Mr. Biden’s immigration plan would provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, and increase diversity visas and border-security funding. But, conceding the long odds of achieving such extensive changes, lawmakers are focusing on cobbling together a package of smaller bills that would legalize about eight million or fewer undocumented immigrants.

A team of immigration activists and researchers as well as congressional aides is exploring the question, digging into the best way to present their case to Ms. MacDonough, who declined to comment for this article. They have found past precedents, including one from 2005, in which changes to immigration policy were allowed as part of a budget-reconciliation package, and they are tallying up the budgetary effects of the immigration proposals — which total in the tens of billions.

“Before we can do anything meaningful on immigration, we’re going to have to deal with the current crisis at the border,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who has been involved in the bipartisan talks. “I don’t think the public is going to tolerate us ignoring this crisis, and it’s just going to get worse unless we deal with it.”

To pull it off, Democrats would have to grapple with strict budget rules that limit what can be done under reconciliation.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month endorsed the idea of using reconciliation to push through an immigration measure, citing the “budget impacts of immigration in our country.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democrat, came out in favor of the approach last week.

The pro-immigration group FWD.us hired Kevin Kayes, a former assistant Senate parliamentarian, to help hone the procedural argument in favor of allowing the maneuver this year.“Those provisions are the precedent for us,” said Kerri Talbot, the deputy director of the Immigration Hub. “A lot of things we’re trying to do now relate to what was approved in 2005.”

Twenty-two Democrats, including four senators, recently wrote a letter to Mr. Biden urging him to include an immigration overhaul in his infrastructure package. Many are worried that they will lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, and fearful that the Supreme Court will strike down former President Barack Obama’s protections for Dreamers.

Yet not all Democrats are likely to support a unilateral approach

For now, Senator Richard J. Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat who has for years pushed for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, said that he was focused on passing a bipartisan immigration bill, and that Mr. Schumer had encouraged him to work to reach a deal with Republicans.

“The crisis at the border is undisputable — even the president admits that now — so if we can work on that, and then work on some of the path options that I’ve supported in the past, I’m guardedly optimistic,” he said.

If Justice Thomas’s questions differed from those of his colleagues, it was in their courtesy. He almost never interrupted lawyers, though he asked pointed follow-up questions if there was time left.

Over the course of the last term, Justice Thomas mused about the ballooning salaries of college football coaches, said a police officer’s supposed “hot pursuit” struck him as a “meandering pursuit,” commented on the “sordid roots” of a Louisiana law enacted to advance white supremacy and wondered how public schools should address students’ comments “about current controversies, like protests or Black Lives Matter, antifa or Proud Boys.”

“He is an excellent questioner, and an important voice on the court,” said Gregory G. Garre, a lawyer with Latham & Watkins who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

Mr. Garre said Justice Thomas’s questions at the court’s first phone argument, over whether Booking.com could trademark its name, refocused the court with a smart analogy. The justice asked how an internet domain name differed from a 1-800 phone number, noting that 1-800-PLUMBING is a registered trademark.Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer pursued the point, and Booking.com prevailed, in Justice Ginsburg’s last majority opinion.

“I think it’s unnecessary in deciding cases to ask that many questions, and I don’t think it’s helpful,” he said at Harvard Law School in 2013. “I think we should listen to lawyers who are arguing their cases, and I think we should allow the advocates to advocate.”

When he did speak from the bench, the effect could be electrifying. In 2002, for instance, the courtroom was riveted when he shared his reflections on the meaning of a Virginia law that banned cross burning, recalling “almost 100 years of lynching” in the South by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups.

The justices hope to return to the courtroom when the new term starts in October. Once he is back on the bench, will Justice Thomas revert to his usual taciturnity?

But it’s also fair to say that Justice Thomas may well prefer the orderly questioning of the current format as opposed to the feeding frenzy that can dominate when the justices are on the bench together.”

“The deaths happened between Sunday and Monday morning, but we can’t say all died due to lack of oxygen,”

Last week, after oxygen ran out at one hospital in India’s capital, New Delhi, 12 people died. The week before that, it was 20

Doctors at dozens of hospitals in Delhi have been warning that they have come dangerously close to running out as well and that it was untenable to keep waiting for last-minute supplies to arrive. As the latest incident shows, at a hospital more than a thousand miles from the capital, oxygen shortages have now spread nationwide.

The same thing happened at Jaipur Golden Hospital in New Delhi.

“We are living from oxygen cylinder to oxygen cylinder,” she said.Medical oxygen has suddenly become one of the most precious resources in India, and the need for it will continue as the surge of coronavirus infections is hardly abating.

Representatives of the federal government told the court on Sunday that its officials are working hard to deal with the crises and any such order would have a demoralizing effect on them.

India has been receiving aid from other countries, and many have airlifted oxygen generators, including France, which delivered eight oxygen generator plants on Sunday, and from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The country has also received six planeloads of equipment and supplies including material for coronavirus vaccines from the United States.

In recent days delays in moving oxygen to the hospitals in cities that are far from the generating plants have caused deaths which could have been avoided, experts said. On Saturday 12 patients, including a doctor, died when a hospital in New Delhi ran out of oxygen for an hour, according to Sudhanshu Bankata, an official of the Batra Hospital, where the deaths took place.

While people continue to die from a lack of oxygen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and the local government in Delhi, the epicenter of the oxygen crisis, are fighting in court.

The investigation at the hospital continues. On Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. doctors and paramedical staff said they had run out of oxygen and contacted everyone they could think of to get help.

Officials in the neighboring district of Mysore, which is one of the hot virus spots in the state, said they sent supplies late on Sunday evening, but Chamarajanagar district officials said none arrived at the hospital.

When she arrived at the hospital her father-in-law told her she was now a widow. Her husband had died early on Monday, during that 10-hour period when the hospital was out of oxygen.

Yet beginning in the 1970s, America took a wrong turn. We slowed new investments in health and education and embraced a harsh narrative that people just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps

What does that mean in human terms? I’ve written about how one-quarter of the people on my old No. 6 school bus died of drugs, alcohol or suicide — “deaths of despair.” That number needs to be updated: The toll has risen to about one-third.

The most important thread of Biden’s program is his plan to use child allowances to cut America’s child poverty in half. Biden’s main misstep is that he would end the program in 2025 instead of making it permanent; Congress should fix that.

Roosevelt started a day care program during World War II to make it easier for parents to participate in the war economy. It was a huge success

Then there are Biden’s proposed investments in broadband; that’s today’s version of rural electrification. Likewise, free community college would enable young people to gain technical skills and earn more money, strengthening working-class families.Some Americans worry about the cost of Biden’s program.

As many Americans have criminal records as college degrees. A baby born in Washington, D.C., has a shorter life expectancy (78 years) than a baby born in Beijing (82 years). Newborns in 10 counties in Mississippi have a shorter life expectancy than newborns in Bangladesh. Rather than continue with Herbert Hoover-style complacency, let’s acknowledge our “grave internal disorder” and summon a doctor.

Letters to this newspaper, as well as numerous commentaries elsewhere, have persuasively lauded the achievements of Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi on challenges ranging from public health to poverty. But another of their contributions to our culture deserves far more attention than it generally receives.

So I was surprised to read about the passing of skinny jeans, which have been around for most of my adult life. Discovering that they are no longer “cool” is like saying goodbye to a part of me (and to my millennial coolness).

While Ecclesiastes says “for everything there is a season,” I wish that the season of skinny jeans could have lasted a little longer. If I’d known that my favorite trousers would be going out of style, at least I could have worn them instead of my pandemic leggings for the past year!

These institutions were established to educate Black Americans, most of whom, before 1865,

Pronouncements from the ivory towers of predominantly white institutions about what Black colleges should do may score political points and draw public attention

Harvard’s endowment is $42 billion, Yale’s is $31 billion, and Princeton’s is $27 billion. Howard’s is only $712 million. There are reasons for this discrepancy. Almost all Ivy League institutions were founded before the Revolutionary War, while H.B.C.U.s did not get into full swing until well after the Civil War.

Fortunately, Howard is doing relatively well for an H.B.C.U., but not so well that it doesn’t have to make hard decisions. While the university did eliminate the classics department, it did not gut the humanities.

There is no spiritual catastrophe unfolding on Howard’s campus. Quite to the contrary, our campus, students and faculty are in the midst of a Renaissance replete with all the accompanying spiritual and intellectual affirmations. The administration decided to eliminate the classics department, but it also started majors in interdisciplinary humanities

Our history provides many examples of hopes for progress that seemed hopelessly naïve, up until suddenly they weren’t: abolition, female suffrage, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and now, possibly, a just climate policy. Let’s not throw in the towel, Mr. Krugman.

These paid family leaves need to be divided into two parts: postpartum recovery time for a parent who gave birth to the child joining the family, and additional weeks of paid leave for each parent for the purpose of family bonding and adjustment.

The distinction between postpartum time and bonding time is key. Research has shown that, in many professional fields at least, gender-neutral family leave programs advantage male parents and disadvantage women parents. Men, receiving equal benefits with nothing close to the same burden, use the extra time off to advance their careers while women fall farther behind.

When people say that America is a racist country, they don’t necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist.

however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.

Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”

America is not the same country it was, but neither is it the country it purports to be. On some level this is a tension between American idealism and American realism, between an aspiration and a current condition.

As Mark Twain once put it: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

I could tell him about the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded Mr. Frank, a leader of the Nisqually tribe, during the Obama administration, or how his struggle led to a monumental 1974 federal court ruling on resource equality known as the Boldt decision, awarding his people 50 percent of the salmon in their waters.

If culture is an expression of our refined and uplifting impulses, he spread many ripples in the heritage of humanity. He’ll join Dwight Eisenhower, Samuel Adams, Helen Keller as well as several other Native Americans in the Capitol not because it’s his turn. But because his life exemplifies the best values of a nation’s shared stories.

“The people need to know the truth,” he used to say, by way of explaining an 1854 treaty between the tribes of Puget Sound and the American government that guaranteed tribal fishing rights for eternity.

The same cannot be said of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, a man who was indicted on a charge of treason, and another traitor, his vice president, Alexander Stephens — both of whom are still in Statuary Hall, even after waging war on the United States. Mr. Stephens said the Confederacy was founded “upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The outgoing statue of Mr. Whitman in buckskin and a Bible is a totem to the Big Lie that he saved the Oregon Country from the British, a founding myth of the Pacific Northwest. “It was the kind of lie that many Americans still love — simple, hero-driven, action-packed, ordained by God,” Mr. Harden told me. “Replacing Marcus Whitman with Billy Frank Jr. is sweet symbolic justice.”

But I also wanted to summon the spirit of the man I knew as just Billy — his guts, his wisdom, his unbroken big heartedness. “Being with Billy is like floating on a steady, easy river,” his wife Sue Crystal, who died of cancer in 2001, once said. “He’s the happiest person I know.”

To some, it might sound harmless, even amusing. But it made me deeply uneasy. Although the #MeToo movement has helped to raise awareness of the lack of diversity in publishing, biography is a genre in which the voices of women and people of color are still starkly underrepresented. According to a study done by Slate in 2015, 71.7 percent of the biographies the magazine surveyed that year were written about a male subject, and 87 percent of those were by male authors. The study did not consider race, but in the last 20 years, only two books with a person of color as both author and subject have won the Pulitzer Prize for biography.

The question of access — to materials, to family members and sometimes to the subject — has major repercussions for the work of scholars. Authorized biographers tend to be fiercely protective of their privileged status, which is often the basis for a book contract. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene’s authorized biographer, argued that a comma in his agreement with Greene allowed him sole access to Greene’s papers for more than a decade while he labored over his three-volume biography, delaying other researchers’ work in the process.

As critics pointed out even before the allegations surfaced, the biography’s accounts of some of Mr. Roth’s relationships contain biases and sexist characterizations that appear to parrot Mr. Roth’s opinions, including an uncomplimentary description of one woman’s genitalia. (Nearly five years ago, Mr. Bailey wrote a review of my own biography of Shirley Jackson that was perceived by many, including myself, as sexist.)

Critics like to speak of biographies as “definitive,” but in reality there’s no such thing. Biographers aren’t stenographers; we’re more akin to novelists, constructing a narrative of a person’s life and making editorial choices at every turn. An anecdote whose importance I might overlook could be seized on by someone else as a revealing detail.

Publishers should explicitly encourage a diversity of perspectives on a person worthy of biography, and biographers who care about improving representation would do well to rethink their own roles in the system. They might begin by pledging to keep the papers of subjects where they belong: in public archives, open to any scholar prepared to devote the time and energy to working with them.

The result would bring an infusion of new perspectives on literary giants, giving renewed relevance to an often conservative industry. It would also help to generate a more inclusive roster of authors considered worthy of chronicling, remaking and expanding the American literary canon.

Mr. Biden’s suggestion, made during his primary campaign, that entering the United States illegally should no longer be treated as a criminal offense, his promise to end construction of the border wall and his pledge that not a single deportation would take place during his first hundred days in office — ’tis gone, and all is gray.

A sort of blithe tactlessness persists. “Did you ever five years ago think every second or third ad out of five or six would be biracial couples?” is not a question one can readily imagine being asked by any American politician of standing other than Mr. Trump — or his successor, who in fact posed it to CNN’s viewers in February.

The United States may be on the verge of returning to the Obama administration’s nuclear weapons accord with Iran, but when it comes to North Korea, the nation is also, in the words of Lloyd Austin, Mr. Biden’s secretary of defense, “ready to fight tonight,” presumably with fire and fury.

Even in the area of economics, where it might have been supposed by both supporters and critics during the presidential campaign that Mr. Biden would adopt a more progressive agenda, he has differed from the bipartisan center-right economic consensus along curiously familiar lines. In addition to keeping Mr. Trump’s moratorium on evictions in place, for example, he has continued with the suspension of interest on student loan debt and the collection of monthly payments.

Despite occasional rhetorical sops to organized labor that have become a mainstay of populist conservative rhetoric, Mr. Trump was arguably the least union-friendly president since Ronald Reagan, whereas Mr. Biden has restored some collective bargaining rights by executive order.

Why is Mr. Biden having more success carrying out some of his predecessor’s policies? Certainly Mr. Trump’s fabled étourderie and his inability to staff a cabinet with qualified officials sympathetic to what was ostensibly his agenda are a part of the story. A more interesting question, though, is where the indignation from would-be opponents of moderate protectionism and realism in foreign policy has gone. Would Mr. Biden’s broken promises regarding deportations be less excusable if he, too, were in the habit of calling immigrants revolting names?

First, though, Mr. Biden took a detour to Plains, Ga., where Mr. Carter lives with his wife, Rosalynn Carter. Mr. Carter, the longest-living former president, is 96 years old and a cancer survivor.

The most recent batch of plans, which Mr. Biden detailed on Wednesday, include efforts to reduce child care costs, the creation of a federal paid leave program, free community college, universal prekindergarten and expanded efforts to fight poverty.

“We owe special thanks to the people of Georgia,” the president said. “Because of your two senators, the rest of America was able to get the help they got so far. The American Rescue Plan would not have passed. So much have we gotten done, like getting checks to people, probably would not have happened. So if you ever wonder if elections make a difference, just remember what you did here in Georgia: When you elected Ossoff and Warnock, you began to change the environment.”

“Some of my colleagues in the Senate thought it was youthful exuberance,” Mr. Biden said in the video. “Well, I was exuberant, but as I said then, ‘Jimmy’s not just a bright smile. He can win, and he can appeal to more segments of the population than any other person.’”

In the message, the president hailed Mr. Carter’s work in office and after his defeat to Ronald Reagan in 1980, praising Mr. Carter for working to eradicate disease and house the poor while still finding time to teach Sunday school. Mr. Biden said Mr. Carter had called him the night before his inauguration to wish him well and say he would be there in spirit.

The visit between the two families on Thursday lasted less than an hour. Mr. Biden’s motorcade arrived at the Carters’ home from Jimmy Carter Regional Airport at 2:30 p.m. A pool reporter glimpsed Mrs. Carter, in a white top and using a walker, on the front porch. There was no sign of Mr. Carter.

Even considering patients like mine as recipients of new lungs represents a paradigm shift. A lung transplant is an arduous procedure, one that a very frail patient has little hope of surviving. And given that lung transplant programs are evaluated based on one-year mortality, they have a disincentive to take a chance on sicker patients.

When asked whether they want to receive a transplant after considering all the implications, many will say yes. But others say no.

He is not alone.

But a larger second wave is coming, this time of coronavirus survivors who have made it out of the hospital but are left with lungs that are irrevocably scarred.

Moving forward, this means that we will need to educate doctors in the community, outside of large academic centers, who simply might not think of post-Covid patients as candidates for transplants.

No one can survive the physical and emotional toll of transplant without assistance, especially in the first year. But not everyone is lucky enough to have people who can commit to helping with medications and appointments. Will we choose not to list someone whose family members live in a different state? How about a patient who would be an ideal candidate but simply lives an isolated existence?

Even as we prepare for this next wave, my 61-year-old patient and his family continue to wait. Standing at his bedside, I am struck by the reality that if his son had not pushed for him to be transferred to a hospital that would consider him a potential transplant candidate, if we did not have access to the machine that could make it possible to reach that goal, he surely would have died.

“If we look up at the mountain, we grow overwhelmed and feel that we are going to fail,” he tells them. “So we don’t worry about the peak. We focus on the individual steps. There is still no guarantee. But we’re going to attempt. That’s all we can do.”

But the Biden administration is not entirely neutral when it comes to family policy. When, during a conference call, I asked three administration officials Thursday about this, they mentioned two other social goals. First, getting people working. “We want parents to be in the work force, especially mothers,” said Susan Rice, head of the Domestic Policy Council. Second, the administration wants kids in classroom settings, to extend the public school system down two years.

Whether a child will be helped or harmed by professional child care experience depends an awful lot on the nature of the particular child, the particular care center and the particular parents. These are circumstances only the parents, who are right there, can know, so parents should be given maximum power and flexibility to make decisions.

Finally, I worry about the class politics of all this. In that American Compass research, more-affluent families support day care expansion but working-class families overwhelmingly support direct subsidies. Thriving meritocrats may be eager to re-enjoy the satisfactions of full-time work, but in one 2018 survey only 28 percent of married mothers said working full time was ideal. Forty percent said working part time was ideal.

Over the past few decades the economy has placed enormous strain on American families, forcing people to have fewer kids and spend less time with them than they would prefer. A fully generous child tax credit would give some parents a chance to step back from the job market for a few years while their kids were young — if they so chose.

It was meant, as the Supreme Court described it in 1975, “to free widowed and divorced mothers from the necessity of working, so that they could remain home to supervise their children.”

Eligibility was determined by states and localities, which found various ways to exclude Black women. With the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, however, more Black mothers were able to receive benefits.

But universal day care programs that would help women work didn’t go anywhere either. In 1971, Congress passed a bill that would have created a national network of high-quality, sliding-scale child care centers, akin to those that exist in many European countries. Urged on by Patrick Buchanan, Richard Nixon vetoed it, writing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family‐centered approach.”

Ever since, efforts to expand government-supported child care have faced furious opposition from the religious right.

At the same time, many on the right, driven partly by concerns about low birthrates, have awoken to the crushing financial burden of parenthood. The public policy debate is thus no longer whether to subsidize child rearing, but how. Mitt Romney’s Family Security Act, for example, would give parents $350 a month for each child under 6, and $250 a month for children between 6 and 17, up to $1,250 per family per month.

With the laissez-faire economic assumptions that dominated America since the Reagan administration discredited, Democrats no longer cower when the right accuses them of fostering big government. As Biden said in his address to Congress on Wednesday, “Trickle-down economics has never worked.”

This doesn’t mean that the American Families Plan is going to happen. With little chance of any Republican support, it would have to be passed through the reconciliation process, so its fate likely lies in the hands of Joe Manchin, the Senate’s most conservative Democrat. Still, it’s amazing that it’s suddenly possible that American parenthood could actually become a less financially brutalizing experience.

The filibuster is believed — wrongly, in my view — to promote bipartisanship, and so it maintains a symbolic appeal for those who wish for a more bipartisan Senate. “There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster,” Senator Joe Manchin wrote in The Washington Post. “The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship.”

But even senators who’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that the rules do need to change, like Klobuchar, are caught between reform and regret. And so I want to pose an argument that will clash with the catechisms of American politics: Bipartisan governance isn’t innately better than partisan governance. In fact, it’s often worse.

But put that aside. Let’s make this easier for bipartisanship and imagine the only condition that needs to be fulfilled is that both parties think a bill is a good idea.

Virtually the entire Republican Party signed a pledge to oppose any and all tax increases, so a truly bipartisan approach would mean taxes were simply off the table for policymaking. That would plainly be absurd. But even where more reasonable compromise is possible, problems abound.

They are considering ideas they actually think are right for the country — and popular with voters — as opposed to the narrow set of ideas Republicans might support. The question they will face in the coming months is whether they want to embrace partisan legislating, repeatedly using budget reconciliation and even ridding the Senate of the filibuster, or abandon their agenda and leave the rest of the country’s problems unsolved.

Think of the major partisan bills of the past few decades. Liberals loathed the Bush tax cuts and Medicare Part D, and promises of repeal were constant.

Similarly, Republicans professed themselves desperate to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but when they took power, it turned out they didn’t have 50 Senate votes to do anything but defang the individual mandate.

President Donald Trump then reversed that order, and then President Biden reversed Trump’s reversal. If the Dream Act — which passed the House and got 55 Senate votes — had been made law in 2010, I think it would have had a better shot at surviving the Trump era intact.

We are a divided country, but one way we could become less divided is for the consequences of elections to be clearer. When legislation is so hard to pass, politics becomes a battle over identity rather than a battle over policy. Don’t get me wrong: Fights over policy can be angry, even vicious.

This whole debate is peculiarly American. In parliamentary systems, the job of the majority party, or majority coalition, is to govern, and the job of the opposition party is to oppose. Cooperation can and does occur, but there’s nothing unusual or regrettable when it doesn’t, and government does not grind to a halt in its absence.

The other argument for bipartisanship is that bipartisan policy is more stable — you avoid, for example, the Republicans’ 10-year war to repeal Obamacare, or the Democratic Party’s long fight against the Bush tax cuts. This is a fear Senator Jon Tester voiced to me when we appeared together on “Real Time With Bill Maher” in February. If you get rid of the filibuster and embrace partisan lawmaking, he said, “every time Congress changes hands, what you did two years ago will be repealed and you’ll go in a different direction.”

It will surprise no one to hear that I think Democrats should get rid of the filibuster. But it’s not because I believe Democrats necessarily have the right answers for what ails America. It’s because I believe the right answers are likelier to be found if one party, and then the other, can try its hand at solving America’s problems.

The main work will fall to governors and state legislators, mayors and city councils, county executives and commissioners, school superintendents and boards.

While they fend off padded proposals from vendors, the normal political process churns toward what policy wonks call the “peanut butter spread” problem — in other words, giving everyone something, yet falling short of lasting change.

Putting these principles into action, we’d focus on serving the children who have suffered most from the pandemic. School closures, parents’ job losses and social isolation have set back children in ways we are only starting to understand. Here’s just one stunning example: The share of Virginia’s early elementary students at high-risk for reading failure increased by more than 50 percent this fall, with the biggest increase seen among children who are Black, Latino, or poor

Rescue Plan dollars can meet all these challenges. Start with lead: As part of his infrastructure plan, Mr. Biden has committed to eliminating all lead service pipes. But there’s no reason to wait for that bill to pass, and we can’t focus on pipes alone. In addition to some nine million U.S. homes with lead service lines, 24 million homes (built before 1978), including four million with young children, have lead-based paint hazards. Lead exposure in children — from inhaling the dust or eating the paint — may lead to reductions in educational outcomes and potentially criminal behavior. This is a perfect use of Rescue Plan dollars: one-time, proven impact and huge results for those at greatest risk.

We know these connections are crucial so families get the help they need when they need it. The platform also generates data essential to determining the results investments are getting.

But I worry about the implications of the question posed by Dr. William Rawlins: “Who have you taken a risk at a certain point to see because they mean that much to you?”

es, we need to work at our friendships to maintain them, but is it fair to gauge a relationship by a willingness to take risks during a pandemic?

fear of either getting or spreading a disease. I would hope that in a real friendship, we don’t put demands on others to take risks beyond their comfort level to prove their commitment.

The significance of President Biden’s speech was beyond all the policy agendas he laid out — we knew most of them already. Mr. Biden’s purpose (which I think was achieved) was to show that he is not Donald Trump, that he is an intelligent, plain-spoken, experienced public servant who is in control, and who can lay out his positions with down-to-earth words and logic and appeal to our hopes and dreams without using fear or lies. The simple, easy-to-follow quality of his speech was something I’m not sure even Barack Obama achieved.

President Biden’s speech to Congress and the nation was a passing of the baton from squeezing American government into a smaller and smaller box (Ronald Reaganism) back to a more expansive and supportive role for government (Lyndon Johnsonism).

The Republicans were OK with the trillions President George W. Bush spent on America’s failed military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were OK with the trillions lost from President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy.

In “You Don’t Actually Need to Reach Across the Aisle, Mr. Biden,” (Opinion guest essay, April 28), John Lawrence argues — correctly — that President Biden should not reach across the aisle to seek bipartisan support for his legislative program. Mr. Biden can and should promote another form of bipartisanship that, bypassing Republican legislators, addresses Republican voters.

He can and should highlight the partisanship of Republican legislators who fail to faithfully represent Republican voters, let alone Americans as a whole.

To accuse President Biden of seeking to divide our country, while supporting the refusal of his own party to make any attempt to support the president as he tries to move our country forward and bring the promise of the American dream to all of his fellow citizens, is disingenuous, to say the least.

And I think we’ve seen that there is an expectation in this country of who is supposed to be policed and who is not supposed to be policed, that you’re supposed to go police those people over there, but if you order me to wear a mask, well, that’s just too much here. And we see time and time again that most killings by police start with traffic stops, mental health checks, domestic disturbances, low level offenses. We’ve seen with the cases of Philando Castile and others that traffic stops can be deadly. Randy, where does this come from? Why is the focus on low level offenses and not solving murders? I think a lot of people think that the police are focused on catching criminals, when that’s not really what they do.

Yeah. I mean, I think lovingly, I came to this position because we’ve been putting platinum bandaids and piecemeal reforms into place. And it hasn’t made policing any better for Black people or poor people or immigrant people, right? When we talk about defunding the police, we’re not just talking about the sheriff in your county or the P.D. in your inner city neighborhood. We’re talking about the state police. We’re talking about Capitol police who we literally watched hand-walk insurrectionists out of the Capitol on January 6. We’re talking about immigrant communities that are impacted by I.C.E., right? We’re talking about Customs and Border Patrol.

And the roots are embedded in white supremacy ideology that oftentimes we’re unwilling to admit. The other thing, good apples can’t simply override bad apples. Yes, overwhelmingly, officers get into it because they want to protect and serve. But we just heard from Randy what happens in that process. Good apples become poisoned. And they also can at times become rotten themselves. Because part of what happens is that they get swallowed up in the system. And due to qualified immunity, they are completely alleviated from any sort of financial culpability. And I think insurances can be a huge way to increase accountability.

So part of what we have to think through is better solutions. And what the research I’ve conducted suggests is that if we reallocate some of those calls for service, not only are there better people in the social service sector, such as mental health specialists or Department of Transportation better equipped to handle those things, but also police officers can then focus on the more violent crimes and increasing that clearance rate.

That’s how we got Ferguson, right? That’s how we ended up with the death of Michael Brown. So what all of this led me to is when you follow the money, just over the past five years, in the major 20 metropolitan areas in the United States, taxpayers have paid out over $2 billion with a B in settlements for police misconduct. Oftentimes, people are paying for their own brutality, so outside of police budgets, which have swelled over the past three decades. I mean, you have everything from over 40 percent in Oakland to well over 35 percent in cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, that these civilian payouts don’t even come from the police budget. And what it led me to is that if we had police department insurance policies, if we had more police officer malpractice individual liability insurance, we would see not only a shift in financial culpability, but also a shift in accountability.

How do we keep people safe if we defund the police? But I bet if I asked you, Jane or Rashawn or Randy, to close your eyes and tell me a time where you felt safe, what did it feel like, you wouldn’t tell me that there was a cop there. And if it was, it would probably be because that cop might have been your dad or your mom or your aunt or your uncle, right? Not because they were in their uniform in a cop car policing somebody else. So quite frankly, I think the only solution to policing in this country is abolition. And how do we get there through divestment and investment is really super clear.

Do I think that we can reform our way out of the crisis of policing in this country? I do not. And I don’t because I’ve seen so many times us try. I’ve seen us say that if we just trained them more, it would be different. I’ve seen us say, if we just banned no-knock warrants, it would be different. I’ve seen us say, if we just got body cams on these cops, which is more and more and more money going to policing, but what we’ve seen is that that hasn’t distracted or detracted them because they can continue to use reasonable force as their get out of jail and accountability-free card. So I just don’t believe that the data shows that reforming our way out of policing is keeping Black people free and alive.

But you know what? They did. But you know what also survived those historical periods? Law enforcement. You know why? Because law enforcement is the gatekeeper of legalized state sanctioned violence. Law enforcement abolition probably requires a revolution we haven’t seen before. Part of what abolitionists also want — because I think there are two main camps. There are some that are like, law enforcement shouldn’t exist. Prisons shouldn’t exist. There are others who are like, look, we need to reimagine it. Like those rotten trees, we need to cut it down. When you deal with a rotten tree or a rotten plant, simply cutting it down doesn’t make it go away. The roots come back, right? And oftentimes, the plant comes back stronger. And interestingly, it comes back in a different form, like it’s wrapped in a different package. And so, but there are some people who say, how about we address abolition from the standpoint of abolishing police departments as they currently stand and reimagining and rebuilding public safety in a way that’s different? See, even the terminology we use is really important — policing, law enforcement, public safety. Part of reimagining law enforcement is reimagining the terms we use for what safety means. And how I think about it is, who has the right to truly express their First Amendment right and be verbally and/or nonviolently expressive? It’s not illegal to be combative.

And one of my colleagues was reading a clip. And he was saying, yeah, we need more police surveillance. We need to make sure that we watch what they’re doing. We need more training. This clip was from the 1980s, almost around the same time where Ash was talking about she was born.

The United States taxpayer is essentially asked to foot this impossible and never-ending bill to maintain this failed system of policing, right? I want to pull a little bit on Randy’s last point and what Dr. Ray raised about guns as well. It’s like even Forbes, I think, last week mentioned that more than one mass shooting per day has occurred in 2021. And so if cops keep me safe from gun violence, this stat wouldn’t be real, right? So if police officers were keeping Black people safe from gun violence, the world will be a very different place. And I doubt we would be having this conversation in the first place. We’ve got to actually be innovative beyond the request for support for more money for more trainings, for more technology. And so, quite frankly, when we think about what’s happening on the federal level legislatively right now with the Justice and Policing Act, I think the movement for Black — well, not I think — I know the movement for Black Lives unequivocally doesn’t support it. Because, again, it’s an attempt at 1990 solutions to a 2021 problem

If you want to learn more about police reform, I recommend reading the text of the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act of 2021. I also recommend The New York Times Magazine piece that features a roundtable of experts and organizers. It’s called, “The message is clear: policing in America is broken and must change.