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hannahcarter11

Biden's 50-day mark to coincide with relief bill win | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...-coincide-with-relief-bill-win

biden relief bill 50 days

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • President BidenJoe BidenManchin cements key-vote status in 50-50 Senate The Memo: How the COVID year upended politics Post-pandemic plans for lawmakers: Chuck E. Cheese, visiting friends, hugging grandkids MORE will mark the 50th day of his presidency Wednesday on the verge of his first significant legislative accomplishment as the House moves to pass his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.
  • He has quickly unraveled key policies of his predecessor by way of executive action, the country has administered tens of millions of vaccine doses, and major school systems are set to return to in-person learning over the next month.
  • Biden’s first 50 days have been consumed by the coronavirus pandemic and attempts to blunt both the virus and its economic fallout
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  • Biden is expect to announce plans to secure an additional 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's coronavirus vaccine, according to a White House official.
  • Still, Biden will encounter significant challenges in the second half of his first 100 days as he looks to take steps toward marshalling through further legislation to boost the economic recovery, rebuild infrastructure, address climate change and repair the immigration system. Much of his legislative agenda faces an uncertain fate in the 50-50 Senate.
  • At the same time, Biden is facing pressure to hold his first press conference, after waiting notably longer to do so than his predecessors.
  • The president also made good on his promises to roll back a host of Trump-era orders and initiatives by rejoining the Paris climate accords and World Health Organization, halting construction of the border wall and ending the so-called travel ban on Muslim-majority nations.
  • The White House has also used its initial actions to convey the sense that Biden is getting right to work; his array of early executive actions far outpaced those of previous presidents.
  • But the administration has offered mixed messaging on the reopening of schools, at first setting a low bar by stating that one day of in-person learning would qualify as reopening.
  • Biden has sought to manage expectations on the pandemic and regularly underscores the need to wear masks and social distance, an approach public health experts say has been a welcome change from the previous administration.
  • Biden said in an NBC News interview after the election that he wanted to send an immigration proposal to Congress in his first 100 days. He accomplished that on his first day in office, but the bill was introduced by lawmakers weeks later and passage appears unlikely anytime soon, if at all.
  • Biden has done much of his work behind the scenes, engaging with elected officials and other stakeholders to confront multiple crises he has had to manage since taking office Jan. 20.
  • Biden’s relief proposal has made its way through Congress along partisan lines, and calls have increased among Democrats to do away with the filibuster in the Senate in order to avoid seeing the president’s agenda stonewalled by Republicans.
  • Democrats are cognizant of the limitations of their majority in Congress, but they note that there is still one more opportunity to use the budget reconciliation process to pass a major bill without GOP support
  • The ongoing surge of immigrant children at the southern border has also threatened to overwhelm the new administration
  • And while Biden has secured legislation to address the pandemic, the public health crisis will remain atop his priorities.
  • The administration projects the U.S. will have enough vaccines for all adults by the end of May, but officials need to overcome hurdles to distributing vaccines and addressing concerns of those who are hesitant to receive them while ensuring Americans continue to follow public health guidelines as the country inches toward herd immunity.
mimiterranova

Sackler Family, Owner Of Purdue Pharma, Set To Win Immunity From Opioid Lawsuits : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-immunity-from-opioid-lawsuits

family immunity lawsuits Opioid

shared by mimiterranova on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • After more than a year of high stakes negotiations with billions of dollars on the line, a bankruptcy plan for Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, cleared a major hurdle late Wednesday.
  • Public health experts and many government officials say the introduction of Oxycontin fueled the nation's deadly opioid epidemic.
  • According to legal documents filed as part of the case, that immunity would extend to dozens of family members, more than 160 financial trusts, and at least 170 companies, consultants and other entities associated with the Sacklers.
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  • "The Sacklers are paying $4.275 billion and they very much plan and expect to be done with this chapter," said Marshall Huebner, an attorney representing Purdue Pharma, during a hearing last week. One of the firms that would secure protection from future opioid lawsuits under the deal is Luther Strange & Associates, founded by former U.S. Sen. Luther Strange (R-Alabama) who helped Purdue Pharma pitch the bankruptcy plan to Republican state attorneys general.
  • In the coming weeks, more than 600,000 individuals, companies and governments with claims against Purdue Pharma will vote on the package, described by attorneys involved in the process as one of the most complicated and controversial bankruptcies ever.
  • The reorganization plan also includes a detailed formula that would be used to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars each year in aid to communities and individuals harmed by opioids.
  • But critics, including more than 20 mostly Democratic state attorneys general, say the Sacklers are improperly piggybacking on their company's bankruptcy without actually filing for bankruptcy themselves.
  • Again, the Sacklers have denied any wrongdoing, have never been charged with crimes. As part of their settlement with the DOJ, members of the Sackler family paid $225 million while denying the allegations.
  • "Raymond Sackler family members have consistently expressed their regret that OxyContin, which continues to help patients suffering from chronic pain, unexpectedly became part of the opioid crisis," the family said in a statement.
  • The Sacklers maintain they did nothing wrong and acted ethically. If this bankruptcy plan is approved and upheld on appeal, it's unlikely the allegations will ever be tested in court.
anonymous

Julie Ann Hanson: Almost 50 years later, police make an arrest in the 1972 murder of a ... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by anonymous on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Almost five decades later, police have arrested and charged a man in the death of an Illinois teen whose body was found in a field stabbed multiple times.
  • Barry Lee Whelpley, 76, of Mounds View, Minnesota, was arrested on June 2 for the 1972 killing of Julie Ann Hanson, a 15-year-old resident of Naperville, Illinois,
  • "The investigation and resulting charges were truly a team effort that spanned decades, and I could not be more proud of the determination and resourcefulness of our investigators, both past and present, who never gave up on Julie."
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  • On July 8, 1972, Hanson borrowed her brother's bicycle to go to a baseball game and never returned home, said Marshall during a news conference. She was reported missing to the Naperville police and her body was discovered later that day in a field with multiple stab wounds.
  • A suspect in the case was not immediately identified. But after 49 years of continued investigation, authorities were led to an arrest through technological advancements in DNA and genetic genealogy analysis,
  • At the time of the Hanson's killing, Whelpley was 27 years old and lived within one mile of Hanson's home, police said.
  • The Will County State's Attorney Office has charged Whelpley with three counts of first-degree murder with a bond set at $10 million.
  • The Hanson family said in a statement that they are grateful to all who have worked on the case throughout the years, according to police.
anonymous

Biden's Budget Removes A Longstanding Ban On Abortion Funding : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-long-ban-on-abortion-funding

shared by anonymous on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • President Biden's budget proposal fulfills a campaign promise to remove a longstanding ban on federal funding for most abortions known as the Hyde Amendment.
  • Abortion rights advocates have praised the move; a statement from Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson called the Hyde Amendment "racist, sexist, deeply unjust" and thanked Biden for working to remove it.
  • Biden reversed his longtime position on Hyde, joining other Democratic hopefuls in saying he would work to overturn it. "If I believe heath care is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone's zip code," Biden said in June 2019.
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  • Biden said his position had changed in response to changing circumstances, including increasing efforts by Republican lawmakers to restrict abortion. "It was not under attack," Biden said. "As it is now."
  • At the same time, Republican state lawmakers have continued a nationwide push to limit abortion, introducing hundreds of restrictions this year alone. Anti-abortion rights groups hope one of those laws will invite the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973.
  • The budget plan, released late last week, would drop the policy which has restricted funding for abortion through federal programs such as Medicaid. The rule, in effect since 1980, includes exceptions in cases of rape, incest, or to save a pregnant woman's life.
  • Biden, a lifelong Catholic, supported Hyde for decades — as did many other Democrats, often as a compromise position with Republicans. It often has been a sticking point in negotiations over healthcare policy, including the debate surrounding the Affordable Care Act and subsequent legislation.
  • Later that month, in a forum on abortion rights hosted by Planned Parenthood in South Carolina, Biden explained his reversal, saying he'd supported Hyde in an effort to expand federally-funded healthcare. But he suggested that for low-income women who rely on federal programs, Hyde had become an obstacle to full healthcare access.
  • Promising to reverse multiple Trump-era abortion restrictions, Biden ultimately marshaled the support of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights advocacy groups, who put the weight of their campaign operation behind him in his fight against Trump in 2020.
  • Since taking office, Biden has taken steps toward providing federal funding for abortions for low-income people. Like other Democratic Presidents before him, Biden announced plans soon after taking office to reverse the Mexico City Policy, or what critics describe as the "Global Gag Rule." It forbids international aid groups who receive U.S. funding from providing or referring patients for abortion.
  • Abortion rights groups are asking the administration to take additional steps, including reversing the Helms Amendment, which also restricts the use of U.S. dollars in paying for abortions abroad.
rerobinson03

Tasked to Fight Climate Change, a Secretive U.N. Agency Does the Opposite - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nal-maritime-organization.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It was a breach of the secrecy at the heart of the I.M.O., a clubby United Nations agency on the banks of the Thames that regulates international shipping and is charged with reducing emissions in an industry that burns an oil so thick it might otherwise be turned into asphalt. Shipping produces as much carbon dioxide as all of America’s coal plants combined.
  • An agency lawyer underscored that point last fall in addressing the Saudi complaint. “This is a private meeting,” warned the lawyer, Frederick J. Kenney.Next week, the organization is scheduled to enact its first greenhouse gas rules since Paris — regulations that do not cut emissions, have no enforcement mechanism and leave key details shrouded in secrecy. No additional proposals are far along in the rule-making process, meaning additional regulations are likely five years or more away.
  • The stakes are high. Shipping, unlike other industries, is not easily regulated nation-by-nation. A Japanese-built tanker, for instance, might be owned by a Greek company and sailed by an Indian crew from China to Australia — all under the flag of Panama.
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  • The company, based in Virginia, did all the work and, on paper, the Marshall Islands became home to one of the world’s largest fleets. The government shared in the revenue — roughly $8 million a year as of recently, one official said.Things got thorny, however, when the foreign minister, Tony de Brum, traveled to the I.M.O. in 2015. His stories of his vanishing homeland had given urgency to the Paris talks and he expected a similar reception in London.
  • Industry officials and the maritime organization say such arrangements give a voice to the experts. “If you don’t involve the people who are actually going to have to deliver, then you’re going to get a poor outcome,” said Guy Platten, secretary general of the International Chamber of Shipping.
  • When delegates met last October — five years after Mr. de Brum’s speech — the organization had not taken any action. Proposals like speed limits had been debated and rejected.
  • German delegates were so upset that they threatened to oppose the deal, likely triggering a cascade of defections, according to three people involved in the talks. But European Union officials rallied countries behind the compromise, arguing that Europe could not be seen as standing in the way of even limited progress.
Javier E

Opinion | The 1619 Chronicles - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-1619-project-criticisms.html

1619 history politics project racism 1776 Founding journalism

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.
  • in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.
  • ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded
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  • on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.
  • That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.
  • he deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”
  • She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.
  • I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.
  • “1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”
  • Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):
  • In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”
  • What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”
  • As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them.
  • These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.
  • Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing?
  • On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?
  • The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.
  • This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.
  • It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.
  • James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”
  • In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”
  • McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”
  • Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s.
  • ie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”
  • The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.
  • “It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?
  • unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.
  • On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | Biden Should Boost Covid Vaccine Supply With New Manufacturing Plan - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...world-covid-vaccines.html

politics crisis pandemic US trump

shared by kaylynfreeman on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The Covid-19 pandemic has been mismanaged for months. Now vaccines are here —  but in very short supply. Most Americans will wait months to get immunized, and poorer countries are scrambling to find any vaccines at all.
  • There is another way. President-elect Joe Biden can solve the U.S. and worldwide vaccine shortages by using a strategy inspired by the one our country used to address the AIDS crisis. Mr. Biden can marshal the federal government’s resources to manufacture additional vaccine supplies and combine that move with vigorous efforts to boost distribution.
  • Mr. Biden can help address today’s urgent global health challenge by establishing the President’s Emergency Plan for Vaccine Access and Relief, or Pepvar, and rapidly building facilities to manufacture vaccines and their constituent components at scale. Manufacturing could be coordinated using a model similar to the one used by the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, in which a government-owned facility is operated by a private organization experienced in the relevant sector.
aidenborst

Harris to be sworn in as vice president by Justice Sonia Sotomayor - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US Trump history crisis policy Biden inauguration Harris

shared by aidenborst on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Kamala Harris will be sworn in Wednesday as the next vice president of the United States by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, according to a Harris aide.
  • "Mrs. Shelton would bring her Bible to church every Sunday," Harris wrote. "Sitting alongside her, I was introduced to the teachings of that Bible. My earliest memories were of a loving God, a God who asked us to 'speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves' and to 'defend the rights of the poor and needy.' This is where I learned that 'faith' is a verb, something we must live and demonstrate through our actions."
  • The vice president-elect will take her oath of office using two Bibles; one that previously belong to a former neighbor and family friend of Harris,' Regina Shelton, and another that belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, the aide said.
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  • Harris will make history as the first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president, and she will be sworn in by the first Hispanic and third female justice in US Supreme Court history.
  • President-elect Joe Biden and Harris will take their oaths of office on the West Front of the US Capitol during a significantly scaled-down event on January 20.
  • Authorities are bracing for more extremist violence in the coming days after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed and breached the US Capitol on January 6 in a violent riot that left five people dead. The National Park Service announced Friday that the National Mall will be closed to the general public on Inauguration Day due to security concerns.
Javier E

On Umair Haque. The Master of Catastrophe | by Steven Gambardella | Medium - 0 views

stevengambardella.medium.com/on-umair-haque-abdd762860b

catastrophe apocalypse writer activism

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Haque has made a fine art of catastrophisation. The USA is dead. The UK is dead. Civilisation is dead. We’re doomed. We can’t help but wonder why it could be so bad… and so we click.
  • Most of the titles strike hard with a fatalism. They also hail and often bait an audience. “America” and “American” appears frequently. The words “idiot” and “idiots” too.
  • It’s a potent mix, a Molotov cocktail of inflammatory divisiveness that’ll stick to whomever it hits and burn ferociously. He is grandiose and petty in turns.
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  • For me at least, reading Haque is like trying to hold a conversation with somebody who only speaks in apocalyptic jazz scat.
  • I read a tweet the other day that said, “looking at Twitter is like microdosing poison.” It’s true
  • How? The internet of 2020 is ruled by the “attention economy”. People’s attention is commodified in a way that never happened before. In the attention economy there’s an arms race to capture clicks and reads. Nuance, painstaking insight and subtlety does not deliver attention.
  • Marshall McLuhan wrote “The medium is the message”. What he meant by that is that the medium through which information is transmitted structures that information. It does so either through changing the behaviour of the author or the receiver of the information, or both. It is the medium that shapes the character of interaction.
  • From a very basic perspective, think of a lightbulb in a windowless room. The lightbulb is the medium by which people in the room can see each other. It enables people to behave in a way that they wouldn’t or couldn’t if there was no lightbulb in the room.
  • Now think of Twitter as a medium, how do you convey nuance and deep insight into a 280 character “microblog”? Is it any wonder that scrolling on Twitter feels like you’re speeding through hell in a convertible? You feel the sizzle of rage but somehow come out intact.
  • His articles read like old school sales letters: each short paragraph makes you read the next. He “twists the knife”, as copywriters say, by layering agitation on agitation, directly addressing his reader:
  • The text is breathless, rhythmic with machine-gun punctuation, and imaginatively vivid
  • If you read the articles, you’ll see that Haque is well-meaning. He wants positive change. And to be fair, he has his own answers to society’s problems. He has credentials too, he’s a trained economist, he’s been a contributor to some serious academic publications and an author of books, real books.
  • Believe me, I’m sold on the destination but feel a bit carsick on the journey. The tone is so hysterical as to be meaningless. It serves only to entrench people deeper into their world-views rather than engaging and enlightening them.
clairemann

With Democrats in control, Supreme Court reform proposals reclaim center stage - SCOTUS... - 0 views

www.scotusblog.com/...proposals-reclaim-center-stage

US history SCOTUS Democrats Biden Politics

shared by clairemann on 26 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Joe Biden promised, if elected, to create a bipartisan commission to study court reform proposals
  • But who would sit on the commission? And would it have any teeth?
  • With Democrats now in control, some liberals are clamoring for quick action on Supreme Court reform, and some Republicans are proposing a constitutional amendment that would lock in the number of justices at nine.
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  • “Democrats and progressives are … uncomfortable with the acquisition and use of power.” In contrast, Holder pointed to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to consider Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in a presidential election year, and his subsequent push to confirm Barrett in the run-up to the next presidential election.
  • Those actions have created “a crisis of legitimacy” on the Supreme Court, Holder said. “Republican conduct deserves a response – a measured response.”
  • Kang championed court packing as both the remedy to and the natural conclusion of Senate Republicans’ justification for the Garland/Barrett saga: that “nothing in the Constitution prohibited it.”
  • Epps focused on term limits, in particular 18-year terms with regular vacancies every two years, as a solution to the trend he finds most troubling: the growing push by both parties to appoint “ideologues” to the court.
  • Twenty states, she said, have introduced legislation to expand their state courts of last resort – two of which were successful, Georgia and Arizona, both Republican controlled.
  • “At present, the biggest obstacle” to court reform legislation “is the persistence of the Senate filibuster,” Reynolds said, which can uphold Senate business until the other side marshals 60 votes to end it.
  • He urged the president, who has already pledged to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, to prioritize both demographic and professional diversity on the commission. “Quite confident, unfortunately” that future Supreme Court decisions will incite progressive anger, Kang said the true job of Biden’s commission will be to “adequately set the table” for Congress to react.
Javier E

Davos: Globalism Saved the World and Damned the West - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...582202

politics policy economics green New Deal

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • In 2016, Manyika co-wrote a landmark report on earnings growth in advanced economies over the previous 20 years. It was a tale of two decades, he said. In the first 10-year period, from 1995 to 2004, wages grew for at least 98 percent of households in just about every advanced economy. But in the second decade, from 2005 to 2014, everything fell apart.
  • “We found inequality, yes. But that was the least interesting thing we found,” Manyika told me. “The more interesting thing was wage stagnation in almost all the advanced economies.”
  • This was an entirely new phenomenon. Wage income declined for the majority of households in France, the Netherlands, the U.K., and Italy. The U.S. had it even worse. Four out of five households saw flat or falling income before accounting for taxes and transfers
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  • Between globalization, the Great Recession, and the not-so-great recovery, the middle class was slammed.
  • they felt it, too. Manyika’s research team asked more than 6,000 people in the United States, the U.K., and France to describe their economic status. Between one-third and 40 percent of respondents in each country felt that their incomes were falling behind. “And these people tended to blame free trade and immigrants for hurting their wages and ruining their culture,”
  • Anti-elite sentiment “has become the most potent political force in Europe,” writes Martin Gurri, author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. “It brought Brexit in Britain, electoral defeat to German chancellor Angela Merkel, drove protests in France, shattered so many political coalitions that governed Europe since World War II, and raised to prominence new parties and persons nominally attached to the right or the left but always fractious, sectarian, ‘populist.’”
  • The changing media landscape is part of the story, too
  • In other words, saving the American middle class might take a leftist intervention, but saving the world will also require something very much like free-market globalism
  • iss conference.Right-wing nationalism is the solution that solves nothing. What’s needed instead is a movement that doesn’t just succeed in outraging voters, but actually seeks to use government to address the source of their outrage.
  • some members of the American left seem to be pointing to a compromise: a new system of universal guarantees supported by higher taxes and higher peacetime deficits in this context of a capitalist system
  • For all the hatred directed toward the Davos crowd, there will be no economic growth in the West without policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation.
  • any realistic plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy will almost surely require the sort of commercial technological breakthroughs that tend to come from private entrepreneurs tinkering with the products of publicly funded research
  • And to reduce global emissions, the United States will have to share its eco-technology with China, southeastern Asian countries, and African nations, which account for most of the growth in future emissions
  • Globalization and poor governance created the conditions in which nativist insurgencies can grow. Social networks made it possible for political cults to organize around outrage.
  • For years government elites could silence political outsiders by denying them an audience. In the late 20th century, the Democratic and Republican Parties were terrifically effective at marshaling elite power to shape public opinion during the presidential-election process. Voters didn’t select candidates at random; rather, as political scientists like to say, “the parties decided” on the favored candidates and used their power to funnel voters toward these insiders.
  • That was before the Cambrian explosion of digital media made it impossible for insiders to control their nomination processes
  • nativist movements are gaining power by opposing the values of openness and empiricism. These nativists have often thrived by arguing that free markets and globalization have impoverished the middle class and destroyed all sense of national identity or sovereignty.
  • What’s more, taxing the rich to fund universalist programs directly addresses middle-class insecurities caused by global capitalism—unlike, say, building a giant border wall. Free markets without income security have been a recipe for instability. So have socialist policies that stamp out free markets.
  • But there’s a good reason that commentators tend to lump together Trump, Brexit, and other “populists” and “populist” movements: They’re built to oppose rather than lead, and right now it’s fair to say they’re in a shambles, unable to fulfill their nativist promises. In the U.K., Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal was voted down in humiliating fashion. In the United States, Trump’s record-breaking government shutdown led not to a wall but to declining poll numbers for the president. Both May and Trump had to cancel their appearances at the Sw
  • “All this has happened chiefly because countries—from China to India to Ethiopia—have adopted more market-friendly policies,” the CNN host Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post.
  • At a conference symbolizing the promise of capitalism, every non-plutocrat is fighting for scraps.
hannahcarter11

Protesters in Poland Vow to Fight Abortion Ban - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...and-protests-abortion-ban.html

abortion ban poland protest

shared by hannahcarter11 on 29 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Women’s rights advocates and allies in Poland vowed on Thursday to continue to fight a near-total ban on abortion, calling it a breach of human rights and a sign that the country is regressing.
  • The constitutional court ruling, which abruptly came into effect Wednesday night, tightened Poland’s already restrictive laws to further ban abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities
  • When the ruling was first announced in October, it set off a month of protests on a scale not seen since the 1989 collapse of communism.
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  • The move came as Poland is struggling through the economic repercussions of the pandemic, a partial lockdown and a sluggish vaccine rollout.
  • The Constitutional Tribunal, the country’s top court, which issued the ruling, explained its decision by saying that “human life has value in every phase of its evolution, and as a value, the source of which is in the constitutional laws, it should be protected by lawmakers.”
  • Even before the tribunal’s decision, Poland’s abortion laws were among the most restrictive in Europe, allowing for termination of pregnancies only in cases of rape or incest, a threat to a woman’s life and fetal abnormalities.
  • The government has tried to frame the abortion debate as an attack on the church and therefore an attack on the people, said Edit Zgut, a fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a move that could further polarize an already divided society.
Javier E

Opinion | What Should Drive Biden's Foreign Policy? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-foreign-policy.html

biden foreign policy domestic policy human rights civil rights 1948 cold war liberals

shared by Javier E on 29 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In May 1950, Hubert Humphrey, the firebrand liberal from Minnesota, took to the floor of the Senate to call for passage of a fair employment practices commission to root out systematic racial discrimination in hiring. “So long as men and women and children of color are discriminated against in the United States,” Senator Humphrey insisted, “the colored people of the world have the right to suspect our professed friendship for them.”
  • Figures like Humphrey, who came to be known as “Cold War liberals,” argued that the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism could be won only if the United States proved that democracies could deliver social justice more effectively than communism could
  • No fully established democracy has surrendered its norms more rapidly than the United States, which over the last decade has fallen from 22nd to 33rd in Freedom House’s annual Freedom in the World index
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  • “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world,” Mr. Biden wrote earlier this year in an essay in Foreign Affairs laying out his worldview. “But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.”
  • “Lead” need not be a euphemism for “dominate.” Though we think of the Cold War as a series of military and diplomatic crises, liberals like Humphrey always understood it as a battle of ideas — a struggle over “the fundamental issue of man’s right to freedom,
  • The Marshall Plan as well as later food aid programs constituted acts of global leadership. But so, too, was civil rights, which liberals regarded as the ultimate demonstration project for the moral capacities of democracy.
  • “If we wish to inspire the peoples of the world whose freedom is in jeopardy,” President Harry Truman said in his historic 1948 message to Congress proposing laws banning employment discrimination and lynching as well as segregation in interstate transport, “we must correct the remaining imperfections in our practice of democracy.”
  • Now our situation is reversed. At a moment when the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the economy and killed 400,000 people and counting, foreign policy feels like an afterthought; yet our failures at home contribute to democratic erosion abroad.
  • To take only the most obvious and shameful example, the haplessness of President Trump’s response to the pandemic — and, if somewhat less egregiously, that of other Western nations — stands in glaring contrast to China’s success in both reducing deaths and restoring economic growth
  • Trump’s canting about “the China virus” and his bluster over China’s (genuinely unfair) trading practices only accentuate America’s weak position at a time when China is aggressively promoting its model of autocratic capitalism through trade, investment and cultural diplomacy.
  • A politics of democratic renewal would once again bind together domestic and foreign affairs. Mr. Biden has in fact argued that such a policy must begin with a reassertion of moral principle at home by banning torture and ending the gross mistreatment of migrants at our borders.
  • Joe Biden has every reason to emulate Harry Truman, another political lifer disdained by the party’s activist wing and admired for common sense and decency rather than vision.
  • The coronavirus response will pose the first test: The Biden Administration must demonstrate that democratic citizens, under wise leadership, can voluntarily choose to take difficult public health decisions that autocratic states impose on their people
  • There is every reason to fear that Mr. Biden’s agenda will be stalemated by Senate Republicans who calculate that their political success depends upon making a Biden presidency fail — as they did with President Barack Obama. If they do so, the consequences, as Humphrey warned, will not be limited to domestic affairs. The gap in prestige between a China growing in wealth and confidence under the iron control of President Xi Jinping and a fragmented, dispirited America will only grow larger.
  • “To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation. Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this.”
katherineharron

Conservative Republicans unveil Obamacare replacement plan - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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trump

shared by katherineharron on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Months after President Donald Trump declared the GOP would become the "party of health care," House conservatives are set to announce a sweeping health care proposal -- one that has virtually no chance of becoming law.
  • The conservative caucus says its plan, titled "A Framework for Affordable, Personalized Care," will protect coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, a top priority for many Americans. The concern that Republicans would weaken the Affordable Care Act's protections helped doom the GOP plan to repeal and replace the law in 2017 and was one reason Democrats, many of whom ran campaigns focused on health care, recaptured the House in the 2018 midterm elections.
  • The plan contains several elements that were in those 2017 replacement proposals, which narrowly fell short of enough Republican support to pass the Senate at the time. It would create federally-funded, state-run insurance pools to cover people with high-cost illness. For instance, states could establish high-risk pools, which existed before the Affordable Care Act with mixed levels of success, or institute reinsurance programs to stabilize the health care market.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "It's even worse than what passed out of the Republican House last Congress," the aide said. "The whole notion of that sort of block granting idea just rips out even more of the protections."
  • House Republicans are rolling out their complex plan as Trump struggles to articulate broad ideas for the nation's health care, and as Democrats campaign across the country on an easy-to-explain vision for extending coverage to everyone.
  • That plan -- so far a patchwork quilt of health care proposals that Trump's team hopes will stack up to a comprehensive vision -- will serve as the White House's answer to the growing support on the left for the kind of universal health care system that Republicans have spent years warning against.
  • "The White House welcomes the RSC announcement and their contributions to improving our healthcare system," Judd Deere, White House spokesman, told CNN. "The Trump Administration continues to work to improve healthcare more broadly, which includes creating a system that protects the vulnerable and those with pre-existing conditions and delivers the affordability Americans needs, the choice and control they want, and the quality they deserve."
  • The House GOP plan comes against the backdrop of a court case that has the potential to upend the nation's health insurance system and the 2020 election campaign. Federal appellate court judges in Louisiana are now considering a case brought by a coalition of Republican-led states, and backed by the Trump administration, that argue Obamacare as a whole is unconstitutional because Congress essentially eliminated the penalty for not having health insurance, the so-called individual mandate. A US District Court judge in Texas in December sided with the Republican states.
  • The Trump administration has chosen not to defend the law, leaving many Republicans concerned that they will not have a replacement ready if the appellate court upholds the lower court's ruling. Democrats are already attacking Trump and the GOP for threatening the coverage of millions of Americans, and if the court invalidates the ACA, Republicans could be left with the blame for dismantling the country's health care system without preparing a realistic replacement.
  • "Do you want a president who wants to have the government take over your health care, or do you want personal choices?" Marshall said Monday. "So even though there's impeachment and all those other things going on here, I think this -- healthcare -- is the issue of 2020."
Javier E

Opinion | Liberals Do Not Want to Destroy the Family - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...barr-liberals-family.html

liberalism conservatism despair anomie values crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • It is critical to bear in mind that the U.S. has a less generous social safety net than almost all of the other advanced countries to which we compare ourselves: Canada, the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, etc. And yet we have higher rates of nonwork among prime-age men and women, and much worse socio-demographic outcomes: family stability, investment in children, educational attainment, life expectancy, rates of violent death, etc. It defies logic to assert that the relatively stingy U.S. social safety net has somehow lured the U.S. public into licentiousness and social decline whereas the much more comprehensive social safety nets in other wealthy democracies has failed to do so.
  • The white working class constituency that would seem to be most immune to the appeal of the cultural left — the very constituency that has moved more decisively than any other to the right — is now succumbing to the centrifugal, even anarchic, forces denounced by Barr and other social conservatives, while more liberal constituencies are moving in the opposite, more socially coherent, rule-following, direction.
  • now we are in a new social paradigm that has normalized nonmarital childbearing and child rearing among certain segments of the population, and it will take more than economic improvement to restore the stable two-parent family in the communities it which that norm has been steadily eroding.
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  • Autor, Kearney and others whose work I will go on to discuss offer analyses and explanations of contemporary social dislocation that serve to reveal the oversimplification and the striking omissions in the work of social conservatives, who often fail, to give one crucial example, to account for the impact of mass incarceration.
  • Many factors have contributed to the income stagnation in the bottom tiers and the overall increasing inequality in the United States. Paramount among these are changes in the economy that have placed a greater premium on college-educated workers, advances in technology and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to lower-wage countries. One can hardly understand the impact of these dynamic contributing structural factors to our rising inequality by focusing almost exclusively on so-called changes in the values of the American population
  • We need to address the underlying premise that there is a rise in social disorder. That claim does not hold up to scrutiny, in both the long and short term. In the United States and many other parts of the world, the last two decades have seen a remarkable decline in many of the most visible signs of social disorder.
  • You can see that many of these improvements in the quality of life have coincided with the creation of the modern liberal welfare state and many of place that enjoy the least social disorder are, in fact, places with leftist political systems that provide for social welfare.
  • Uniquely among major socioeconomic groups, the white working class decreased in absolute numbers and population share in recent decades. At the same time, the five measures of well-being we tracked all deteriorated for the white working class relative to the overall population. The shares of all income earned and wealth owned by the white working class fell even faster than their population share.
  • the white working class — the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements — has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay.
  • While five decades ago, many on the left denounced the 1965 Moynihan Report, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” for “blaming the victim” because of its description of rising numbers of nonmarital births in the black community, there has been a striking reversal in favor of the report in the academic and liberal policymaking community.
  • “The broad-based decline that is unique to the white working class may be due in part to the group’s loss over time of advantages it once enjoyed relative to those of nonwhite working classes,”
  • These included more years of education and plentiful high-paying jobs available in white working class communities. And, as the explicit discrimination minorities faced in the workplace has diminished, so has the advantage that it had given the white working class.
  • . In an email, she wrote:My read of the evidence is that the declining economic position of less educated men (both in a relative and absolute sense) has probably been a key driver of the breakdown of the two-parent family among less educated populations for many decades.
  • The most telling critique of the claims of social conservatives is that their single-minded focus on the destructive forces of liberalism offers a facile (and erroneous) answer to developments that do not fit simple categories of good and evil
  • Some people believe that humans are born good and are only later corrupted by society. They emphasize the importance of a society that collectively helps each individual achieve their inherent potential. Others believe that individuals are inherently flawed, often ill-disciplined, weak-willed, and capable of evil as well as good. They emphasize the importance of social structures that help people, in the words of Edmund Burke, “to put chains upon their appetites.”
  • Under current conditions of stark political polarization, these two sides are at loggerheads. Sawhill argues that:What a functioning and tolerant politics would permit is a negotiated settlement of this dispute. We would devise institutions and norms but also laws and practices that bring out, in Lincoln’s famous words, the “better angels of our nature.”
  • the willingness to accommodate the opposition — an essential step toward compromise and reconciliation — appears modestly stronger on the left than the right.
  • While in absolute terms the white working class — those without college degrees, in pollster shorthand — have higher levels of marriage and cohabitation, homeownership and self-reported health ratings than members of the black working class, the trends are downward for whites and upward for African-Americans.
  • Similarly, “The Moynihan Report Revisited: Lessons and Reflections after Four Decades,” edited by two liberal scholars, Douglas S. Massey and Robert J. Sampson, sociologists at Princeton and Harvard, found that the trends toward family breakdown documented in the report “have only grown worse, not only for blacks, but for whites and Hispanics as well.” The authors were sharply critical of the attacks on Moynihan from the left that had appeared when the report was first published.
  • Patrick Deneen, whose book received near unanimous praise from conservative critics, defines the “culture war” that has characterized recent decades, and which seems to grow more virulent daily, in implacable terms: “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
  • Barr, in turn, argues thatin the Framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people — a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
  • The reality is that Barr is not only selling traditional values to conservative voters, some of whom are genuinely starved for them, he is also marketing apocalyptic hogwash because, for his boss to get re-elected, Trump’s supporters must continue to believe that liberals and the Democratic Party are the embodiment of evil, determined to destroy the American way of life.
  • The secular left, in Barr’s view, is at war with what he views as a decent America:This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
  • “Democracy, in fact, cannot ultimately function in a liberal regime.”
Javier E

Want a Green New Deal? Here's a better one. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html

GND climate change activism reform policy

shared by Javier E on 24 May 19 - No Cached
  • the goal is so fundamental that policymakers should focus above all else on quickly and efficiently decarbonizing. They should not muddle this aspiration with other social policy, such as creating a federal jobs guarantee,
  • the goal is so monumental that the country cannot afford to waste dollars in its pursuit. If the market can redirect spending most efficiently, money should not be misallocated on vast new government spending or mandates.
  • we propose our own Green New Deal. It relies both on smart government intervention — and on transforming the relentless power of the market from an obstacle to a centerpiece of the solution.
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  • U.S. natural gas is far less damaging to the environment than coal. It has become so cheap that it is displacing coal in electricity generation, driving down emissions. To others, Cove Point is an environmental catastrophe. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it releases lots of greenhouse-gas emissions, which cause climate change. Both arguments are right.
  • society must eliminate its carbon dependency. It cannot burn vast amounts of any fossil fuel for “decades and decades,” as Mr. Farrell hopes, unless there is a revolution in emissions capture technology. Even in the short term, U.S. emissions are rising, despite the restraint that stepped-up natural-gas burning has provided. The government must demand more change, more quickly.
  • One objection is that carbon pricing is not powerful enough. The European Union’s carbon pricing program has not worked well. But that is a failure of design and political will. A carbon price equal to the challenge would start high and rise higher, sending a much stronger price signal.
  • carbon pricing is still the best first-line policy
  • A high-enough carbon price would shape millions of choices, small and large, about what to buy, how to invest and how to live that would result in substantial emissions cuts. People would prioritize the easiest changes, minimizing the costs of the energy transition. With a price that steadily rose, market forces would steadily wring carbon dioxide out of the economy — without the government trying to dictate exactly how, wasting money on special-interest boondoggles.
  • The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found last year that an average carbon price between 2030 and the end of the century of $100, $200 or even $300 per ton of carbon dioxide would result in huge greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, could restrain warming to the lowest safety threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius and would almost certainly prevent the world from breaching the traditional warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius
  • Republicans never embraced the market-based idea, even though conservative economists admit its appeal, because they never accepted the need to act at all. Some environmentalists, meanwhile, are increasingly wary of carbon pricing. The Democrats’ Green New Deal, which is noncommittal on the policy, reflects the accelerating drift from the obvious.
  • A third objection is that carbon pricing is politically impossible, because it reveals the cost of fighting global warming in the prices people pay
  • Another criticism is that carbon pricing hurts the poor, who would suffer most when prices rose. But the revenue from carbon pricing could be recycled back to Americans in a progressive way, and most people would end up whole or better off.
  • This is a leadership challenge, not a policy challenge. More than 40 governments globally, including several states, have found the political will to embrace carbon pricing programs, which is the only option that would plausibly be bipartisan.
  • One objection does have merit: Though carbon pricing would spur huge change in infrastructure and power generation, that alone would not be enough. It would not stimulate all the innovation the nation needs in the climate fight, nor would it change behaviors in circumstances where the desired price signal is muted or nonexistent
  • Foreign aid to prevent deforestation could be among the most cost-effective climate-preserving measures. Helping other countries to replace archaic cooking stoves that produce noxious fumes would help cut emissions and improve quality of life across the developing world.
  • , economists know that companies that invest in research and development do not get rewarded for the full social value of their work. Others benefit from their innovations without paying. Consequently, firms do not invest in research as much as society should want
  • It would take only a small fraction of the revenue a carbon pricing system would produce to fund a much more ambitious clean-energy research agenda. Basic scientific research and applied research programs such as ARPA-E should be scaled up dramatically
  • The government must also account for the fact that not all greenhouse-gas emissions come from burning the fuels that a carbon pricing program would reach — coal, oil and gas. How would the government charge farmers for the methane their cows emit or for the greenhouse gases released when they till their soil? How about emissions from cement, ammonia and steel production? The federal government would have to tailor programs to the agricultural and industrial sectors, which might include judicious use of incentives and mandates.
  • only government can ensure adequate mass transit options. Local governments could help with zoning laws to encourage people to live in denser, more walkable communities. The federal government should also press automakers to steadily improve fuel efficiency.
  • That starts with making sure that emissions-cutting efforts at home do not have unintended consequences. If the United States puts a price on greenhouse-gas emissions, other countries would lure U.S. manufacturers with the promise of lax environmental rules. Relocated manufacturers could then export their goods to the United States. The net effect would be no benefit for the planet but fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs.
  • One response is a kind of tariff on goods entering the country from places with weaker carbon-dioxide policies. That would both eliminate the incentive to offshore manufacturing and encourage countries to strengthen their own rules.
  • Participating in the agreement would give the United States a forum — and a basis — to press other nations to reduce emissions.
  • Start with carbon pricing. Then fill in the gaps.
  • There are a lot of bad ideas out there.
  • The Green New Deal that some Democrats have embraced is case in point. In its most aggressive form, the plan suggests the country could reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, an impossible goal
  • that would be more spent every three years than the total amount the country spent on World War II.
  • At the same time, the Democratic plan would guarantee every American “high-quality health care” and “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.” These expensive aspirations, no matter how laudable, would do nothing to arrest greenhouse-gas emissions.
  • Massive social reform will not protect the climate. Marshaling every dollar to its highest benefit is the strongest plan.
katherineharron

Nearly a dozen Republican senators announce plans to vote against counting electoral vo... - 0 views

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election

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  • Nearly a dozen Republican senators and senators-elect announced Saturday they will vote against counting electoral votes next week when Congress is expected to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory
  • The 11 Republican lawmakers said they intend to support an objection to the Electoral College votes, if one is brought, and propose an election commission to conduct an "emergency 10-day audit" of the election returns in the "disputed states." The group includes Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
  • Congress' vote on January 6 is the "lone constitutional power remaining to consider and force resolution of the multiple allegations of serious voter fraud."
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  • the objection from President Donald Trump's Republican allies has virtually zero chance of changing the election outcome, only to delay for a few hours the inevitable affirmation of Biden's victory as the Electoral College winner and the next president.
  • On Wednesday, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley became the first senator to announce plans to object to the results -- a significant move since both a House member and senator are required to mount an objection when Congress counts the electoral votes. CNN previously reported that at least 140 House Republicans are expected to vote against counting the electoral votes in Congress, according to two GOP House members.
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- who has said the vote would mark one of the most significant, perhaps the most significant, he'd ever cast
  • Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, seemingly dismissed the announcement Saturday from the handful of Republicans, tweeting: "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be President and Vice President of the United States in 18 days."
  • On Friday, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit from GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and several Arizona Republicans seeking to force Vice President Mike Pence to help throw the election to Trump.
yehbru

Pence Backs Republican Lawmakers' Plan To Object To Electoral College Results : Biden T... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...t-to-electoral-college-results

US Politics Trump Biden Election Voting Democrats Republicans Electoral College

shared by yehbru on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A group of Republicans has announced plans to reject presidential electors from states they consider disputed if Congress doesn't create a commission to investigate their claims of fraud.
  • The move will not alter Biden's path to assuming the presidency but will draw out a normally routine process.
  • Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana issued a joint statement Saturday claiming "unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities."
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  • They were joined by Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
  • "Accordingly, we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not 'regularly given' and 'lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed," the statement goes on to say.
  • President Trump and his legal team have targeted several states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, in their attempts to overturn the election. But their legal efforts all failed because they couldn't provide clear evidence of fraud or misconduct in the 2020 election.
  • Brooks has said that more than 30 members of Congress plan to challenge the results.
  • None of the lawmakers has provided evidence to back up their concerns.
  • "The courts and state legislatures have all honored their duty to hear legal allegations and have found nothing to warrant overturning the results," Murkowski said.
  • And on Saturday evening, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah harshly condemned the effort of fellow Republicans, calling it an "egregious ploy" that "dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."
mattrenz16

Congress Swearing-In: A Look At The Incoming Freshman Class : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ngress-incoming-freshman-class

shared by mattrenz16 on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • For many, the process will be familiar territory. But for most of the incoming lawmakers, it's the beginning of a brand new chapter.
  • After electing a speaker of the House, one of the first orders of business for the new Congress will be adopting a set of rules to govern the much-talked-about Jan. 6 joint session, when both chambers meet to formally count the votes of the Electoral College. Several House members and a group of senators have said they plan to object, which will cause a delay in the proceedings.
  • A record number of women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ community make the 117th Congress the most diverse in history.
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  • For the first time, women of color will completely comprise New Mexico's House delegation, including Democratic Rep.-elect Teresa Leger Fernandez, who becomes the first woman to represent the 3rd district since its creation in 1983.
  • Rep.-elect Yvette Herrell, R-N.M., becomes the first Republican Native American woman in Congress.
  • Rep.-elect Marilyn Strickland, D-Wash., will be the first Black woman to represent her state in Congress.
  • Incoming Republican North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn, 25, has replaced Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., as the youngest member of Congress.
  • As for the Senate, incoming Sens.-elect Roger Marshall (Kansas), Ben Ray Luján (New Mexico) and Lummis (Wyoming) all have served in the U.S. House. Lummis was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus.
  • Reps.-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., made headlines earlier this year for their support of QAnon, a fringe movement that has launched baseless, far-right conspiracy theories about the U.S. government.
  • In October, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning QAnon.
  • Several younger, more diverse and progressive candidates ousted longstanding Democratic incumbents this year.
  • It's quite possible some of these progressives will quickly become household names in the way that Ocasio-Cortez and members of the so-called "squad" have (which includes Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass).
  • Rep.-elect Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., a formal school principal, won his general election after triumphing over Rep. Eliot Engel in the primary. Engel was a 16-term incumbent who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Bowman was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Ocasio-Cortez.
  • Should both Democrats prevail, control of the Senate will be split 50-50 between the two parties and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris can cast tiebreaking votes.
anonymous

Pence Welcomes Futile Bid by G.O.P. Lawmakers to Overturn Election - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tors-josh-hawley-election.html

Politics

shared by anonymous on 03 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s move to endorse it — reflected a groundswell among Republicans to defy the unambiguous results of the election and indulge President Trump’s attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.
  • It will also pose a political dilemma for Republicans, forcing them to choose between accepting the results of a democratic election — even if it means angering supporters who dislike the outcome and could punish them at the polls — and joining their colleagues in displaying unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump, who has demanded in increasingly angry fashion that they back his bid to cling to the presidency.
  • In their statement, the Republicans cited poll results showing most members of their party believe the election was “rigged,”
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  • The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
  • But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.
  • Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, on Thursday condemned the attempt, calling it a “dangerous ploy” intended to “disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He accused fellow Republicans of making a political calculation to try to further their careers at the expense of the truth by tapping into Mr. Trump’s “populist base.”
  • As Mr. Biden racked up victories in November, Mr. Trump indulged in increasingly outlandish fictions, spreading disinformation about the election’s results and encouraging his followers to challenge the vote at every step. In recent weeks, as his legal defeats have stacked up, the president has become more vitriolic in his condemnations of Republicans who fail to support his false claims of having been the true victor in the election, and has lavished praise on those who parrot his accusations.
  • Senator Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the election’s outcome.“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”
  • Nevertheless, more than a month after Mr. Biden’s victory, with increasing numbers in their party marching in lock step with Mr. Trump, some Republicans felt the need on Saturday to explain why they planned to vote to uphold the results of a democratic election.
  • The vice president, the statement continued, “welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on Jan. 6th.”
  • Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight, prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.
  • “A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,” they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.”
  • Vice President Mike Pence signaled his support as 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
  • The senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election will not change the outcome. But it guarantees that what would normally be a perfunctory session on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the results of the presidential election will instead become a partisan brawl, in which Republicans amplify specious claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed for weeks even as Mr. Trump has stoked them.
  • “We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.
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