people," he said, insisting that "New Yorkers know me."
rerobinson03

Opinion | Senator Kirsten Gillibrand Reflects on the U.S. Capitol Riot - The New York T... - 0 views

  • Vice President Mike Pence was abruptly removed from the presiding chair by his security detail, and Senator Chuck Grassley was shuttled across the floor into that seat. Moments later, a Capitol Police representative informed us the Capitol had been breached and that we were sheltering in place.
  • The Capitol Police led us out the chamber’s back doors, through the corridors, down the stairs, into the tunnels under the Capitol to a secure location in a nearby office building.
  • It is our job as senators to represent the will of the American people. That meant making it clear that while this riot was a temporary disruption of the democratic process, it was not a disruption of our democracy. So, after the violence came to an end, we set out to fulfill our constitutional duty.
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  • We were escorted back to the Senate chamber, swept free of broken glass, and resumed our certification of the electoral votes. We held fast to the oath we swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
  • That is how elections are conducted in this country — not by mob rule.
  • Unlike the peaceful protesters who gathered in Lafayette Square or across New York City last year for Black Lives Matter protests, the rioters at the Capitol were not met with overwhelming police and military force.
  • They were not stopped from storming onto the Senate floor, taking a podium or defacing the speaker’s office. We should all consider what that says about our country, how we see public safety and racial biases in our law enforcement.
  • Every option available, from invoking the 25th Amendment to impeachment and removal to criminal prosecution, should be on the table.
  • Congress and the Department of Justice must undertake a thorough investigation of how this happened, and why the planning for this protest and response to these white supremacist groups was so inadequate, putting lawmakers and the people who work in and maintain our Capitol building at risk. More broadly, we must assess the role of the ultra conservative media, which purports to be news but only offers misinformation and division, as well as the power of unchecked social media to divide our nation
anonymous

McMaster Was Rebuked in 2015 Over Handling of 2 Officers Accused of Sexual Assault - Th... - 0 views

  • McMaster Was Rebuked in 2015 Over Handling of 2 Officers Accused of Sexual Assault
  • WASHINGTON — A two-year-old report by the Army’s inspector general concluded that Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, now President Trump’s national security adviser, violated the service’s regulations in a case that involved two junior officers accused of sexual assault.
  • The report asserts that during an assignment as the commanding general at Fort Benning, Ga., General McMaster “improperly” decided to allow two second lieutenants to attend Ranger School even though they were under investigation on allegations that they had sexually assaulted a female officer as cadets at West Point.
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  • Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, a Democrat and a member of the panel, has taken a strong interest in the role of women in the military and, an adviser said, pushed the Army to investigate why the junior officers were allowed to attend Ranger School.
proudsa

Hillary Clinton Sets Up A Fight With Bernie Sanders Over Paid Leave - 0 views

  • Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday offered new details about her plan to make sure all workers can take time off, with pay, in order to care for a newborn or sick relative.
  • During that time, the worker would be eligible to receive replacement wages, up to two-thirds of his or her salary.
  • The proposal, if enacted, would patch a major gap in America’s safety net. Workers in every other developed country are entitled to paid leave, in some cases for more than a year.
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  • Some companies provide paid leave anyway. In the last year, high-profile employers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs introduced or expanded paid leave for their employees.
  • “The benefit of being one of the last countries in the world to adopt paid maternity leave is that we have been able to learn from other countries' experiences and the results are clear,” Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and former adviser to President Barack Obama, told the Huffington Post on Thursday.
  • Clinton has criticized that approach repeatedly because it would mean higher taxes on lower- and middle-income workers.
  • Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the only Republican presidential candidate to address the issue formally, has said he’d offer small tax breaks to companies that offer paid leave -- an approach unlikely to have much impact, except perhaps to help well-off workers.
  • But Clinton’s proposal differs from the bill in one crucial way. In order to finance the replacement wages that workers would get, the Gillibrand-DeLauro bill would impose a small payroll tax, of 0.4 percent, that employers and employees would split evenly.
  • To advocates like Heather Boushey, chief economist and executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, that’s a welcome sign that American politics is finally talking about the challenges of parents who also have jobs.
Javier E

Foreign Policy Distinguishes Bernie Sanders in 2020 - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • From a $15 national minimum wage to Medicare for all to free college tuition, Sanders’s opponents have embraced policies that were considered radical when he first proposed them during the 2016 campaign
  • Sanders doesn’t just warn against U.S. military intervention in Venezuela, as Warren and Gillibrand have. He warns against it while invoking the United States’ “long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American countries.
  • In 2016, foreign policy was the area where Sanders distinguished himself least.
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  • This time, by contrast, Sanders arguably talks about foreign policy more than any other declared candidate does. Of the four senators who launched their candidacies via video—Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Sanders—only his mentioned foreign policy
  • What distinguishes Sanders is the same quality that distinguished him on domestic policy in 2016: his willingness to cross red lines that have long defined the boundaries of acceptable opinion
  • He’s produced videos that call Gaza an “open-air prison,” he’s depicted Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the “growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism,” and, most controversially of all, he’s suggested cutting U.S. military aid to Israel.
  • He’s the only presidential candidate in recent memory who regularly describes the Cold War not as a heroic American victory, but as a cautionary tale
  • there’s another policy realm where Sanders may find it easier to carve out a distinctly lefty niche: America’s relationship to the rest of the world.
  • he wants America to shun the quest for global supremacy that leads it to overthrow regimes it can’t control and to instead pursue a foreign policy based on “partnership, rather than dominance.”
  • He called for putting the United Nations—which he called “one of the most important organizations for promoting a vision of a different world”—near the heart of American foreign policy
  • Sanders challenged the domestic side of the exceptionalist creed: the belief that American capitalism—buttressed by modest regulations and welfare provisions—provides upward mobility.
  • Now Sanders is poised to challenge exceptionalism in foreign policy: the belief that America, as a uniquely virtuous nation, can substitute its own self-interest and moral intuition for international institutions and international law
  • A 2017 Pew Research poll found that Americans over the age of 30 were far more likely to say that the “U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than to say, “There are other countries that are better than the U.S.” But among adults under 30, the latter view predominated by a margin of more than two to one.
  • For a presidential candidate, challenging American exceptionalism would, until recently, have seemed like a sure path to political oblivion
  • In 2020, Americans will learn whether there’s a market for his anti-imperial heresies too.
Javier E

Health Care and Insurance Industries Mobilize to Kill 'Medicare for All' - The New York... - 0 views

  • The lobbyists’ message is simple: The Affordable Care Act is working reasonably well and should be improved, not repealed by Republicans or replaced by Democrats with a big new public program. More than 155 million Americans have employer-sponsored health coverage. They like it, by and large, and should be allowed to keep it.
  • Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can increase premiums with a person’s age, and older people who do not qualify for subsidies face the highest premiums on the insurance exchange. For a 60-year-old in Charlotte, N.C., the average premium for a midlevel silver plan is more than $1,100 a month; in Phoenix, it is nearly $1,000 a month.
  • Beyond their desire to preserve the status quo, coalition members have done well by the Affordable Care Act. Many participants, such as the American Medical Association, the pharmaceuticals lobby and the hospital association, backed the A.C.A. from the start, banking that more insured Americans would mean more customers. The hospitals saw the health law’s Medicaid expansion as a lifeline as they struggled with the uninsured working poor.
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  • The need to bolster the Affordable Care Act will become even more urgent, the coalition says, if Texas and other states succeed in their lawsuit to invalidate the entire law.
  • Yet another Democratic proposal, allowing states to create a Medicaid buy-in program for all their residents, regardless of income, has won support from 23 senators, including Mr. Booker, Mr. Brown, Ms. Gillibrand, Ms. Harris, Ms. Klobuchar and Ms. Warren.
  • And “during the whole debate over the Affordable Care Act, we supported having a public option in the individual insurance market in every state,” said Robert B. Doherty, senior vice president of the college, which represents 154,000 doctors who specialize in internal medicine.
knudsenlu

Are we seeing signs of a Democratic wave in the primaries? | Jill Abramson | Opinion | ... - 0 views

  • ith new Democratic voters racing to the polls in big numbers in Tuesday’s primaries, Texas is looking purple rather than Republican red. That’s big news, especially on the heels of Democrats winning recently in Alabama, where Doug Jones beat Roy Moore, and Virginia, where Democrat Ralph Northam was elected governor.
  • Though winning control of the House of Representatives in 2018 is their focus, my Democratic sources say that there are already 20 credible presidential challengers giving serious thought to opposing Donald Trump in 2020. The list, unsurprisingly, includes a raft of Democratic senators, and, perhaps surprisingly, at least three strong women, New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar and Massachusetts’s Elizabeth Warren.
  • Unlikely southern stars have aligned to boost Democrats’ confidence. West Virginia, a state that was once a stronghold, had slipped out of the party’s reach in 2000 and in 2016 gave 68% of its vote to Trump. But there’s a tide of anger over issues like the scandalously low pay of teachers, who defied the state’s right to work law and went out on strike.
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  • A critic of the war on drugs, he’s for legalizing pot and banning assault weapons. A graduate of Columbia University in New York, he performed for a time in a punk band. But Texas likes quirky politicians and O’Rourke defeated an entrenched incumbent in a primary in 2012, the same year Texas sent Cruz, now 47, to the Senate.
  • Besides Cruz’s personal unpopularity, there is Trump’s unpopularity affecting the mood in Texas. According to the Washington Post, Gallup’s 2017 year-long average found Trump’s job approval rating at 39% among Texas adults.
  • It’s easy to look at what’s happening in Washington DC and despair. That’s why I carry a little plastic Obama doll in my purse. I pull him out every now and then to remind myself that the United States had a progressive, African American president until very recently. Some people find this strange, but you have to take comfort where you can find it in Donald Trump’s America.
Javier E

We must demand of candidates: how real is your commitment to fixing democracy? | Lawren... - 0 views

  • Speaker Nancy Pelosi has set the only meaningful bar. HR1, the reform package that she passed in the House, was extraordinary not just because of the incredible range of reform packed into that single bill – from campaign finance to gerrymandering, to a commitment to automatic voter registration and a restoration of the Voting Rights Act. It was also extraordinary because it recognized that reform must happen first. “Fix democracy first” has become the slogan of many in this movement.
  • The South Bend mayor, Pete Buttigieg, told Trevor Noah that reform “like HR 1” would be a “day one” priority for his administration. Andrew Yang “amend[ed]” his platform to make “fixing democracy” the first thing that he would do as president. So too did Warren tell Chris Hayes that “anti-corruption reform” would be the first thing her administration would take up. Marianne Williamson has said the same. So too has Gillibrand.
  • The next president should follow the lead of Nancy Pelosi and commit to making reform fundamental. He or she should then explain to us what that fundamental reform will include.
Javier E

Opinion | Is the Religious Right Privileged? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Serwer is stating with particular force something that most liberals seem to believe: That populism in all its forms, but maybe religious conservatism especially, is best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged, the longtime white-male-Christian winners of our history, at discovering that under conditions of equality they don’t get to be the rulers anymore.
  • I want to complicate the first argument, and challenge the second one
  • The complication has to do with the history of black emancipation and black politics
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  • the challenge has to do with the actual composition of the religious right and the history of liberalism’s relationship to Christianity.
  • On the first point, it’s true that black America has never formed an illiberal bloc in American politics, and true as well that the dominant, so far victorious strain in African-American activism and political thought is represented by the fulfill-the-founding patriotism that binds Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • slavery was abolished only because of the interaction between Southern paranoia, ambition and vainglory and Northern abolitionists who regarded the constitutional order as a “compact with hell” — an interaction that led first to political violence, then a breakdown of the constitutional order and then a civil war
  • a stark reminder that our system has advanced morally through effective re-foundings as well as liberal reforms, and that some moral-religious-cultural chasms can be closed only by extra-constitutional events.
  • As an undercurrent, at least, the black political tradition in America has included many “post-liberal” forays and flirtations, sharpest in periods of apparent political breakdown, that encompass everything from the Communist affiliations of many black intellectuals in the 1930s to the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and other black nationalist movements in the civil rights era.
  • If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people’s flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities. And defenders of the system should accept that openness
  • the idea that the religious-conservative coalition just represents the former big winners of American history, resentful of their lost privilege and yet even now so secure within it that they can’t imagine being on the receiving end of state oppression, is … not really an accurate description.
  • the religious right consists of an alliance of several groups that, without experiencing anything like the oppression visited on black Americans, have consistently occupied lower rungs in the American social hierarchy.
  • Today’s evangelicalism is a complicated mix, but it is heavily descended from Bible Belt, prairie and Sun Belt folkways that were often poor and marginalized and rarely close to the corridors of power.
  • Its allies in pro-life, pro-family politics include Orthodox Jews, whose history is not exactly one of power; Mormons, who were harried westward by a brutal persecution and then forced to rewrite their doctrines by state power; and conservative Roman Catholics
  • all of these groups are embedded in global religious communities in which persecution is as common as privilege — which if anything probably leads them to worry too much about what a hostile government might do to them, not to fail to imagine such oppression.
  • secular liberalism, in its meritocratic-elite form, may present itself as a vehicle for long-suffering minorities to finally grasp power, in many ways it is also a peculiar post-Protestant extension of the old WASP ascendancy
  • to impose the current doctrines of Episcopalians on the Baptists and the Papists.
  • after 50 years of small-d democratic activism by pro-lifers, the pro-choice side seems to be hardening into a view that such activism is as un-American as racism. Legally, elite liberalism is increasingly embracing arguments that would make it difficult or impossible for the church to operate hospitals and adoption agencies today, and perhaps colleges and grammar schools tomorrow
  • they threaten the return of longstanding tendency in modern secular polities — an institutionalized anti-Catholicism that effectively oppresses the church even if it stops short of persecuting it, a form of liberalism that is (if you will) integrally opposed to my religion’s flourishing
  • because I would prefer that political liberalism turn away from the trajectory that is inspiring both integralism and Trumpism, I want liberals — liberals like Serwer, perhaps liberals like you, reader — to embrace a historical perspective that is wider and more complicated than a partisan story about privileged white Christians whining because they’ve never lost anything before
  • two arguments, two lines of thinking, that it eloquently distills.
  • The first argument is a broad historical defense of the American experiment
  • America was born imperfect and remains so, in this story, but it is a place where the most oppressed and disfavored people need never despair of their future, need never abandon the promise of the founding, because the arc of our national story can always, with enough activist zeal and procedural perseverance, be bent toward justice.
  • Then the second argumen
aleija

Opinion | There's a Sexual Assault Crisis in the Military. Congress Can Stop It. - The ... - 0 views

  • Advocates for reform contend that a key reason for the impunity is the military chain of command, the rigid organizational structure that gives commanders authority over their subordinates. This arrangement also extends to the handling of sexual assault. The rules give commanders a key role in the prosecution of such cases involving service members under their authority.
  • Despite promises from military leaders that they could be trusted to solve the problem themselves, in the last decade reports of assault have doubled, while the conviction rate has halved. The pending bill would remove the prosecution of sexual assault cases from the chain of command. The legislation enjoys broad, bipartisan support with more than 60 co-sponsors, including Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, a combat veteran and survivor of sexual assault, who participated in the video above.
  • But even though Senator Ernst’s recent decision to throw her weight behind the bill has given the effort new impetus, the legislation’s chances of passage are uncertain amid stiff resistance from some key senators. Last week, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and the ranking member, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, blocked the bill from a vote in the Senate — where it surely would have passed given its broad support.
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  • Congress now has a month to pass the bill. In July, it will go to committee, where Senators Reed and Inhofe’s influence leaves the legislation’s solutions vulnerable to being watered down or minimized.
delgadool

The Warren-Sanders handshake is keeping us from discussing sexism - Vox - 0 views

  • Perhaps it was an intentional snub and Warren didn’t want to shake his hand. It could also have been an awkward oversight akin to not noticing someone trying to give you a high-five or waving to someone only to realize they weren’t waving at you. It’s even less clear what they discussed.
  • In some ways, all the attention heaped on this one moment was unsurprising, coming after several days of escalating tension between the two progressive leaders
  • Making a handshake the biggest moment of January’s debate has drawn attention away from important things that informed it: narrowly, Sanders and Warren working hard to bury the hatchet in the name of advancing the progressivism they share, and broadly, conversations around the sexism inherent to questions of whether a woman can be president.
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  • Warren and Sanders have had a nonaggression pact throughout the campaign, but that truce was broken following a report from Politico’s Alex Thompson and Holly Otterbein that the Sanders campaign had given volunteers a script that attacked other candidates, including Warren.
  • The Warren campaign responded to this by saying Sanders told Warren during a private meeting that he didn’t think a woman could win the White House in 2020. Sanders and his surrogates said the Vermont senator said no such thing. Warren and her surrogates said he did.
  • But the peace and goodwill engendered by the debate itself was largely derailed — among the senators’ bases, at least — by the moment CNN captured after, when no handshake occurred.
  • Obviously, this little moment is getting so much attention because the Iowa caucuses are now about two weeks away. Voting in New Hampshire comes directly after that, then contests in Nevada and South Carolina. In other words, time is running out.
  • That hesitancy is reflected in polls on the issue, many of which show that individuals want — or at the very least have no problem with — a woman nominee, but that they don’t believe other voters feel the same.
  • haven’t swayed voters in favor of the Minnesota senator. Instead, Biden, who has lost elections, and who does not have as strong a record of winning in Republican areas, is seen as Democrats’ best chance to beat Trump, according to recent polls. And it is Biden who leads nationally.
  • In 2020, anything could happen: Trump enjoys the advantages of incumbency and the Electoral College system, but experts have said the Democratic base is incredibly energized and is expected to show a strong turnout. Respondents to polls may believe Biden has the best chance against Trump, but experts have told Vox that no research argues a woman would be destined to lose in November because of her gender.
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