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While the election has come and gone, the fight for our democracy is not over. While things look under a Biden presidency so far, it's clear Donald Trump's white nationalist and hateful rhetoric have set root in the Republican Party. The fight for America will continue as Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans are expected to continue making it difficult for Joe Biden to pass even widely popular measures. The Covid-19 pandemic surges and Americans continue for just representation and push back against the rise of fascism. Your contribution to AlterNet All Access will ensure progressive, honest reporting when it's needed more than ever. While advertising covers some of our expenses, it doesn't come close to the resources needed to cover the new of the world today. Support AlterNet All Access and know that we'll be here to get the facts out, whether they be the good or the bad. With a donation of $95 or more, you'll also receive advanced ad-free access to original reporting from AlterNet and Raw Story, exclusive investigative content, and more. Click the following link if you prefer to make a monthly donation. Want to send a check? Send your check payable to "AlterNet" to : 'AlterNet Media P.O. Box 47864 Chicago, IL 60647

MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan went after Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) on Twitter this week after a Fox News appearance in which he twisted data about border crossings to score points on Fox News. Hasan then invited Crenshaw on his show to talk about the issue and avoid political nonsense. Crenshaw agreed, but the nonsense continued. Showing data from the CBP, Hasan explained that there is an influx of migrants coming over the border, the problem is that there has been an influx of migrants over the past nine months from President Donald Trump's administration into the Biden administration. What became very clear is that Hasan came with the numbers and Crenshaw didn't know them or was trying to distort them. The next big piece of information was that people are crossing the border again after being thrown out during the Trump administration. Numbers don't generally reflect that. Another confusing moment for Crenshaw was when Hasan played the clip of his Fox News interview in which he said, "This happened overnight, okay, when President Biden rescinded the remain in Mexico policy when they rescinded the asylum cooperation agreements with the northern triangle countries. So Biden has the nerve to say quietly don't come, wink, don't come. don't come here. If you come here, we're going to give you a bus ticket wherever you want and not going to deport you." Hasan explained that it's a lie. Since there's been an influx for the past nine months, the massive influx didn't happen overnight, as Crenshaw claimed. He claimed that Biden was giving people a "wink" not to come to the United States and that Biden said that the U.S. wasn't going to deport you. Crenshaw, after watching the video, denied he said that Biden wasn't going to deport people. Over and over, Crenshaw claimed, "I didn't say that." Even after Hasan read the statement again, Crenshaw replied, "thank you for proving me right." See the video below: Part 1: Republican goes down in flames www.youtube.com Part 2:

Rep. Dan Crenshaw's (R-Texas) stock purchase history is coming under fire due to questionable transactions made at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Although the Republican lawmaker did not purchase any stock in his first 13 months of office, he made a number of purchases in a short period of time as the United States shut down in March of last year. Crenshaw also failed to report those transactions, the Daily Beast reports. The Beast offered a brief breakdown of Crenshaw's transactions: Five of those purchases came in the three days between March 25 and 27, as the Senate and House voted on the CARES Act and former President Trump signed it into law. Crenshaw, who supported the bill, did not initially disclose the transactions, in violation of the STOCK Act, a law that requires members of Congress to tell the public when they engage in securities trades. Months later he amended his records to reflect the purchases. The Republican lawmaker's purchases, which total approximately $120,000, pale in comparison to former Georgia Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue's controversial stock sales. However, Crenshaw's transactions were only discovered when he amended his annual report back in December. Crenshaw's communications director, Justin Discigil, released a statement defending the lawmaker's actions. "You're referencing financial disclosures that use a range to report stock purchases, and you're choosing the upper end of the range to come up with that $120,000 figure," Discigil told the publication in an email. "The real number is around $30,000 at most," Discigil said, and "in no way were his purchases unethical or related to official business." Despite the statement, the Beast notes that the timing creates the biggest discrepancy. Ben Edwards, a University of Las Vegas Nevada professor and a security law expert, explained the issues with Crenshaw's transactions. "Members of Congress should not be actively trading securities in the middle of a crisis. It shows that when the market crashes, that person is thinking about themselves and using the volatility to their own advantage," said Edwards. "We all have a limited amount of attention, and if you've got [an] eye on your stock portfolio, then you're not giving that crisis or the American people the full attention they demand."

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) appeared on “The View,” where he battled co-hosts Joy Behar and Sunny Hostin over remarks made by one of his fellow freshman lawmakers. The Texas Republican and the show’s conservative co-host Meghan McCain have been hitting Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for months, accusing her of anti-Semitism and insensitivity toward 9/11 victims, and Crenshaw said Democrats have not condemned her forcefully enough. “Unfortunately, we’re playing a team sport these days,” Crenshaw said. “We just had a long discussion about how Republicans feel about Trump, and I think you’re seeing the same issues play out on the democrats’ side with somebody on their own team, and they’re not sure how to handle it, even though they might behind closed doors disagree with what she’s saying.” Behar pointed out that Omar was a recently elected congresswoman, and not halfway through a presidential term like Trump. “She’s a new congresswoman,” Behar said. “On the right what we have is the president of the United States in Charlottesville saying there are good people on both sides, and people are yelling, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ There are not good people on both sides.” Crenshaw objected to her point, saying that Trump’s widely televised remarks did not represent what he believes. “In that same sentence, when he said that, he also said, ‘I’m definitely not referring to white nationalists,” Crenshaw said. Behar heard enough. “Why do you apologize for him?” she said. “It’s ridiculous.” Crenshaw insisted the president’s remarks about “fine people on both sides” were a bit more nuanced than many recall. “You have to listen to what he says,” the congressman said. Trump did, in fact, offer support for marchers who were protesting the removal of Confederate monuments, while saying the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists who who organized the rally “should be condemned totally.” But he also attacked “troublemakers” in the group of counterprotesters as “a lot of bad people.” Crenshaw then got back to attacking Omar, who drew strong criticism for saying anti-Muslim sentiment had spiked after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “CAIR was founded after 9/11,” Omar said, “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” Hostin said the Minnesota Democrat’s comments have been taken out of context, but Crenshaw refused to extend the same courtesy to Omar. “Unless you’re referring to a different event, and I don’t think she was, then it clearly was not taken out of context,” Crenshaw said. “I don’t think she’s apologized, either, she doubled down.” Hostin reminded him that George W. Bush had used similar language to describe the attacks, and no one objected to his choice of words, and Crenshaw said there was no comparison. “It was dismissive in tone, and in gesture, and in words,” he said. 

The Biden Administration is attempting to solve the influx of migrants at the border. NBC’s Mehdi Hasan presses Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) on his claims that Biden brought this on himself after eliminating Trump era policies.

John McCormack is a reporter in Washington. NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—It’s 4 p.m. on Wednesday, the first day of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference—not exactly a prime speaking slot—but a standing room-only crowd has gathered to hear from freshman Congressman Dan Crenshaw. While we wait for the 34-year-old Texan, who is running late due to a vote in the House, the first person I talk to at the back of the Eastern Shore meeting room is Jacob Foster, an 18-year-old high-school student at Gann Academy outside Boston, who is attending CPAC for the third time in his young life. Foster is something of an endangered species at the conference: a conservative who likes a lot of the policies advanced by President Donald Trump yet doesn’t intend to vote for him in 2020 because of Trump’s character. But Crenshaw gives Foster hope. “The glaring difference is he’s not facing accusations of sexual assault, he hasn’t had three marriages, he didn’t dodge the Vietnam draft,” Foster says. “On policy issues, there are meaningful differences. On trade, he’s not as quick to use tariffs.” When Crenshaw arrives, the former Navy SEAL speaks about how to inspire “people back home” to embrace conservative values—personal responsibility, limited government, virtue, liberty—over a culture of outrage. “A society full of people who are easily enraged by every tweet they see, or some news story that comes out—so susceptible to outrage culture, so ready to be offended—it’s not a sustainable society. It’s a society at each other’s throats,” he says. Crenshaw doesn’t mention Trump once. The only politician cited by name is John Adams. The Constitution is “wholly inadequate for any other people but a moral people,” says Crenshaw, paraphrasing the Founding Father. Meanwhile, Trump fixer Michael Cohen is across the Potomac testifying to Congress. Afterward, Foster says it was a “phenomenal” speech that “gets to the core of the more enduring part of conservatism.” But Trump fans find something to like, too. “Crenshaw is kind of like a more youthful version of Trump,” says 20-year-old Jeremiah Childs, a University of Maine student in a red MAGA cap. “He’s a more family-friendly version of Trump,” he continues, searching for the right comparison. Childs calls Trump critics Mitt Romney and Jeff Flake “dinosaurs” whose day is done in the GOP. But Crenshaw? “He’s young. He’s exciting. He has a great story. Like, Trump’s a billionaire, and he’s the soldier, you know?” Childs says. “It’s two different things that are part of the ethos of the Republican Party. And he also sort of has that pop-culture brand.” That “pop-culture brand” is something Crenshaw attained last November, when his gracious response to “Saturday Night Live‘s” mockery of his war wound went viral. In just the few months since, he has established himself as one of his party’s most prominent communicators. As comfortable on “Face the Nation” and “Morning Joe” as he is on Fox News, Crenshaw has written op-eds for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. He might not have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s millions of Twitter followers, but his more than 500,000 total followers make him the most popular Republican House member on Twitter, where his tweets—whether he’s slamming his Democratic colleagues, speaking fluent Spanish in a video supporting the Venezuelan people or humble-bragging about his double ax-throwing skills—are frequently shared and “liked” by thousands or tens of thousands of people. Crenshaw’s social media stardom and his unlikely path to victory—he had no electoral experience and no money when he upset the Texas GOP establishment on his way to win the Republican nomination in his district in 2018—invite comparison to the Democrats’ most media-savvy new member, @AOC. “She always seems like she’s having a good time, and you get that same impression from Dan,” says conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, host of one of the country’s most popular political podcasts. “He’s an authentic person.” Crenshaw might be the congressional GOP’s best answer to AOC, but he decidedly doesn’t want to be seen as a Republican version of the 29-year-old New York Democrat, who is “always trying to embrace radicalism,” he told me during a recent interview in his new office on the fourth floor of the Cannon House Office Building. He wants to take his party in a more traditional—not radical—direction. “We have to make conservatism cool and exciting again,” is how he described his mission in politics when I first met him a year ago. “We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.” Crenshaw’s combination of traditional conservatism and rising popularity put him in an unusual position in Congress. He describes himself as a “plain old conservative”—he supports free trade, wants to reform Medicare and Social Security, and thinks American troops should stay in Afghanistan (where an IED took one of the veteran’s eyes) as long as they’re needed to prevent another 9/11. That puts him at odds with Trump, whom Crenshaw has been unafraid to criticize, going so far as to call his rhetoric “insane” and “hateful” during the 2016 presidential campaign. But Crenshaw is more “Sometimes Trump” than “Never Trump.” He is not pushing for a 2020 Republican primary challenge and is not trying to write off Trump’s wing of the party—hence, his warm reception at CPAC. In fact, Crenshaw has praised the president for his policies on immigration, even recently voting in support of Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to build a border wall, a move many conservatives opposed. One type of success in today’s Republican Party involves becoming a Trump booster, like Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a 36-year-old in his second term who unfailingly defends the president on TV. Crenshaw is showing that it’s not the only way. The mainstream conservative is the House GOP’s one rising star to emerge from the midterms, whereas true Trump nationalists like Corey Stewart, Roy Moore and Kelli Ward have met electoral defeat. Crenshaw is only two months into the job, but he might just offer the possibility that the future of the Republican Party could be more conservative than Trumpist—if he can chart his own course in Washington. *** When Crenshaw first grabbed the national spotlight, he seemed to succeed, at least for one night, in his improbable mission to prove that a conservative politician could be cool. The weekend before the 2018 midterm elections, “Saturday Night Live” comedian Pete Davidson mocked Crenshaw’s physical appearance, saying the wounded veteran’s eye patch made him look like a “hitman in a porno movie.” When “SNL” invited Crenshaw on the show the next week, he agreed and, after ribbing Davidson, provided a rare moment of political unity. “Americans can forgive one another. We can remember what brings us together,” Crenshaw said, before telling viewers to “never forget the sacrifices of veterans past and present, and never forget those we lost on 9/11, heroes like Pete’s father,” a firefighter who died trying to save those trapped in the World Trade Center. “I thought that he had a lot of maturity and gentleness in his response to it, which seems increasingly rare nowadays,” says Foster, the 18-year-old Trump critic at CPAC, who recently accepted an appointment to attend West Point. “Dan Crenshaw started the week as a punchline and ended it as a star,” the headline of a Washington Post profile declared. By the time the “SNL” spot aired, Crenshaw had already won. But it had not been an easy road. Although he had worked in politics briefly, as a military legislative assistant for Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, he was still a relative outsider, having taken a medical retirement from the Navy in 2016 and then completed a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard. In the fall of 2017, John Noonan, a Senate aide to Tom Cotton of Arkansas, persuaded Crenshaw to run for a seat that had opened up with the retirement of Representative Ted Poe. “We were building the plane as we were heading down the runway,” Crenshaw campaign consultant Brendan Steinhauser says of the candidate’s brief GOP primary campaign in Texas’ 2nd Congressional District, home to parts of Houston. With no money for TV ads, Crenshaw relied on digital and earned media. In February 2018, he ran 100 miles through his suburban district to draw attention to Hurricane Harvey relief efforts and his own campaign. He made it to the GOP runoff by 155 votes—his margin over multi-millionaire Kathaleen Wall, a self-styled “female Trump” who spent $6 million of her own money and had the backing of Senator Ted Cruz and Governor Greg Abbott. “He’s proof that personal story and charisma can overcome just about any amount of money in a primary setting,” says David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. “Voters just liked him.” Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in an explosion in Afghanistan, stands alongside fellow Republicans as President Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address on February 5. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine In the runoff, Crenshaw’s GOP opponent, state Representative Kevin Roberts, focused on a December 2015 Facebook post in which Crenshaw had blasted candidate-Trump’s proposed ban on all Muslims entering the United States. “Trump’s insane rhetoric is hateful,” Crenshaw had written. “On the one hand you have idiots like Trump, and on the other you have equally ignorant liberals.” In response, Crenshaw emphasized that he had supported Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But he never recanted. He went on to defeat his GOP opponent 70 percent to 30 percent and won the general election by 7 points. In Harris County—part of his district that is increasingly diverse, young and wealthy—Crenshaw ran 12 percentage points ahead of Cruz. When I asked Crenshaw recently whether he regretted the “idiot” remark or anything else he had said about Trump, he replied: “Do I regret it? I don’t know. That’s not a useful emotion. You know, you learn lessons. That’s a better way to look at life.” *** Crenshaw was sworn in as a new member of Congress on January 3 in the midst of the government shutdown. The standoff wasn’t exactly conducive to producing moments of unity like his “SNL” appearance. Nor does Crenshaw seem particularly interested in forging friendships with his young, progressive counterparts. “The new face of the Democratic Party is coming out in favor of [Venezuelan dictator] Nicolás Maduro. It’s anti-Israel,” he says. “And that’s a change. That’s a new normal. These are the ones who get elevated.” But now that he’s in Washington, Crenshaw has also continued to criticize his own—whether Congressman Steve King of Iowa (“We don’t need guys like that,” Crenshaw told me when asked whether King should leave Congress) or Donald Trump. Two weeks before he took office, Crenshaw wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post urging the president to reverse his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from the fight against ISIS in Syria. “I have a background in this. I have experience in this,” Crenshaw told me. “I understand pretty well what the mission is and why it should continue.” Crenshaw also believes, in defiance of Trump, that Congress should take back the authority it ceded long ago to the executive branch to impose tariffs. But Crenshaw is happy to support the president, or challenge his critics, when the two agree. “He has taken, from what I can see, the same approach that I have taken,” Ben Shapiro says of the congressman. “He’s not going to be in the business of pretending Trump is something he’s not, but he’s also not going to dump on Trump for the sake of a little bit of strange new respect from the left.” Crenshaw, who has met with Trump once at the White House, greets talk of a potential 2020 Republican primary challenge with a rhetorical shrug. “It’s democracy, so it’s going to be what it’s going to be. Do I have any real thoughts on that and how it turns out? I don’t know,” he says. “I think it’s pretty safe to predict he’ll be our nominee, and I think that’s perfectly fine. We know what we’re getting with the president.” In addition to saying he is “proud to stand with the Trump administration” in support of the Venezuelan people, Crenshaw has been an enthusiastic advocate for Trump’s push to build a wall on the Southern border. In videos on Twitter and in TV appearances, he has made the case for a physical barrier as a common-sense security measure, and has pinned Democratic opposition to the policy on hatred of the president. But when Trump went so far as to declare a national emergency in February in order to divert military and other funding for border-wall construction, many mainstream conservatives objected. The question was no longer simply about the policy of a border wall but whether the president was flouting the rule of law and setting a dangerous precedent that a future Democratic president could use to his or her own ends. Crenshaw seemed to find himself in a bit of a bind. In a written statement on February 15, he expressed both hesitation and praise for the emergency declaration. “I share his frustration with the position we are in now,” Crenshaw’s statement said. “While I’m hopeful that this option will start to address the problems at our border, I remain wary of the precedent it sets. This is simply the result of Congress not doing its job.” Crenshaw’s office declined for a week say how he would vote on a resolution rescinding the national emergency, but the congressman had an answer over the phone this past Monday. “I’ll certainly be voting in favor of the president’s policy,” he said. Through the emergency declaration, he argues, Trump is merely appropriating additional funds to enforce the federal law prohibiting illegal border crossings. “He’s not changing any laws. He’s not changing any policies. He is simply putting more money towards his faithful execution of the law than was allowed by Congress,” Crenshaw says. He argues that a Democratic president closely following Trump’s precedent wouldn’t be so bad, as long as he or she were only putting more money toward the enforcement of existing laws. A significant number of conservatives sharply disagree with Crenshaw’s support for the emergency declaration. “The same congressional Republicans who joined me in blasting Pres. Obama’s executive overreach now cry out for a king to usurp legislative powers,” Michigan GOP Congressman Justin Amash wrote on Twitter. “If your faithfulness to the Constitution depends on which party controls the White House, then you are not faithful to it.” When the roll was called in the House to terminate the national emergency declaration, Amash was one of just 13 Republicans to vote for it. Crenshaw was among the 182 Republicans who sided with Trump. *** Crenshaw is still getting settled into his new job. He is pleased to have landed assignments on the Homeland Security and Budget committees. He has a fresh coat of navy blue paint on the sparsely decorated walls in his office. He has found a small apartment near Navy Yard and works out at the gym there (he doesn’t want to pay the fee for the members’ gym and says the group that does P90X gets up too early). His wife, Tara, sometimes travels with him to D.C., but they haven’t yet gotten into a rhythm. Stuck in the minority, Crenshaw seems less intent on passing legislation than being an effective messenger for his party, including trying to convince younger voters that conservatism and Trump aren’t one and the same. “It’s my goal to help them see: Think what you want about him, but please focus on the policies and the general approach to governance we’re taking,” Crenshaw says. It’s a role he is carefully cultivating; none of his social media posts go up without his involvement, he told me. “Think what you want about [Trump], but please focus on the policies and the general approach to governance we’re taking,” says Crenshaw, shown at his congressional office in Washington. | M. Scott Mahaskey for Politico Magazine So far, Crenshaw has managed to earn praise from both Republican Trump loyalists and skeptics in Washington. Andrew Surabian, a former Trump White House official who worked under Steve Bannon, says of Crenshaw: “While he has some views that are different from the president, he has put himself in a position where he is still an ally to the administration on the whole.” Liz Mair, a NeverTrump Republican consultant, says politicians who share Crenshaw’s ideology “struggle to get traction a lot of the time because they just seem like boring, mainstream, conservative Republican dudes,” but Crenshaw “could become a much bigger player in the party if he chooses to.” As his experience on the national emergency shows, however, it’s not easy taking a middle-ground approach to Trump. The president will surely present Crenshaw with more opportunities to alienate Trump supporters or opponents. And it remains to be seen whether Crenshaw can navigate his first two years in office without turning off voters who backed both him and Beto O’Rourke, Ted Cruz’s Democratic Senate opponent, in 2018. But the Trump-skeptical conservatives left in the Republican Party don’t seem to have written off Crenshaw because of his support for the emergency declaration. Ben Shapiro, who supports rescinding the emergency, wrote in a text message: “There’s a legitimate difference of opinion on the issue.” At CPAC, Jacob Foster, who also opposed the emergency declaration, told me he thinks Crenshaw was representing his constituents and wouldn’t set such a “dangerous precedent” if he were president. “I think he’s got an incredible future,” says Shapiro, who would be happy to see Crenshaw launch a presidential campaign before turning 40. “Why the hell not?” he says. “The more good people running in 2024 the better.” Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna contributed to this report.

On Valentine's Day, the major utility that supplies electricity to West Texas readied for a severe winter storm. Hired contractors prepared to fix power lines, managers started up the storm emergency center, and operators reviewed the list of facilities that should — no matter what — keep power during an emergency: 35 of them on Oncor's list were natural gas facilities that deliver fuel to power plants. As Sunday turned to Monday, Allen Nye, the CEO of Oncor, one of the state's largest transmission and delivery utilities, thought his team was ready. But the situation rapidly deteriorated as the storm bore down on Texas. At 1:20 a.m., the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state's power grid, ordered the first cut of power to bring demand down to match an extremely low power supply as the frigid temperatures caused power plants to rapidly trip offline. Oncor's team, along with other utilities, began a plan to roll outages at 15- and 30-minute intervals. But just before 2 a.m., ERCOT ordered them to take even more power offline — then kept ordering more reductions. By late Monday morning, ERCOT had ordered 20,000 megawatts of power offline; Oncor's share was 8,000 megawatts, or enough to power 1.6 million homes. Rolling the outages “quickly became impossible," Nye said. “We sat there praying that electrons showed up." With millions of Texans without power, Nye got an urgent request from DeAnn Walker, then chair of the Public Utility Commission: She needed Oncor to flip the switch back on to certain natural gas facilities that couldn't deliver fuel to power plants without electricity. A PUC spokesperson said Walker was “ceaselessly" on the phone, calling Nye about dozens of natural gas facilities that weren't on Oncor's “critical" list. That meant that Oncor, which delivers power to the Permian Basin — the state's most productive oil and natural gas basin — had unwittingly shut off some of the state's power supply when it followed orders to begin the outages. The desperate scramble to power up natural gas facilities again exposed a major structural flaw in Texas' electric grid: Oncor and other utilities didn't have good lists of what they should consider critical infrastructure, including natural gas facilities — simply because natural gas companies failed to fill out a form or didn't know the form existed, company executives, regulators and experts said. It's the electricity customer's responsibility to fill out the form, which is provided by electric utilities, usually online (ERCOT provides a second avenue with its own form). Retail electricity providers inform residents and businesses of their right to apply, according to a PUC rule. At one point during February's winter storm, more than half of the state's natural gas supply was shut down due to power outages, frozen equipment and weather conditions, analysts estimate. More than 9,000 megawatts of power outages were caused by power plants not getting enough gas, enough to power 1.8 million Texas homes and accounting for at least 20% of the total outages during the week of the storm, according to ERCOT's estimate. As natural gas stopped flowing from the oil patch to power plants, big natural gas pipelines and production companies including Kinder Morgan, Targa Resources Corp. and Diamondback Energy Inc., kept Nye's phone ringing off the hook during the storm, requesting that power be restored to their facilities, he would later tell state legislators at hearings the week after the storm. “I don't know where [power plants] are buying their gas, and I don't know how that gas is getting to them," Nye said during his testimony. “They've gotta tell me, or, whoever's delivering that gas [does]. Take your pick." Woody Rickerson, vice president of grid planning and operations at ERCOT, said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that getting gas facilities back online in the middle of a power crisis further complicated a delicate situation. Each time a utility called to inform ERCOT they were going to cut power somewhere else so they could restore power to a critical natural gas fuel facility, grid operators worried that supply and demand would see-saw in the wrong direction. Any power they brought back online had to be equal to what they cut. “I was surprised at the amount of [critical] infrastructure that hadn't been identified," said Rickerson, who was part of an essential ERCOT team that stayed in or near the control room the entire week. “There were phone calls every day." By Wednesday, Feb. 17, natural gas supply in the state hit its lowest point during the storm, experts said. Nye told legislators during his testimony that they were so concerned about the supply of natural gas that his chief operating officer called him and said: “I'm just going to turn on the Permian and see what happens." “And we just turned it on," he said. By the end of the week, Oncor had added 168 new natural gas facilities to its “critical" list — a nearly five-fold increase from just a few days prior. A month after the storm, lawmakers are investigating multiple failures that led to 4.9 million customers losing power, some of them for days during subfreezing temperatures in a storm that caused at least 57 deaths statewide. “In my opinion, if we had kept the supply [of natural gas] on, we would've had minor disruptions," James Cisarik, chairman of the Texas Energy Reliability Council, told legislators. “[Texas] has all the assets, we just have to make sure we evaluate every link in that chain to keep it going." The failures were years in the making: There is no requirement for natural gas and other companies that operate crucial parts of the grid to register as “critical." And a trend toward electrifying key components of the state's natural gas infrastructure in recent decades, plus the lack of a single agency to oversee all parts of the electric delivery system, created what Kenneth Medlock, a fellow in energy and resource economics at the Rice University's Baker Institute, called a “single point of failure" — one that state regulators were blind to. “That's a failure of regulation," said Medlock, who is also the senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice. “That's all it is. It's relatively simple." Power cut to fuel source A few days before Winter Storm Uri barreled into Texas, more than 100 natural gas production and transportation executives, power generation executives, regulators and ERCOT engineers, tuned in to a conference call. The goal: Make sure the natural gas system remained functional during the storm. The Texas Energy Reliability Council — a voluntary body with no regulatory authority — usually meets twice a year. Rickerson, the ERCOT vice president, said the primary conversation before the storm hit was about residential heating, which is the top priority for delivering natural gas during times of short supply. Power generation is much lower on the list, and TERC advised the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and natural gas industry, including pipelines, to move it up to No. 2. But that move wouldn't prevent the coming disaster. When the storm hit that weekend, the group's participants began to report “big supply cuts" of natural gas. Production had plummeted at the wellheads — crews couldn't go out on icy roads and the water that comes up from the ground with oil and gas during production froze and created a mess for operators if trucks couldn't get to the wellheads to move it. The power cuts to wellheads, processing plants and compressors dramatically exacerbated the shortage. The daily conference calls became dire. It quickly became clear to TERC members that some new natural gas facilities hadn't yet filled out the form to be added to their utility's critical infrastructure list. Some had interpreted “critical" narrowly and assumed they didn't qualify. Still others that were not considered critical before the storm suddenly became critical when other facilities froze. So, in the middle of one of the worst winter storms in Texas history, Cisarik, Rickerson and others advised companies of what their emergency response should be: Fill out the form. “Ideally, every critical [facility] would've been registered before the storm," Rickerson said. “That didn't happen. The only way to get [utilities] aware is to fill out the form." During the legislative hearings after the storm, major natural gas companies said they didn't know there was a form to ensure that their power wasn't turned off. “It was the first time that we had learned about a form, as well, to my knowledge," said Grant Ruckel, vice president of government affairs for Energy Transfer, one of the largest natural gas pipeline companies in the U.S., during testimony to the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce. The committee's chair, Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, stopped him. “Really? It's not like you just came into existence — the business has been around a while," Hancock said. “And yet, you just learned about a form from ERCOT that you needed to identify those key locations." State Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, asked industry representatives during a House hearing the week after the storm to do what he said the state has not: “Since the state hasn't done a very good job of telling people you need to sign up as critical infrastructure, will you get the word out to your members that they need to and they need to now?" Geren asked Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, the largest oil and gas industry group in Texas. Staples assured him he would. “A vicious downward spiral" When Texas deregulated its electricity market in the early 2000s, making supply and demand the primary forces for the price of power and increasing competition, wholesale power prices fell. That made it cheaper to electrify natural gas compressor stations and other equipment rather than the traditional method of using the natural gas produced in the field to run the compressor's turbines or engines, energy experts said. Reliance on electricity, however, made the state's electric power system a loop rather than a chain: Electricity relied on natural gas production, and natural gas production relied on electricity. If anything goes wrong with any part of the loop, it creates what Medlock, the Rice University expert, calls “a vicious downward spiral." Deliveries of gas are slowed and supply dwindles. Power plants can't generate as much electricity, making the problem worse. “If anything in that circle breaks, the whole circle breaks," he said. “We cannot just harden power generation if we do not harden the natural gas system," Mauricio Gutierrez, the CEO of NRG Energy Inc., a large Houston-based power generation company, told legislators. “We have a system-wide problem." Some regulators and experts believe that Texas' power outages would have been minimal, or at least shortened, if the natural gas supply system had not lost power. Christi Craddick, chair of the Railroad Commission, told lawmakers during testimony the week after the storm that outages “caused a domino effect," adding that “any issues of frozen [natural gas] equipment could have been avoided had the production facilities not been shut down by power outages." Supply shortages caused U.S. natural gas prices to spike more than 700% during the storm. But no matter the price, the system couldn't deliver enough of it to power plants. Cisarik, the TERC chairman, explained to legislators that, particularly in major metro areas, natural gas pipelines are contractually obligated to prioritize residential customers; power plants typically don't have similar contracts guaranteeing their fuel supply. So when demand for natural gas spiked during the frigid weather, homes got natural gas and some power plants didn't, he said. Still, as Medlock, the Rice University expert, put it: “There's no getting around the fact that there just wasn't enough gas on the system." Calls for a new agency The chaos in the natural gas system during the storm has sparked calls for a new regulatory agency, or giving additional powers to the Public Utility Commission, to ensure regulators can identify gaps and weak points between the natural gas industry and the electric power industry. “Could [a single agency] make it better? Just think about everything that has happened here," Kenneth Mercado, executive vice president of the company's electric utility business at CenterPoint Energy, told the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce on Feb. 26. “Gas not talking to electric, electric not talking to gas." James Robb, the president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which has some authority to regulate power generators in the U.S., said during a U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing on March 11 that he believed the regulation of natural gas supply for the purpose of electric generation, “needs to be rethought." “The natural gas system was not built or operated with electric reliability first in mind," Robb told the committee. “Policy action will be needed to ensure reliable fuel supply for electric generation." In an interview with the Tribune, Robb said regulators don't have enough oversight of the natural gas supply system in the U.S., given how much its role has grown in the electric power system — a result of the increasing replacement of coal-fired and nuclear power plants with natural gas, wind and solar generation. America's fracking boom has led to an explosion of natural gas production — and that gas fueled 40% of all power generation in 2020, more than coal and nuclear, the next two largest sources, combined, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But the industry isn't set up to make delivering fuel for reliable electricity a priority. “Our gas system, quite frankly, is designed for industrial [use], and space heating. It's not designed to serve large power plants," Robb said. “We don't think of gas as the same criticality as we do power. That makes sense, except when you realize a power system without reliable gas supply is not that useful." Pat Wood, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who previously served on Texas' PUC, told the Tribune that the critical “interplay" between the gas supply system and the electric power system was pointed out a decade ago in a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report, and since then, their reliance upon one another has only grown. He said having a single regulatory body that could oversee both gas suppliers and electric generation in Texas is “long overdue," but added that in Texas, pushing for additional oversight of the politically powerful oil and gas industry is a “pipe dream." “Getting that all under one purview seems to make a lot of sense," said Wood, who has worked in the energy industry for decades in Houston. “I know the politics are very intense, but if we were thinking of the good government thing to do, I think a lot of people would agree with me on that one." Disclosure: CenterPoint Energy, NRG Energy, Oncor and Rice University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

On Valentine’s Day, the major utility that supplies electricity to West Texas readied for a severe winter storm. Hired contractors prepared to fix power lines, managers started up the storm emergency center, and operators reviewed the list of facilities that should — no matter what — keep power during an emergency: 35 of them on Oncor’s list were natural gas facilities that deliver fuel to power plants. As Sunday turned to Monday, Allen Nye, the CEO of Oncor, one of the state’s largest transmission and delivery utilities, thought his team was ready. But the situation rapidly deteriorated as the storm bore down on Texas. At 1:20 a.m., the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state’s power grid, ordered the first cut of power to bring demand down to match an extremely low power supply as the frigid temperatures caused power plants to rapidly trip offline. Oncor’s team, along with other utilities, began a plan to roll outages at 15- and 30-minute intervals. But just before 2 a.m., ERCOT ordered them to take even more power offline — then kept ordering more reductions. By late Monday morning, ERCOT had ordered 20,000 megawatts of power offline; Oncor’s share was 8,000 megawatts, or enough to power 1.6 million homes. Rolling the outages “quickly became impossible,” Nye said. “We sat there praying that electrons showed up.” With millions of Texans without power, Nye got an urgent request from DeAnn Walker, then chair of the Public Utility Commission: She needed Oncor to flip the switch back on to certain natural gas facilities that couldn’t deliver fuel to power plants without electricity. A PUC spokesperson said Walker was “ceaselessly” on the phone, calling Nye about dozens of natural gas facilities that weren't on Oncor’s “critical” list. That meant that Oncor, which delivers power to the Permian Basin — the state’s most productive oil and natural gas basin — had unwittingly shut off some of the state’s power supply when it followed orders to begin the outages. The desperate scramble to power up natural gas facilities again exposed a major structural flaw in Texas’ electric grid: Oncor and other utilities didn't have good lists of what they should consider critical infrastructure, including natural gas facilities — simply because natural gas companies failed to fill out a form or didn’t know the form existed, company executives, regulators and experts said. It’s the electricity customer’s responsibility to fill out the form, which is provided by electric utilities, usually online (ERCOT provides a second avenue with its own form). Retail electricity providers inform residents and businesses of their right to apply, according to a PUC rule. At one point during February’s winter storm, more than half of the state’s natural gas supply was shut down due to power outages, frozen equipment and weather conditions, analysts estimate. More than 9,000 megawatts of power outages were caused by power plants not getting enough gas, enough to power 1.8 million Texas homes and accounting for at least 20% of the total outages during the week of the storm, according to ERCOT’s estimate. As natural gas stopped flowing from the oil patch to power plants, big natural gas pipelines and production companies including Kinder Morgan, Targa Resources Corp. and Diamondback Energy Inc., kept Nye’s phone ringing off the hook during the storm, requesting that power be restored to their facilities, he would later tell state legislators at hearings the week after the storm. “I don’t know where [power plants] are buying their gas, and I don’t know how that gas is getting to them,” Nye said during his testimony. “They’ve gotta tell me, or, whoever’s delivering that gas [does]. Take your pick.” Woody Rickerson, vice president of grid planning and operations at ERCOT, said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that getting gas facilities back online in the middle of a power crisis further complicated a delicate situation. Each time a utility called to inform ERCOT they were going to cut power somewhere else so they could restore power to a critical natural gas fuel facility, grid operators worried that supply and demand would see-saw in the wrong direction. Any power they brought back online had to be equal to what they cut. “I was surprised at the amount of [critical] infrastructure that hadn’t been identified,” said Rickerson, who was part of an essential ERCOT team that stayed in or near the control room the entire week. “There were phone calls every day.” By Wednesday, Feb. 17, natural gas supply in the state hit its lowest point during the storm, experts said. Nye told legislators during his testimony that they were so concerned about the supply of natural gas that his chief operating officer called him and said: “I’m just going to turn on the Permian and see what happens.” “And we just turned it on,” he said. By the end of the week, Oncor had added 168 new natural gas facilities to its “critical” list — a nearly five-fold increase from just a few days prior. A month after the storm, lawmakers are investigating multiple failures that led to 4.9 million customers losing power, some of them for days during subfreezing temperatures in a storm that caused at least 57 deaths statewide. “In my opinion, if we had kept the supply [of natural gas] on, we would’ve had minor disruptions,” James Cisarik, chairman of the Texas Energy Reliability Council, told legislators. “[Texas] has all the assets, we just have to make sure we evaluate every link in that chain to keep it going.” The failures were years in the making: There is no requirement for natural gas and other companies that operate crucial parts of the grid to register as “critical.” And a trend toward electrifying key components of the state’s natural gas infrastructure in recent decades, plus the lack of a single agency to oversee all parts of the electric delivery system, created what Kenneth Medlock, a fellow in energy and resource economics at the Rice University’s Baker Institute, called a “single point of failure” — one that state regulators were blind to. “That’s a failure of regulation,” said Medlock, who is also the senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice. “That's all it is. It's relatively simple.” Power cut to fuel source A few days before Winter Storm Uri barreled into Texas, more than 100 natural gas production and transportation executives, power generation executives, regulators and ERCOT engineers, tuned in to a conference call. The goal: Make sure the natural gas system remained functional during the storm. The Texas Energy Reliability Council — a voluntary body with no regulatory authority — usually meets twice a year. Rickerson, the ERCOT vice president, said the primary conversation before the storm hit was about residential heating, which is the top priority for delivering natural gas during times of short supply. Power generation is much lower on the list, and TERC advised the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and natural gas industry, including pipelines, to move it up to No. 2. But that move wouldn’t prevent the coming disaster. When the storm hit that weekend, the group’s participants began to report “big supply cuts” of natural gas. Production had plummeted at the wellheads — crews couldn’t go out on icy roads and the water that comes up from the ground with oil and gas during production froze and created a mess for operators if trucks couldn’t get to the wellheads to move it. The power cuts to wellheads, processing plants and compressors dramatically exacerbated the shortage. The daily conference calls became dire. It quickly became clear to TERC members that some new natural gas facilities hadn’t yet filled out the form to be added to their utility’s critical infrastructure list. Some had interpreted “critical” narrowly and assumed they didn’t qualify. Still others that were not considered critical before the storm suddenly became critical when other facilities froze. So, in the middle of one of the worst winter storms in Texas history, Cisarik, Rickerson and others advised companies of what their emergency response should be: Fill out the form. “Ideally, every critical [facility] would’ve been registered before the storm,” Rickerson said. “That didn’t happen. The only way to get [utilities] aware is to fill out the form.” During the legislative hearings after the storm, major natural gas companies said they didn’t know there was a form to ensure that their power wasn’t turned off. “It was the first time that we had learned about a form, as well, to my knowledge,” said Grant Ruckel, vice president of government affairs for Energy Transfer, one of the largest natural gas pipeline companies in the U.S., during testimony to the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce. The committee’s chair, Sen. Kelly Hancock, R-North Richland Hills, stopped him. “Really? It’s not like you just came into existence — the business has been around a while,” Hancock said. “And yet, you just learned about a form from ERCOT that you needed to identify those key locations.” State Rep. Charlie Geren, R-Fort Worth, asked industry representatives during a House hearing the week after the storm to do what he said the state has not: “Since the state hasn’t done a very good job of telling people you need to sign up as critical infrastructure, will you get the word out to your members that they need to and they need to now?” Geren asked Todd Staples, president of the Texas Oil and Gas Association, the largest oil and gas industry group in Texas. Staples assured him he would. “A vicious downward spiral” When Texas deregulated its electricity market in the early 2000s, making supply and demand the primary forces for the price of power and increasing competition, wholesale power prices fell. That made it cheaper to electrify natural gas compressor stations and other equipment rather than the traditional method of using the natural gas produced in the field to run the compressor’s turbines or engines, energy experts said. Reliance on electricity, however, made the state’s electric power system a loop rather than a chain: Electricity relied on natural gas production, and natural gas production relied on electricity. If anything goes wrong with any part of the loop, it creates what Medlock, the Rice University expert, calls “a vicious downward spiral.” Deliveries of gas are slowed and supply dwindles. Power plants can’t generate as much electricity, making the problem worse. “If anything in that circle breaks, the whole circle breaks,” he said. “We cannot just harden power generation if we do not harden the natural gas system,” Mauricio Gutierrez, the CEO of NRG Energy Inc., a large Houston-based power generation company, told legislators. “We have a system-wide problem.” Some regulators and experts believe that Texas’ power outages would have been minimal, or at least shortened, if the natural gas supply system had not lost power. Christi Craddick, chair of the Railroad Commission, told lawmakers during testimony the week after the storm that outages “caused a domino effect,” adding that “any issues of frozen [natural gas] equipment could have been avoided had the production facilities not been shut down by power outages.” Supply shortages caused U.S. natural gas prices to spike more than 700% during the storm. But no matter the price, the system couldn’t deliver enough of it to power plants. Cisarik, the TERC chairman, explained to legislators that, particularly in major metro areas, natural gas pipelines are contractually obligated to prioritize residential customers; power plants typically don’t have similar contracts guaranteeing their fuel supply. So when demand for natural gas spiked during the frigid weather, homes got natural gas and some power plants didn’t, he said. Still, as Medlock, the Rice University expert, put it: “There’s no getting around the fact that there just wasn’t enough gas on the system.” Calls for a new agency The chaos in the natural gas system during the storm has sparked calls for a new regulatory agency, or giving additional powers to the Public Utility Commission, to ensure regulators can identify gaps and weak points between the natural gas industry and the electric power industry. “Could [a single agency] make it better? Just think about everything that has happened here,” Kenneth Mercado, executive vice president of the company’s electric utility business at CenterPoint Energy, told the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce on Feb. 26. “Gas not talking to electric, electric not talking to gas.” James Robb, the president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., which has some authority to regulate power generators in the U.S., said during a U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing on March 11 that he believed the regulation of natural gas supply for the purpose of electric generation, “needs to be rethought.” “The natural gas system was not built or operated with electric reliability first in mind,” Robb told the committee. “Policy action will be needed to ensure reliable fuel supply for electric generation.” In an interview with the Tribune, Robb said regulators don’t have enough oversight of the natural gas supply system in the U.S., given how much its role has grown in the electric power system — a result of the increasing replacement of coal-fired and nuclear power plants with natural gas, wind and solar generation. America’s fracking boom has led to an explosion of natural gas production — and that gas fueled 40% of all power generation in 2020, more than coal and nuclear, the next two largest sources, combined, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But the industry isn’t set up to make delivering fuel for reliable electricity a priority. “Our gas system, quite frankly, is designed for industrial [use], and space heating. It’s not designed to serve large power plants,” Robb said. “We don’t think of gas as the same criticality as we do power. That makes sense, except when you realize a power system without reliable gas supply is not that useful.” Pat Wood, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who previously served on Texas’ PUC, told the Tribune that the critical “interplay” between the gas supply system and the electric power system was pointed out a decade ago in a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report, and since then, their reliance upon one another has only grown. He said having a single regulatory body that could oversee both gas suppliers and electric generation in Texas is “long overdue,” but added that in Texas, pushing for additional oversight of the politically powerful oil and gas industry is a “pipe dream.” “Getting that all under one purview seems to make a lot of sense,” said Wood, who has worked in the energy industry for decades in Houston. “I know the politics are very intense, but if we were thinking of the good government thing to do, I think a lot of people would agree with me on that one.” Disclosure: CenterPoint Energy, NRG Energy, Oncor and Rice University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. At least 57 people died in Texas as a result of last month’s winter storm, according to preliminary data the state health department released Monday. The largest number of deaths — at least 25 — occurred in Harris County, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported. The deaths occurred in at least 25 counties between Feb. 11 and March 5, the state agency said. The majority of verified deaths were associated with hypothermia, but health officials said some were also caused by motor vehicle wrecks, “carbon monoxide poisoning, medical equipment failure, falls and fire.” The preliminary data is “subject to change” as state disaster epidemiologists gather additional information and additional deaths are verified, the agency said. The information will be updated weekly, it said. The winter storm plunged large swaths of Texas into subfreezing temperatures and overwhelmed the state's electricity infrastructure, causing massive power outages. At the height of the crisis, nearly 4.5 million Texas homes and businesses were without power. That's because nearly half of the total power generation capacity for the main state electricity grid was offline as weather conditions caused failures in every type of power source: natural gas, coal, wind and nuclear. Millions of Texans went days without power. In marathon legislative hearings, Texas lawmakers grilled public regulators and energy grid officials about how power outages happened and why Texans weren't given more warnings about the danger. But policy observers blamed the power system failure on the legislators and state agencies, who they say did not properly heed the warnings of previous storms or account for more extreme weather events warned of by climate scientists. Instead, Texas prioritized the free market. Still, lawmakers have called for investigations of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit that operates the power grid spanning most of the state, and the Texas Public Utility Commission, which oversees the state’s electric and water utilities. Two board members of the utility commission and six members of the ERCOT board resigned. The ERCOT CEO was fired after sharp criticism that they had not done enough to prepare for winter storms. Lawmakers have also filed a slate of bills in response to the power outages last month. The proposals include “weatherizing” the state’s energy infrastructure to protect it from extreme weather, creating a statewide alert system for impending extreme events and improving communication between state agencies to better coordinate during disasters. On Monday, the Texas Senate suspended its own rules to quickly pass a bill to force the state’s utility regulator to reverse billions of dollars in charges for wholesale electricity during the winter storm. The cost of electricity during the winter storm has emerged as a surprise hot-button issue in this year's legislative session after an independent market monitor estimated that the electric grid operator overbilled power companies around the time of the storm.

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, in a speech Friday at a major national conservative gathering, joked about his recent trip to Cancún during the Texas winter weather crisis and promised that former President Donald Trump would be a lasting force in the Republican Party. Cruz appeared at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, as President Joe Biden headed to Texas to see the state's recovery from last week's storm, which left millions of Texans without power and potable water. The Democratic president was set to be joined in Houston by the state's senior U.S. senator, John Cornyn, as well as Gov. Greg Abbott, both Republicans. Cruz opened his CPAC speech by poking fun at his ill-timed visit to Cancún, which sparked a national uproar late last week. Cruz returned early from his trip, calling it a "mistake." “I gotta say, Orlando is awesome. It's not as nice as Cancún," Cruz said, pausing amid laughter in the crowd. “But it's nice." Cruz went on to use the address to rally Republicans against the Biden agenda and for the next two election cycles. At one point, he brought up Trump and said there were some in Washington D.C., who want to move on from him. “Let me tell you this right now: Donald Trump ain't goin' anywhere," Cruz said, arguing the GOP has become the party of “not just the country clubs" but also blue-collar workers. “That is our party and these deplorables are here to stay," Cruz added, referring to the term Hillary Clinton used to describe some of Trump's supporters in the 2016 presidential race. Cruz led up to the declaration by referencing a report Thursday that an old intraparty nemesis, ex-U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, told Cruz to “go f--k yourself" in an off-script moment while recording the audio version of his new memoir. “Yesterday, John Boehner made some news," Cruz said. “He suggested that I do something that was anatomically impossible — to which my response was, 'Who's John Boehner?'"

Did Senator Ted Cruz escape the Texas disaster with his wife and two young children by flying to Cancun and leave behind the family dog? Cruz returned to Texas this evening, after a reporter just after midnight Thursday morning revealed the Texas Senator was in Mexico while millions of his constituents literally did their best to not freeze to death. "Just drove by Ted Cruz's house in Houston. His lights are off but a neighbor told me the block got its power back last night. Also, Ted appears to have left behind the family poodle," Texas Monthly writer-at-large Michael Hardy wrote on Twitter. Just drove by Ted Cruz's house in Houston. His lights are off but a neighbor told me the block got its power back last night. Also, Ted appears to have left behind the family poodle. pic.twitter.com/TmLyGQkASy — Michael Hardy (@mkerrhardy) February 18, 2021 To be clear, Cruz told reporters, "we had no heat and no power." Hardy also wrote up his experience for a story in New York Magazine. It turns out a security guard, parked in the driveway, says he was taking care of the family pet. "Supplied with Cruz's address by a knowledgeable friend, I drove the fifteen minutes from my Houston apartment to the uber-rich River Oaks neighborhood where Cruz lives," Hardy writes. "From the street, Cruz's white, Colonial Revival-style mansion looked dark and uninhabited. A neighbor informed me that the block had indeed lost power before finally getting it back late Wednesday night. A glance at the lighted lanterns flanking the doorways of other homes on the block confirmed this. The senator's story appeared to check out. But then I heard barking and noticed a small, white dog looking out the bottom right pane of glass in the senator's front door. Had Cruz left his dog behind?" As I approached to knock, a man stepped out of the Suburban parked in Cruz's driveway. “Is this Senator Cruz's house?" I asked. He said it was, that Cruz wasn't home, and identified himself as a security guard. When asked who was taking care of the dog, the guard volunteered that he was. Reassured of the dog's well-being, I returned to my car. Before leaving, though, I took a photo of the house from my car window, making sure not to include the house address. Hardy also tweeted this: The poodle's name appears to be Snowflake. Which is probably how it felt being left behind without heat in subzero weather — Michael Hardy (@mkerrhardy) February 18, 2021

Companies and entities at every level of the Texas energy supply chain are anxiously waiting to see whether the Texas Legislature will retroactively adjust the price of power in the state's electricity market during the February blackouts in which more than 50 people died. Some have said they would benefit from a decision to readjust the market, while others have said they would be hurt by such a move. But who would be helped or hurt, and by how much, is unclear — and lawmakers and regulators have not said how they would retroactively change the state's electricity market more than a month after those prices settled. Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has pressed regulators, lawmakers and even Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to readjust what happened in the market during the winter storm. In doing so, Patrick has turned the conversation about repricing into a political battle between the three most powerful people in Texas government. Experts inside and outside the Capitol described this debate about repricing the market as a political sideshow about an issue that does not impact a majority of Texas electricity consumers and would do nothing to protect Texans from the next time extreme weather hits the state. "I think it might actually do more harm than good," Joshua Rhodes, research associate at the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin, said of the prospect of repricing the market. In Texas, where private companies — as opposed to government — are largely the ones who invest in the energy space, Rhodes said: "If the rules change after the game, that may have a chilling effect on companies wanting to come in and invest money in Texas." Rhodes said there would be fewer companies wanting to invest money in the Texas energy industry where the regulatory process is uncertain — and repricing would create great uncertainty. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas manages the state's power grid and controls the prices power generators charge to retail electric providers, such as power companies and city utilities. Facing widespread outages during the storm, ERCOT set the price of electricity at $9,000 per megawatt-hour — the highest amount allowed. Power generators typically sell electricity for much lower prices, sometimes even at a loss. The average wholesale price for energy last year was $21 per megawatt-hour, according to Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. The real profits come during a handful of hours each year — usually in the summer — when a large demand for energy pushes the price toward the $9,000 limit, Cohan said. "Just like lottery tickets that don't pay off, most of the time the power that the companies are selling is almost worthless," he said. The controversy stems from a 32-hour period during the freeze when prices were left high, even though ERCOT was no longer forcing outages due to a limited energy supply. An independent market monitor found that ERCOT erred in keeping the $9,000 cap in place, resulting in $16 billion in unnecessary charges to power companies and others. The monitor recommended energy sold during that period be repriced at a lower rate, which would allow ERCOT to claw back about $4.2 billion in payments. Outgoing ERCOT CEO Bill Magness insisted the high prices were necessary to incentivize generators to send power to the grid and to keep big customers from turning their power back on and increasing demand. The power to reprice the market is in the hands of the state's utility regulator, the Public Utility Commission. The agency is run by a three-person board of directors appointed by the governor, and only one member — chair Arthur D'Andrea — remains after multiple resignations. Even he submitted his resignation to Abbott this week, but committed to remain until Abbott names a replacement and the state Senate confirms them, so the agency doesn't go without at least one commissioner. The PUC oversees ERCOT, and while Abbott aimed his criticism in the aftermath of the blackouts at ERCOT, Patrick and many lawmakers have been zeroing in on the PUC. Most of those who favor repricing have offered no public thoughts about how to actually carry out the proposal. It's not as simple as lowering the price of wholesale electricity. Prices are set based on supply and demand and are pegged to specific dates and times. "In practice, it's not as easy as when it's, 'I'm a consumer, you overcharge me, I dispute a credit card charge,'" said Caitlin Smith, an energy adviser in Austin. "It's repricing a market." Patrick, according to a spokesperson, said the price should be changed to what it would have been at 11:55 p.m. on Feb. 18, when ERCOT was no longer forcing outages. Already, companies and entities at every tier of the state's energy system have been impacted. Some have lost large amounts of money and filed for bankruptcy, such as Brazos Electric Power Cooperative, which supplies electricity to 1.5 million customers. In filing for bankruptcy, the Waco-based company cited a $1.8 billion debt to ERCOT. Brazos is one of an unknown number of electricity companies facing enormous charges in the aftermath of the blackouts — and the company could benefit from the state retroactively reducing the price of electricity. Experts are skeptical that repricing the market would actually save companies like Brazos from bankruptcy. D'Andrea and then-Commissioner Shelly Botkin voted in early March against repricing, making a similar argument. The financial pain has already been felt among companies and entities, a result that would be wiped away by repricing the market, said D'Andrea. "You don't know who you're hurting," he said. "And you think you're protecting the consumer, and it turns out you're bankrupting [someone else]." Denton Municipal Electric, an electric provider serving about 60,000 customers in the north Texas city of Denton, lost an estimated $100 to $130 million from the power outages, general manager Tony Puente said. The company, which also runs a natural gas-fired power plant, would be harmed even further by the state repricing the market during the week of the outages, Puente said. The cost of gas also spiked during the storm, a financial burden for many power plants running on that fuel. But the state cannot retroactively change the price of gas during the outages like it can with electricity. "Any repricing without a change on the natural gas side would pose a negative impact on our customers," Puente said in an interview. Puente said he is still unsure how much money exactly was lost due to the outages. But once he's able to determine a figure, "then we've got to look at what financing strategies we can put in place," possibly a decadeslong process to potentially offset the cost for local consumers. Some companies and cooperatives fared well during the outages. Mike Kezar, general manager of South Texas Electric Cooperative, testified to lawmakers that it emerged without taking a financial hit. But the company would likely take a blow from a market reprice, he said. Experts said there is no way to know which companies or entities did well or were harmed following the outages unless those outfits have said so publicly. The city-owned utility Austin Energy made money — earning $54 million as a result of the outages. In San Antonio, the municipally owned CPS Energy lost an estimated $1 billion from the outages — and was recently approved to borrow money from the city to partially make up for the massive loss. With safety nets being deployed to aid entities such as CPS Energy, the debate over repricing the market is only further complicated with time. More than a month has now passed since winter weather swept across Texas and left millions without power and water. The lieutenant governor and others who support repricing have said the primary consideration for doing so would be the benefit to consumers. But repricing would not help the Texans most devastated by the high energy prices during winter storm. In the immediate aftermath, a number of Texans reported receiving astronomical energy bills — some as high as $20,000. Those customers belonged to indexed retail electric plans, where prices fluctuate with the price of wholesale electricity. Indexed plans could result in greater savings than the more common fixed-rate plans. But they also carry incredible risk, since they're vulnerable to large market swings like those that occurred during the winter storm. Repricing would not have any effect on indexed plans, experts said. Griddy — the most prominent Texas provider of this kind — filed for bankruptcy on Monday and is under investigation by both the PUC and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office. As part of its court filings, the company said it would forgive the nearly $29 million owed by its 29,000 customers. Paxton's office further said it would work to reimburse customers who had already paid. The showdown over repricing took center stage at the Texas Legislature this week. The state Senate on Monday suspended its own rules and hastily ushered through Senate Bill 2142, which would force ERCOT to reverse billions in charges stemming from the winter storm. Included in the legislation was a deadline giving the grid operator until Saturday to act. State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, told The Texas Tribune that repricing is needed to moderate the market. The $9,000 cap was never intended to be in place for days at a time, he said, so companies' extreme gains or losses need to be reined in. "The idea of blaming the losers and crediting the winners, I think was just farcical," Johnson said. "Because the market wasn't functioning. And so a repricing, or a price correction in this instance, at least compresses us back into the boundaries of reality, or closer to it." But it's not immediately clear whether or how much the alleged overbilling will affect regular Texans and what impact the Senate legislation would have on people's future electricity bills. Retail power providers buy power off the state market and then sell it to residential or commercial customers. At least some of the additional costs for the retail providers would seem likely to be passed on to consumers. But the financial hit varies from provider to provider. And some retail providers also supply power to the grid, adding more to the uncertainty. Patrick contends repricing would benefit consumers, according to a spokesperson, who did not provide any details about how it would help Texans. "Lowering the price of energy during the storm ultimately will lower the cost to consumers in both the short and long term," the spokesperson said. State Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, the bill's sponsor, and state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, whose committee heard the legislation, did not respond to requests for comment. State Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, suggested that the uncertainty stems from ERCOT and the PUC because the agencies have not "looked at [repricing] close enough." "To say that it would hurt other people or cause some catastrophe in the market — we don't know that yet," Alvarado said. "Nobody has shown us. Nobody has said, 'Well here's why we can't act on your bill, Senate, because if we do it, here's what it triggers.' " On Tuesday, the Texas House dampened senators' hopes that legislative action on repricing would occur this week. House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, said in a statement that there had been "no error" in the operator's prices. He further expressed skepticism about reversing the charges, saying in a statement that doing so "based on disagreement with PUC and ERCOT's management decisions is an extraordinary government intervention into the free market." Abbott has largely avoided taking a position on the issue. He previously named "inaccurate and excessive charges" after the storm as a legislative emergency item. But on Monday, the governor raised concerns about the constitutionality of repricing. D'Andrea, the outgoing PUC chair, has repeatedly said that repricing would be "illegal." Abbott instead put the onus on the Legislature to "weed through all these complexities." On Wednesday, Paxton released an opinion that argued the PUC has "complete authority" to order ERCOT to reprice electricity, rebuffing Abbott's and D'Andrea's concerns. The House finished the week without taking up the Senate bill. Meanwhile, the House State Affairs Committee passed a slate of bills that would address the power grid's vulnerabilities and change the governance structure of ERCOT, among other things. Patrick turned his attention to Abbott, urging the governor at a Thursday afternoon press conference to take executive action to reverse the charges. "The governor is a very powerful person," Patrick said, ratcheting up pressure on Abbott to act after he refused to publicly back the Senate's approach. "He can do anything he wants."

Under some of the plans, when demand increases, prices rise. The goal, architects of the system say, is to balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their usage and power suppliers to create more electricity. But when last week’s crisis hit and power systems faltered, the state’s Public Utilities Commission ordered that the price cap be raised to its maximum limit of $9 per kilowatt-hour, easily pushing many customers’ daily electric costs above $100. And in some cases, like Mr. Willoughby’s, bills rose by more than 50 times the normal cost. Many of the people who have reported extremely high charges, including Mr. Willoughby, are customers of Griddy, a small company in Houston that provides electricity at wholesale prices, which can quickly change based on supply and demand. The company passes the wholesale price directly to customers, charging an additional $9.99 monthly fee. Much of the time, the rate is considered affordable. But the model can be risky: Last week, foreseeing a huge jump in wholesale prices, the company encouraged all of its customers — about 29,000 people — to switch to another provider when the storm arrived. But many were unable to do so. Katrina Tanner, a Griddy customer who lives in Nevada, Texas, said she had been charged $6,200 already this month, more than five times what she paid in all of 2020. She began using Griddy at a friend’s suggestion a couple of years ago and was pleased at the time with how simple it was to sign up. As the storm rolled through during the past week, however, she kept opening the company’s app on her phone and seeing her bill “just rising, rising, rising,” Ms. Tanner said. Griddy was able to take the money she owed directly from her bank account, and she now has just $200 left. She suspects that she was only able to keep that much because her bank stopped Griddy from taking more.

"Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd was once again the recipient of a furious backlash on Sunday after he opened his show by asserting President Joe Biden is in the midst of a "political crisis" at the same time Americans are receiving much-needed stimulus checks and COVID-19 vaccinations rates are exceeding the administration's promises. Standing in front of a screen showing immigrants at the southern border, Todd stated, "It's fair to call the deteriorating situation at the U.S.-Mexican border a crisis, even if the Biden administration refuses to use that word." He then added, "But it's more than that. It's a political crisis for the new president with no easy way out." That set off critics of the NBC host, of which there are more than a few, with calls to fire Todd -- once again. You can see some responses below:

NBC Host Chuck Todd suggested on Sunday that Democratic Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg agrees that former President Barack Obama is to blame for President Donald Trump’s ascendency into power. Buttigieg, however, refused to take the bait. “The vice president is hitting you hard, implying that you are attacking the Obama presidency,” Todd said. “Let me ask the question this way. In the second term of the Obama presidency, what do you think they could have done differently that might have prevented the rise of Donald Trump?” Buttigieg insisted that he had “the Obama White House’s back again and again.” “No, I understand that,” Todd interrupted. “Why did we get Donald Trump in your view. And could this have been prevented by the Obama/Biden administration?” “No,” Buttigieg replied. “I don’t think you can pin this on any one individual administration.” “Now is our chance to put together a big enough majority that it will win against Donald Trump. Then Trump-ism itself goes into the history books,” he concluded. Watch the video below from NBC.

Chuck Todd is once again under fire, as calls mount to fire the host of NBC News' once-venerated "Meet the Press." Todd on Sunday hosted Republican U.S. Congressman Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, an early supporter of Donald Trump, and allowed him to lie on-air with nearly no push-back. Among the lies Rep. Cramer spewed in just 21 seconds: The Obama administration spied on Donald Trump, the Mueller Russia investigation "started with no evidence and ended proving that there was no evidence," and the impeachment of the President was "crazy." Cramer also went on to falsely claim Trump's baseless and frivolous lawsuits – including the most recent one that a judge tossed out "with prejudice" – are "appropriate." Out of three dozen lawsuits Trump has lost 34 and won just two. And while Cramer did say that the GSA should release the transition funds to President-elect Joe Biden he refused to acknowledge Biden won the election. He also spewed other lies, with no pushback from Todd, including: Joe Biden has not yet won the election, Trump "is just exercising his legal options," and Biden has been "over-dramatic." Now even more people want Chuck Todd fired.

Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who is one of the preeminent critics of the profession he teaches, on New Year's Day blasted NBC News and MSNBC's Chuck Todd. "Everything Chuck Todd ever said about his alarm at what the Republicans are doing is hollow and meaningless," Rosen said on Twitter, about the "Meet the Press" host. "After all this, to welcome Ron Johnson back is such a pathetic surrender." Rosen was referring to news that Todd's guest on this coming Sunday's "Meet the Press" will be Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), a far right pro-Trump conspiracy theorist. Meet the Press has booked a shameless conspiracy theorist, Senator Ron Johnson, for Sunday. Johnson says covid is fake and denied Biden won the election. He is MTP's most-booked Republican and has used the platform to spread lies more than any other senator. It is a true feat. pic.twitter.com/h1uPctXaEA — Matt Negrin, HOST OF HARDBALL AT 7PM ON MSNBC (@MattNegrin) January 1, 2021 Rosen's timely takedown of Todd comes just days after he penned a piece slamming the NBC News/MSNBC host on his PressThink website, for his "strategic blindness." "Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of 'alternative facts' on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd," Rosen wrote. "Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it's a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news." Rosen slammed Todd for taking so long to see what many had already told him about the GOP, and then further ignoring it. "You cannot call that an oversight. It's a strategic blindness that he superintended," Rosen charged, calling it "malpractice." Read Rosen's full article, "The Christmas Eve Confessions of Chuck Todd," at PressThink.

Much of the current hand-wringing about this rise in press bashing and delegitimization has been focused on the president, who—as every reporter in America sadly knows—has declared the press the “enemy of the people.” But, like much else in the Trump era, Donald Trump didn’t start this fire; he’s only spread it to a potentially more dangerous place. The modern campaign against the American press corps has its roots in the Nixon era. President Richard Nixon’s angry foot soldiers continued his fight against the media even after he left office. Roger Ailes, who went on to help found Fox News, was the most important of those figures. His sustained assault on the press created the conditions that would allow a president to surround himself with aides who argue for “alternative facts,” and announce that “truth isn’t truth.” Without Ailes, a man of Trump’s background and character could never have won. Roger Ailes was the godfather of the Trump presidency. Nixon’s acolytes blamed the press for drumming a good man out of office. From their perspective, his crimes were no different from the misdeeds of the Kennedys or Lyndon B. Johnson—but only Nixon was held to account. Did they blame this on Nixon? On the voters? No, they blamed the stars of the Watergate drama, the heroes of All the President’s Men. They blamed the media. Enter Roger Ailes. He first made his name by taking credit for Nixon’s rise in Joe McGinniss’s campaign book, The Selling of the President 1968. Ailes was a media genius who understood better than most how to use television to move people. There’s a fine line between motivating people through TV messages and simply manipulating them. Ailes’s gift, and the secret to his success, was his comfort in plunging across that line and embracing the role of TV manipulator. He made his name as a political TV-ad man, one of the pioneers of the field, but he couldn’t help dabbling in news and talk. As a network programmer, Ailes excelled at matching a mood with an audience. From Mike Douglas to Limbaugh to, later, Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly, Ailes had a gift for promoting engaging, smart, man-of-the-people talkers. In the early ’90s, while he was president of CNBC, Ailes had a hunch that an evening lineup catering to a culturally conservative audience would thrive. He wanted to give his theory a chance, but he was passed over for the leadership of the network’s new channel, MSNBC. Enter Rupert Murdoch. The mogul bought into Ailes’s theory, and in 1996 they launched Fox News with the slogan “Fair and balanced.” From the very beginning, Ailes signaled that Fox News would offer an alternative voice, splitting with the conventions of television journalism. Take the word balanced. It sounded harmless enough. But how does one balance facts? A reporting-driven news organization might promise to be accurate, or honest, or comprehensive, or to report stories for an underserved community. But Ailes wasn’t building a reporting-driven news organization. The promise to be “balanced” was a coded pledge to offer alternative explanations, putting commentary ahead of reporting; it was an attack on the integrity of the rest of the media. Fox intended to build its brand the same way Ailes had built the brands of political candidates: by making the public hate the other choice more.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on Sunday defended his decision to vote against a stimulus bill that had similar provisions to bills he supported under former President Donald Trump. During an interview on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace called out Cotton after he said that he had opposed the bill that was signed by President Joe Biden because "prisoners" could get relief checks. Wallace noted that Cotton voted for similar COVID-19 relief bills that were signed Trump. "But Senator, under two previous COVID relief bills that you supported and voted for and that President Trump signed, prisoners also got checks in those bills," Wallace said. "That was obviously never Congress's intent," Cotton opined. "The Trump administration, the IRS and the Treasury Department did not send checks to prisoners. Liberal advocacy groups sued to try to force that. A liberal judge said they had to." "This month was the first time we had a simple up or down vote on whether those checks should go to prisoners," he added. "And the simple fact is that every Democrat voted to keep sending checks to prisoners." Watch the video below from Fox News.

The United States’ federal deficit was already huge before the coronavirus pandemic, but the pandemic has caused it to increase even more — and at a private lunch on Tuesday, July 21, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas clashed with a fellow Republican, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, during a discussion of coronavirus spending and the federal deficit.According to the Washington Post’s James Hohmann, Cotton “suggested” that “Republicans should be willing to keep racking up debt to maintain power.” But Cruz vehemently disagreed, declaring “What in the hell are we doing?” Cotton, Hohmann notes, “argued that the full conference needs to focus on protecting their most vulnerable members. Cotton postulated that Democrats would spend more money if they win the Senate majority in November — and therefore, it is cheaper in the long run to allow the size of the spending package to grow with more goodies to benefit incumbents who are up for reelection.” It remains to be seen whether or not President Donald Trump will win a second term in November. Many recent polls have shown Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee — in some of them, by double digits. But whether Trump leaves the White House in January 2021 or January 2025, Republicans will eventually have to debate what a post-Trump GOP will look like — and as Hohmann sees it, the clash between Cruz and Cotton could foreshadow a clash between the Republican senators in 2024. “Cruz and Cotton are among the small clique of ambitious Republican senators in their forties who have been laying the groundwork to run for president in 2024, along with Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.),” Hohmann explains. “The dueling stances Cruz and Cotton staked out behind closed doors offer an early taste of the ideological battles we can expect as Republicans increasingly vie to take the torch from President Trump. These fights will flare up faster and hotter if the president loses in November. Others outside the Senate, such as Vice President (Mike) Pence and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are also expected to compete for the nod.”

With President Joe Biden having withdrawn his nomination of Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget, some far-right Republicans are hoping to sink another Biden nominee: Vanita Gupta, the president's pick for associate U.S. attorney general. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has insinuated that law enforcement organizations were coerced into endorsing Gupta, but according to Washington Post reporter Matt Zapotosky, those groups are flatly denying that claim. When Cotton was questioning Gupta before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he asked, "Did you, or anyone on your behalf or anyone in or affiliated with the Biden campaign transition or administration, pressure those organizations with threats of retaliation if they did not support your nomination?.... There were no — there were no threats to cut off access or influence to the Department of Justice if those law enforcement organizations did not support your nomination?" The 46-year-old Gupta, who served as an assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights under President Barack Obama, responded that no, there were no such threats. And according to Zapotosky, the Washington Post confirmed that — just as Gupta testified — no one in law enforcement was bullied into coercing her. Zapotosky reports, "Officials representing nine of the country's premier law enforcement professional organizations told the Washington Post this week they were not pressured into supporting Gupta's nomination. Some added that they were taken aback by Cotton's questioning, which had implied they had caved in to threats." One of the law enforcement organizations that has endorsed Gupta is the Fraternal Order of Police. Jim Pasco, the FOP's executive director, told the Post that he was "kind of shocked by" Cotton's questioning of Gupta and said that if the Arkansas senator "really suspects that" the GOP was bullied into endorsing her, "then he doesn't really know the law enforcement organizations as well as he thinks he does — and he certainly doesn't know Vanita Gupta as well as I know her." In addition to the FOP, law enforcement groups that have endorsed Gupta include the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America. And Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, described Cotton's questions as "absurd" and told the Post, "Do you really think you can stand up to law enforcement and threaten them? Do you really think that's going to work?" David Mahoney, who serves as president of the National Sheriffs' Association in addition to being sheriff for Dane County, Wisconsin, told the Post, "I absolutely have not been pressured." Mahoney said of Cotton's questions, "I think it's highly political, and I don't pay much attention to that." Similarly, Kym Craven, executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives — another group that has endorsed Gupta — told the Post there was "no pressure at all" to make an endorsement. Craven told the Post, "We are a policing profession, and our reputations are based on what we do and what we say. And certainly, we would not go along with something where we felt we were coerced into making any recommendations for anybody."

The toxic amendments Mitch McConnell promised in the "vote-a-rama" for the Senate's COVID-19 budget resolution were delivered, but few succeeded in the end. Even though they were all non-binding and by no means have to end up in the final package, the worst of them were dispatched by the time the final vote came around. That included an obnoxious amendment from Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to try to jam Democrats into committing to rule out expanding the Supreme Court. He failed to win over even one Democrat after his amendment was challenged, because it had nothing to do with coronavirus. Sen. Dick Durbin handled the matter with aplomb, and handed Cotton his hat. "The Constitution does not stipulate the number of Supreme Court justices. That's up to Congress," he started out. Then he proceeded with a little history lesson for Cotton. "Congress has a long history of altering the make up of the court," he said. "The number of justices changed six times before we arrived at the number nine. This amendment chooses to ignore the history." He just happened to have his pocket Constitution in hand during the tutorial to Cotton. "But," he said, continuing his lesson, "for the record, there is exactly one living senator who has effectively changed the size of the Supreme Court, he said. "That's Sen. McConnell, who shrank the court to eight seats for nearly a year in the last year of the Obama presidency by refusing to fill the Scalia vacancy." He continued, saying that President Biden's commission on court reforms deserves the chance to do its work. He wrapped up, "Come to think of it, should we be changing the Senate rules in a budget resolution?" "I think not," he said, and raised a point of order that the amendment was not germane to the budget resolution and should not be allowed. Cotton needed 60 votes to overcome that objection, and got just 50—the Republicans. Not a single Democrat joined, even though they could have and still not let the amendment pass. That was a show of force from Democrats demonstrating they're not going to forego the option of Supreme Court expansion. Not if that's what's necessary to allow President Biden's and their agenda to save the nation's economy, health care, the climate—every crucial thing on the agenda for the next four years.

"The claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: for the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted, and jailed," Cotton said during a speech at The Hudson Institute, according to his prepared remarks. | AP Photo Sen. Tom Cotton: U.S. has 'under-incarceration problem' Sen. Tom Cotton on Thursday slammed his colleagues' efforts to pass sweeping criminal justice reforms, saying the United States is actually suffering from an "under-incarceration problem." Cotton, who has been an outspoken critic of the bill in Congress that would reduce mandatory minimum sentences, smacked down what he called "baseless" arguments that there are too many offenders locked up for relatively small crimes, that incarceration is too costly, or that "we should show more empathy toward those caught up in the criminal-justice system." "Take a look at the facts. First, the claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: for the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted, and jailed," Cotton said during a speech at The Hudson Institute, according to his prepared remarks. "Law enforcement is able to arrest or identify a likely perpetrator for only 19 percent of property crimes and 47 percent of violent crimes. If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem." Expanding upon his remarks during a question-and-answer session, Cotton said releasing felons under reduced sentences serves only to destabilize the communities in which they are released. “I saw this in Baghdad. We’ve seen it again in Afghanistan," recalled Cotton, who served in the Army during both wars. "Security has to come first, whether you’re in a war zone or whether you’re in the United States of America.” Those advocating for criminal justice reform through such measures appear to have forgotten the high-crime days of the 1980s, Cotton remarked, noting that the federal prison population is declining. As of Thursday, there are more than 195,000 federal inmates, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. That number represents a decrease from 214,000 in 2014, Cotton said. "I believe the criminal-leniency bill in the Senate is dead in this year’s Congress. And it should remain so if future versions allow for the release of violent felons from prison," he went on to say. "I will, though, happily work with my colleagues on true criminal-justice reform—to ensure prisons aren’t anarchic jungles that endanger both inmates and corrections officers, to promote rehabilitation and reintegration for those who seek it, and to stop the over-criminalization of private conduct under federal law. But I will continue to oppose any effort to give leniency to dangerous felons who prey on our communities." On the effort to "Ban the Box," which Cotton called a "praiseworthy" but ultimately misguided undertaking, he also called it inappropriate for the government to dictate hiring decisions. With respect to restoring felons' voting rights, Cotton said that decision should be left to the individual states. Just last month, Virginia's Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed an executive order granting voting rights to felons who have completed their sentences, reversing decades of state law predating the Civil War. "Now, it’s true there were felon-disenfranchisement laws that deliberately targeted blacks after Reconstruction. Each of those laws has been justly struck down by the Supreme Court or amended to rid them of their original racial animus," Cotton said. " But that sad chapter in our history doesn’t undermine the logic behind modern felon disenfranchisement laws. Should murderers, rapists, and others whose behavior fall so far outside the norms of our society be immediately accommodated? Given recidivism rates, should we create an automatic pro-crime constituency in our society? Should felons be trusted to elect legislators who make the law, prosecutors who enforce it, and judges who apply it?" Cotton then turned to a discussion of "policing techniques and the growing assault on law enforcement." Investigations into use of force are necessary, Cotton said, invoking his past military service. "But what should not and cannot occur is a rush to demonize law enforcement whenever force is used," he continued. "In the absence of facts and hard data, we’re vulnerable to heart-wrenching images, to our own biases, and to cheap demagoguery." Referencing what has been called the "Ferguson effect," as FBI Director James Comey termed a theory that the viral nature of videos showing isolated incidents of police force could be behind a rise in crime, Cotton remarked that a "chilling effect was nearly unavoidable." "Now let me make something clear: black lives do matter. The lives being lost to violence in America’s cities are predominantly those of young black men, with devastating consequences for their families and their communities," he said. :But the police aren’t the culprits. In nearly every case, the blood is on the hands of criminals, drug dealers, and gang members." Recalling former President Bill Clinton's run-in with protesters in which he told them, "You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter," Cotton remarked that "for once," the fellow Arkansan "was right. " "And it’s the police who are trying to protect those lives and prevent those murders," he said. "We shouldn’t stigmatize them; we should thank them."

The rumor appeared shortly after the new coronavirus struck China and spread almost as quickly: that the outbreak now afflicting people around the world had been manufactured by the Chinese government. The conspiracy theory lacks evidence and has been dismissed by scientists. But it has gained an audience with the help of well-connected critics of the Chinese government such as Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist. And on Sunday, it got its biggest public boost yet. Speaking on Fox News, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, raised the possibility that the virus had originated in a high-security biochemical lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak.

Cotton plays successfully to the warring constituencies of the Republican party. Illustration by Justin Renteria; photograph by Zach Gibson / Pool / Getty Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. If you believed the national media, the week of the annual Republican Party fund-raising dinner, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in late August, was one of the worst of Donald Trump’s Presidency. The President had just responded to the unrest in Charlottesville with statements that appeared sympathetic to neo-Nazi demonstrators, and even some members of his own party were denouncing him. The White House staff was in turmoil, following the departure of Reince Priebus as chief of staff, and the Senate had failed to pass a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. The featured speaker for the evening was the state’s junior senator, Tom Cotton, who seized the chance to address the disquiet in the nation’s capital. At forty years old, Cotton is the youngest member of the Senate, and he retains the erect posture and solemn bearing that he displayed as a member of the Army’s Old Guard, which presides at military ceremonies, including funerals, in Washington. He’s let his hair grow, a little, since his Army days. When he first ran for office, in 2012—he served a single term in the House of Representatives before winning his Senate seat, in 2014—Cotton was often described as robotic on the stump, but he’s improved somewhat as a speaker, even if he still projects more intelligence than warmth. In this manner, he gave an assignment to the two hundred or so guests in the hotel ballroom. “Go home tonight and turn on one of the nighttime comedy shows. Tomorrow morning, turn on one of the cable morning-news shows. This Saturday, watch ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” he said. “All the high wardens of popular culture in this country, they love to make fun of Donald Trump, to mock him, to ridicule him. They make fun of his hair, they make fun of the color of his skin, they make fun of the way he talks—he’s from Queens, not from Manhattan. They make fun of that long tie he wears, they make fun of his taste for McDonald’s.” He went on, “What I don’t think they realize is that out here in Arkansas and the heartland and the places that made a difference in that election, like Michigan and Wisconsin, when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.” It was, on one level, a breathtaking leap—to equate mockery of a louche New York billionaire with attacks on the citizens of this small, conservative city, which lies across the Arkansas River from Oklahoma. But Cotton’s appeal to his audience for solidarity with Trump, which was greeted with strong applause, represented just one part of his enthusiastic embrace of the President. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former top strategist and the chairman of the right-wing Web site Breitbart News, told me, “Next to Trump, he’s the elected official who gets it the most—the economic nationalism. Cotton was the one most supportive of us, up front and behind the scenes, from the beginning. He understands that the Washington élite—this permanent political class of both parties, between the K Street consultants and politicians—needs to be shattered.” At the same time, Cotton has maintained strong ties with the establishment wing of the G.O.P. Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political adviser, told me, “Cotton is not like a Steve Bannon, who wants to blow up the existing structure, uproot the ideology of the Republican Party and replace it with something new. He’s a rising star. He’s capable of building bridges within the Party. He wants to get things done.” In recent weeks, several Republican Senators have denounced Trump for his intemperance and his dishonesty. Jeff Flake, of Arizona, and Bob Corker, of Tennessee, condemned Trump and announced that they would not seek reëlection in 2018. Ben Sasse, of Nebraska, whose term is not up until 2020, said that, by threatening journalists, Trump was violating his oath to defend the Constitution. Cotton has made a different bet, offering only the gentlest of criticisms of the President. When, in the course of several weeks of conversations, I asked Cotton about one or another of Trump’s controversial statements or tweets, he always responded in the same manner. “The President puts things sometimes in a way that I would not,” he said in early October. “But he was still nominated by our voters and elected by the American people to be our President, and if we want him to accomplish our agenda we need to set him up for success.” Even Trump’s latest political traumas have not shaken Cotton’s faith in him. Following the indictment of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and former campaign adviser Rick Gates, last week, Cotton urged a prompt resolution of the investigation into the Trump campaign, but he did not call for the removal of Robert Mueller, the special counsel. “What’s in the best interest of everyone is for these inquiries to move forward, and to follow them to their proper conclusion as quickly as possible,” Cotton said. Roby Brock, who hosts the leading public-affairs television program in Arkansas, told me, “From the beginning, Tom could play to both the establishment and the Tea Party. Everyone recognizes he’s got a firm set of conservative principles, but that makes him a polarizing figure. There are a lot of people here, too, who hate him and think he’s the Antichrist. The only thing everyone agrees on is that he wants to be President someday.” To make that next leap, Cotton expresses the militarism, bellicosity, intolerance, and xenophobia of Donald Trump, but without the childish tweets. For those who see Trump’s Presidency as an aberration, or as a singular phenomenon, Cotton offers a useful corrective. He and his supporters see Trump and Trumpism as the future of the Republican Party. In the early days of the Trump Administration, Cotton exercised influence from behind the scenes. Bannon told me, “He spent a lot of time in my little war room, and he gave us a lot of good advice. He was the one who told us about John Kelly,” the former Marine Corps general who is now Trump’s chief of staff. (The Senator and Kelly had met at a security conference when Cotton was in the House.) In recent months, however, Cotton’s influence has become more apparent, as Trump has embraced some of his most high-profile positions. In September, President Trump repealed the Obama-era executive order known as DACA, which protected the so-called Dreamers from deportation, but he said that he also wanted Congress to pass a law that would allow them to remain in the United States, even making a preliminary deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic congressional leaders. But, after Cotton spoke out against a quick deal to protect the Dreamers, Trump made a formal proposal to Congress that attached many strings Cotton had demanded. “I had dinner with the President and General Kelly on October 2nd, and we talked about DACA,” Cotton told me. “They said that Chuck and Nancy had done some post-dinner spin, to go along with the post-dinner dessert, about what the President actually agreed to on DACA. I think the fix that the President announced is a better step in the right direction.” The following month, Trump gave Cotton a victory on the touchstone issue of his Senate career by decertifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear-arms deal that the Obama Administration had negotiated. “I told the President in July that he shouldn’t certify that Iran was complying with the agreement,” Cotton told me. “Putting aside the issue of technical compliance or noncompliance, it’s clear that the agreement is not in our national interest.” Following Trump’s action, Cotton joined forces with Senator Corker, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, on a proposal that, if passed, would likely lead to the termination of the Iran nuclear deal and the reimposition of American sanctions. “Let there be no doubt about this point,” Cotton said, in a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “If we are forced to take action, the United States has the ability to totally destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. And, if they choose to rebuild it, we could destroy it again, until they get the picture. Nor should we hesitate if compelled to take military action.” In describing his preferred approach to negotiations with Iran, Cotton said, “One thing I learned in the Army is that when your opponent is on his knees you drive him to the ground and choke him out.” In response, a questioner pointed out that killing a prisoner of war is not “American practice.” (It is, in fact, a war crime.) Similarly, in North Korea, Cotton supports Trump’s brinkmanship with Kim Jong Un, and excoriates China for its failure to rein in its ally. “Time and time again, Beijing shows that it is not up to being the great power it aspires to be,” Cotton said. (His hostility toward China endears him to the Bannon wing of the Republican Party, which views the U.S.-China relationship as the defining conflict of the modern world.) Cotton has emerged as such a close ally of the Trump White House that one recent report suggested that the President would name him director of the C.I.A. if Mike Pompeo, the current director, were to replace Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. (Trump is widely believed to be dissatisfied with Tillerson.) In a conversation in mid-October, Cotton did not dismiss the possibility of taking the C.I.A. job. “I am pleased to be a senator,” he told me. “But, of course, I will always take a call from the President, and he has called me many times.” As a member of Trump’s Administration, Cotton would ratify the President’s instincts. He offers Trump a certainty that matches his own, especially about the threats the nation faces and the best ways to address them. In August, I visited Cotton in the house where he grew up, in Yell County, Arkansas. When I arrived, Cotton’s father was also walking in the door. Len Cotton did not offer to shake hands right away, because he had just welcomed two newborn calves to the family farm, and he thought it prudent to wash up first. The Cottons have been in Arkansas for six generations, and Tom’s parents make their living running what’s known as a cow-calf operation, on several plots of land in the Arkansas River Valley. In the specialized world of beef-and-dairy production, the Cottons’ business is the first stage—the production of the cows, which are sold to ranchers. The Cottons have always done some farming, but when Tom was a boy his mother was a public-school teacher and a middle-school principal, and his father worked for state government, doing inspections for the Department of Health. Like most people in Arkansas at the time, Tom’s parents were Democrats. But the leitmotif of Tom Cotton’s political career has been the decline of the Democratic Party among white voters in Arkansas. “The Democratic Party has drifted away from them,” Tom told me, as his parents sat nearby. “Bill Clinton would be repudiated by his own party today. Hillary Clinton repudiated a lot of her husband’s chief accomplishments when he was in office. So that’s a real fundamental story about politics in Arkansas and politics across the heartland.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Thursday attempted to backpedal on his support of former President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. During an appearance on CNN, news anchor Manu Raju asked the top-ranking Republican lawmaker about the double standard surrounding his support of Trump's efforts to invalidate the election results while criticizing Democrats for contesting the results of an Iowa Congressional race. McCarthy attempted to suggest that he did not support Trump's efforts as he insisted Raju's remarks were inaccurate. "You're saying something that is not true," the California Republican said. The publication notes that although McCarthy attempted to "rewrite history," the problem lies in his previous actions. When Trump attempted to strong-arm Congress into carrying out his political agenda, McCarthy made no objections. He also supported Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's (R) election lawsuit seeking to toss out millions of votes amid Trump's post-election legal war. Amid questions about his support of Trump, the publication also noted that the lawmaker "refused to say whether he endorsed Trump's efforts to overturn the election, and did not say why he hadn't spoken out against those efforts at the time if he didn't support them." McCarthy's remarks infuriated a number of Twitter users who accused him of lying. Many Twitter users also recalled the number of interviews and statements McCarthy made during Trump's post-election lawsuit filings prior to the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. One Twitter user recalled McCarthy admitting that Trump influenced the insurrection but did not vote to impeach him. That person wrote, "Well, he blamed Donald Trump for the insurrection and the violence. However, he didn't vote to IMPEACH Trump!! Man facepalming So he thought that inciting an insurrection is not worth impeachment!!" Another Twitter user wrote, "Kevin McCarthy does two things fairly well, deflect and lie. How proud he must be. He makes the mistake of thinking people believe his BS!" Despite his claims, McCarthy was one of the Republican lawmakers who refused to vote in favor of impeaching Trump.

(CNN) House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to rewrite history on Thursday by claiming that he was not involved in former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the election in a heated exchange during a news briefing. When asked by CNN's Manu Raju why it was acceptable for him to support Trump's efforts to overturn the presidential election in Congress but to criticize Democrats for doing the same in a contested Iowa US House race , McCarthy repeatedly rejected the notion that he was trying to overturn the election at all. "You're saying something that is not true," the California Republican said when Raju stated that Trump had tried to overturn the election results in Congress and McCarthy supported that effort. McCarthy's explanation flies in the face of reality. Trump tried to pressure Congress to overturn the election and McCarthy raised no concerns about it. He also backed a Texas lawsuit to invalidate millions of votes , and ultimately voted in favor of overturning the election results of two states during votes that took place after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The exchange comes as McCarthy has sought to maintain a relationship with Trump while steering a party whose establishment is wary of allowing the former President to dictate the Republican path forward. McCarthy met with Trump in January to discuss strategy for winning the House majority in next year's midterm elections. Read More

Washington (CNN) In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the US Capitol was under attack , then-President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did. "Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are," Trump said, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the call afterward by McCarthy. McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump's supporters and begged Trump to call them off. Trump's comment set off what Republican lawmakers familiar with the call described as a shouting match between the two men. A furious McCarthy told the then-President the rioters were breaking into his office through the windows, and asked Trump, "Who the f--k do you think you are talking to?" according to a Republican lawmaker familiar with the call. The newly revealed details of the call, described to CNN by multiple Republicans briefed on it, provide critical insight into the President's state of mind as rioters were overrunning the Capitol. The existence of the call and some of its details were first reported by Punchbowl News and discussed publicly by McCarthy. The Republican members of Congress said the exchange showed Trump had no intention of calling off the rioters even as lawmakers were pleading with him to intervene. Several said it amounted to a dereliction of his presidential duty. "He is not a blameless observer. He was rooting for them," a Republican member of Congress said. "On January 13, Kevin McCarthy said on the floor of the House that the President bears responsibility and he does." Speaking to the President from inside the besieged Capitol, McCarthy pressed Trump to call off his supporters and engaged in a heated disagreement about who comprised the crowd. Trump's comment about the would-be insurrectionists caring more about the election results than McCarthy did was first mentioned by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican from Washington state, in a town hall earlier this week, and was confirmed to CNN by Herrera Beutler and other Republicans briefed on the conversation. "You have to look at what he did during the insurrection to confirm where his mind was at," Herrera Beutler, one of 10 House Republicans who voted last month to impeach Trump, told CNN. "That line right there demonstrates to me that either he didn't care, which is impeachable, because you cannot allow an attack on your soil, or he wanted it to happen and was OK with it, which makes me so angry." "We should never stand for that, for any reason, under any party flag," she added, voicing her extreme frustration. "I'm trying really hard not to say the F-word." Herrera Beutler went a step further Friday night, calling on others to speak up about any other details they might know regarding conversations Trump and then-Vice President Mike Pence had on January 6. "To the patriots who were standing next to the former president as these conversations were happening, or even to the former vice president: if you have something to add here, now would be the time," she said in a statement. Another Republican member of Congress said the call was problematic for Trump. "I think it speaks to the former President's mindset," said Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, an Ohio Republican who also voted to impeach Trump last month. "He was not sorry to see his unyieldingly loyal vice president or the Congress under attack by the mob he inspired. In fact, it seems he was happy about it or at the least enjoyed the scenes that were horrifying to most Americans across the country." As senators prepare to determine Trump's fate, multiple Republicans thought the details of the call were important to the proceedings because they believe it paints a damning portrait of Trump's lack of action during the attack. At least one of the sources who spoke to CNN took detailed notes of McCarthy's recounting of the call. Trump and McCarthy did not respond to requests for comment. It took Trump several hours after the attack began to eventually encourage his supporters to "go home in peace" -- a tweet that came at the urging of his top aides. At Trump's impeachment trial Friday, his lawyers argued that the former President did in fact try to calm the rioters with a series of tweets while the attack unfolded. But his lawyers cherry-picked his tweets, focusing on his request for supporters to "remain peaceful" without mentioning that he also attacked Pence and waited hours to explicitly urge rioters to leave the Capitol. A source close to Pence said Trump's legal team was not telling the truth when attorney Michael van der Veen said at the trial that "at no point" did the then-President know his vice president was in danger. Asked whether van der Veen was lying, the source said, "Yes." Former Pence aides are still fuming over Trump's actions on January 6, insisting he never checked on the vice president as Pence was being rushed from danger by his US Secret Service detail. It's unclear to what extent these new details were known by the House Democratic impeachment managers or whether the team considered calling McCarthy as a witness. The managers have preserved the option to call witnesses in the ongoing impeachment trial, although that option remains unlikely as the trial winds down. The House Republican leader had been forthcoming with his conference about details of his conversations with Trump on and after January 6. Trump himself has not taken any responsibility in public. This story has been updated with additional reporting.

When progressive activist Melissa Byrne wanted to push President-elect Joe Biden on cancelling student debt, she bought full-page ads in the print edition of Delaware's The News Journal, which was delivered daily to Biden's home during the transition. "Good Morning President-elect Biden," the ad began in giant bold type. "Hope you'll take a few minutes this morning to meet a few of the 44 million Americans struggling with student loan debt. We need you to help us build back better by cancelling all federal student loan debt." Byrne told The New York Times that she expected some blowback from the incoming administration but instead found herself welcomed into the fold. Incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain encouraged her to keep pushing and even invited Byrne to Zoom meetings with the transition team. "We just kept being able to have people at the table," she told The Times. "That showed me that we could do cool things like sit-ins and banner drops, but we could also be warm and fuzzy." Byrne's activism didn't yield immediate results, as evidenced by the uproar last month over Biden's first pronouncement on student debt cancellation as president. Biden said he was open to canceling $10,000 in debt—a relative pittance—but not necessarily $50,000, the figure both Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have been pushing. But the day after Biden's response at a CNN town hall jumpstarted the student debt conversation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the West Wing was referring the issue to the Department of Justice, to review Biden's authority on the matter and what he had the power to do through executive action. In previous Democratic administrations, that referral might be seen as a dodge—a way for the administration to find its way to justifying what the president has already decided to do. In this administration, it might actually buy time for the White House to come out with a more aggressive stance on the issue than Biden held as a candidate or has even stated as president when first asked. In fact, on Thursday, the Education Department announced it was cancelling some $1 billion in debt for about 72,000 borrowers who were defrauded by for-profit colleges—a life-altering change for every one of those borrowers. But the episode is less instructive as a matter of outcomes than it is as a matter of process and an examination of how exactly progressive activists can best influence the Biden White House and administration policy. Over and over again, the Biden White House has proven to be pleasantly surprisingly, from its progressive posture on Day One of the administration to the way Biden and his top lieutenants unapologetically pushed through one of the most liberal pieces of legislation in generations. This week, the hits just kept on coming, with Biden for the first time indicating he was open to reforming the filibuster so that it requires senators to actually occupy the Senate floor, and Psaki announcing the president supports the push for Washington, D.C. statehood. Two months into the Biden administration, all indications are that it is operating on an entirely different playing field than those of its most recent Democratic predecessors. Not only have Biden and his team learned the lessons of the Obama administration, they also appear to have an entirely different approach to the way they interact with progressive activists. As someone who both reported on and watched different progressive movements work to influence the Obama White House, I have been trying to get a handle on what moves Team Biden—what exactly can liberal activists do to push this administration? What I have concluded is that Biden is much less bothered by outside agitation than President Barack Obama was. The Obama White House was actually quite thin-skinned about criticism from the left. The movements that eventually notched some of the biggest wins during the Obama administration did so by mounting very persistent and highly visible pressure campaigns. Obama bristled at being heckled by LGBTQ activists at a Democratic fundraiser in 2010, just like he did when he was challenged by immigration activists at a speech to members of the National Council of La Raza in July of 2011. Later that year, climate activists linked arms to form a human chain, 2- to 3-people deep, around the White House. All of these actions were part of pressure campaigns that eventually bore fruit in terms of policy changes, but they also came at the price of enormous effort by grassroots activists—while Washington advocates who occasionally spoke out of turn could find themselves frozen out of gaining access to the White House. The Biden White House seems to be taking the exact opposite tack—inviting activists and advocates alike into the conversation on the way to developing the policy. The entire organism is just much less adversarial in nature and also appears to produce more liberal outcomes. President Biden, for instance, has placed more than a half-dozen Warren allies and protégés in his administration, in positions where they could have a very real impact on policy and regulation of the financial industry. One of those appointees, Julie Morgan, is a senior adviser at the Education Department with an expertise in student loan debt, according to Mother Jones. Julie Margetta Morgan, whom Warren calls "another data nerd" like herself, spent two years working in the Senate digging into the particulars of who carries student loan debt. What she discovered, Warren recalls, was "a job that called for oversight" of the Education Department's administration of the loan program. They identified an obscure provision in the Higher Education Act called "defense to repayment," and pushed the department to wipe out the loans of 30,000 students defrauded by for-profit colleges, which it did in 2015. Morgan is now focused on loan debt as a senior counsel at the Department of Education, which is in the midst of studying whether that same provision grants the department the authority to do the sort of mass debt cancellation Warren has advocated for. The present push to cancel student debt and the early success regarding defrauded students is instructive on a couple of levels. First, change in the Biden administration seems to be much more about the conversation than the outside agitation (though I hasten to add that grassroots pressure is still essential to creating space for Democrats to move left). Second, meaningful change may not arrive in the form of one grand sweeping gesture, the way it did with the $1.9 trillion relief package. Policies that are deeply transformative for tens of thousands of people—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—for example, could come in smaller, less obvious bites and be spread out in regulatory changes across the administration. Biden's approach to filibuster reform is yet another example of how his understated approach could yield real wins even if they don't unfold as we imagined they might. Instead of pushing to eliminate the filibuster outright, Biden said this week he wanted a return to "what it was supposed to be"—a talking filibuster like it was "when I first got to the Senate back in the old days." It's brilliant framing, actually, depriving Republicans of any number of talking points about the dangerously radical policies of the left. This change isn't radical in Biden's formulation. In fact, it's anything but radical—it's a reversion to form. Biden topped it all off with the most common-sense observation possible. "It's almost getting to the point where democracy is having a hard time functioning," he told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. Indeed. Who's talking common-sense reforms now, Republicans? It's still early. But by May of 2009, I and some of my close allies had already started to conclude the LGBTQ movement was in for a fight, and not primarily with Republicans. But just a couple months into the Biden administration, it feels like the progressive movement has a partner in the White House. Joe Biden is handling the presidency like a guy who has nothing to prove, which makes him both less reactionary and more persuadable. In some ways, that's a function of his whiteness and, perhaps more specifically, not being the first Black man to occupy the Oval Office, which surely carried unimaginable pressures. But some of Biden's relative ease might also be a function of age. Some people—though certainly not all—simply grow more comfortable in their skin the older they get. Whatever the reasons, Biden appears to be a guy who both understands the transformational moment he's living and is open to transformation. He's living into the historical moment surrounding him, and that ultimately has the potential to yield the most progressive presidency in generations. Watch Melissa Byrne on Daily Kos' The Brief, featuring myself and guest host Cara Zelaya:

For years, Bernie Sanders and Joseph R. Biden Jr. wrestled over the Democratic Party’s future in a public tug of war that spanned three elections, two administrations and one primary contest. But when Mr. Sanders walked into his first Oval Office meeting with the new president last week and saw the large portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt opposite the Resolute Desk, the liberal luminary felt as if he were no longer battling Mr. Biden for the soul of the party. “President Biden understands that, like Roosevelt, he has entered office at a time of extraordinary crises and that he is prepared to think big and not small in order to address the many, many problems facing working families,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “There is an understanding that if we’re going to address the crises facing this country, we’re all in it together.” After a 15-month primary contest that highlighted deep divides within the party, Mr. Biden and his fractious Democratic coalition are largely holding together. United by a moment of national crisis and the lingering influence of his predecessor, the new president is enjoying an early honeymoon from the political vise of a progressive wing that spent months preparing to squeeze the new administration.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of students defrauded by for-profit schools will have their federal loans fully erased, the Biden administration announced Thursday, reversing a Trump administration policy that had given them only partial relief. The change could lead to $1 billion in loans being canceled for 72,000 borrowers, all of whom attended for-profit schools, the Education Department said. “Borrowers deserve a simplified and fair path to relief when they have been harmed by their institution’s misconduct,” said Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “A close review of these claims and the associated evidence showed these borrowers have been harmed, and we will grant them a fresh start from their debt.” ADVERTISEMENT The department said it was rescinding the formula used by the Trump administration to determine partial relief and putting in place “a streamlined path to receiving full loan discharges.” The decision applies to students who already had their claims approved and received only partial relief, the department said. A senior department official briefing reporters said the agency was continuing to review both the backlog of claims yet to be decided and those that have been denied. The department described Thursday’s action as “a first step” and said it would be looking at rewriting the regulations down the road. The borrower defense to repayment program allows students to have their federal loans canceled if they were defrauded by their schools. The Obama administration had expanded the program aimed at helping students who attended for-profit colleges like Corinthian and ITT Technical Institute, which have shut down. But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, pulled it back , saying it had become too easy for students to have their loans erased, and revised the program to make it harder for them to get relief, including providing only partial cancellation of the loans. Congress voted to overturn DeVos’ changes last March, but it was vetoed by Trump. The Education Department said a total of 343,331 applications for relief under borrower defense had been received as of Feb. 28. Of those, 61,511 had been approved and borrowers notified. Most of the others had been declared ineligible or were still pending. In addition to having their loans fully canceled, the Biden administration said students who received only partial awards will be reimbursed for any payments made on the loans and have their eligibility for federal student aid reinstated. The department said it also would ask credit bureaus to remove any negative ratings tied to the loans. “Abandoning partial relief is a strong start for a narrow subset of borrowers, but what we need from the Education Department is an overhaul of the current borrower defense process,” said Toby Merrill, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents former students at for-profit colleges. “The previous administration turned borrower defense into a total sham that was rigged to deny claims without any true consideration,” Merrill said. “The Biden-Harris administration must now address these failings or else perpetuate a system that is stacked against the very students they are supposed to protect.” Career Education Colleges and Universities, an industry lobbying group, said it had no comment on the Biden administration’s actions. Congress voted to overturn DeVos’ changes last March, but it was vetoed by Trump. Nearly two dozen state attorneys general had sued the Trump administration over its implementation of the borrower defense to repayment program, which allows borrowers to have their loans canceled if their colleges made false claims to get them to enroll. One of the plaintiffs in that suit was California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who was confirmed Thursday as President Joe Biden’s health secretary. The lawsuit, which was filed last July, argued that DeVos had changed the policy without justification, failed to provide a meaningful process for students to get their loans forgiven and created “arbitrary impediments” for them, including forcing them to prove that their schools knowingly misled them. Sen. Patty Murray, who heads the Senate committee overseeing education, said DeVos used “faulty math” to deny student full relief. Rep. Bobby Scott, chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, called it “a nonsensical formula.” “This announcement is life-changing for tens of thousands of people across the country,” Scott said.

In fact, President Joe Biden has quickly dispensed of many of the old Obama-era battles that flummoxed liberals and eventually drew them to the streets to protest the administration's inaction. Biden has already sent Congress a bold immigration bill that unequivocally includes a pathway to citizenship, expanded green card access, and fortifies the DACA program for Dreamers established by Obama in 2012. Biden also immediately yanked the Keystone XL pipeline permit—an action Obama didn't take until 2015, after years of pushing by climate activists. And building on the many hard-fought Obama-era wins on LGBTQ equality, Biden quickly signed an order pushing the most aggressive interpretation of Title VII protections for transgender and gay Americans in employment, housing, and education. Sure, these are old battles. And to some extent, Biden has benefited from a natural evolution of the issues over a decade. That is particularly true on policies concerning the LGBTQ movement, which emerged from Obama's presidency lightyears ahead of where it began. But it is also a measure of how far the progressive movement has come over the past decade that we aren't immediately having to go to battle with a Democratic administration that seems less intent on advancing liberal causes than using them as bargaining chips on the way to accomplishing other goals. So far, that vestige of 90s-era Clintonian politics seems to have finally been laid to rest in the Biden White House. The departure is clearly throwing some Washington journalists for a loop after decades of watching Democrats kowtow to Republicans. During Thursday's White House press briefing, The New York Times' Michael Shear fixated on why President Biden wasn't extending more olive branches to Republicans, like Obama had in early 2009. Biden, for instance, doesn't have any GOP Cabinet members such as Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates—a holdover from the Bush administration. Shear also marveled that Biden's first directives were "largely designed at erasing as much of the Trump legacy as you can with executive orders"—the inference being that such an aggressive rejection of Trump policies would turn off Republicans, thereby crushing all comity. Gee, what ever happened to "elections have consequences"? Part of what has gotten lost in translation for journalists is the word "unity," which Biden peppered throughout his inaugural address in some form or another no less than 11 times. Washington journalists view the word almost exclusively as a measure of bipartisan compromise. And to be fair, Biden's emphasis during the Democratic primaries on working with Republicans worried many liberals too. But whatever Biden meant by his compromise talk during the campaign, his definition of unity now appears to be centered around coming together to save America's democratic experiment. This political moment is simply that “dire,” as White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki put it, that fraught. In Biden’s view, no true American patriot needs to sacrifice their values or core beliefs in order to mobilize against white supremacy and the corrosive scourge of disinformation. In his inaugural address, Biden decried "lies told for power and for profit" and named the truth as one of the "common objects we love" as Americans. Lawmakers, he said, "who have pledged to honor our Constitution and protect our nation," bear a special responsibility to "defend the truth and to defeat the lies." Biden also declared war on white supremacy, imploring Americans to unite in battling the nation's "common foes" of "extremism, lawlessness, violence." In response, many Republicans are already reverting to their old tricks. They are calling Trump's impeachment divisive—as if siccing a murderous mob on the Capitol to overturn an election was a great unifier. They say they are uncomfortable with holding a trial for a president who is no longer in office—as if watching the nation's chief executive unleash an attack on the homeland wasn't uncomfortable for the vast majority of Americans. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters this week: "The fact is, the president of the United States committed an act of incitement of insurrection. I don’t think it’s very unifying to say, ‘oh, let’s just forget it and move on.’ That’s not how you unify." And the very same Republicans who saddled taxpayers with some $2 trillion in debt to pass a giant tax giveaway to the rich and corporate-y, are now lining up against Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package to help struggling Americans and shore up the economy. “The one thing that concerns me that nobody seems to be talking about anymore is the massive amount of debt that we continue to rack up as a nation,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who voiced no such hesitation before casting his 2017 vote for the GOP's tax bonanza for the nation's wealthiest. The White House has consistently said Biden believes there is bipartisan appeal for the relief package priorities, such as funding for unemployment insurance, vaccinations, and opening schools. “What are you going to cut?" Psaki posited at her first press briefing on Wednesday. Psaki said Biden plans to be personally involved in rallying support for the package. But she also didn't rule out using the budget reconciliation process as a way to pass relief with a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the 60 needed to bypass a GOP filibuster. Biden has been here before, in 2009, as the country was staring down the Great Recession and negotiations with Republicans yielded a modest stimulus of $787 billion that ultimately hamstrung a quick recovery as many economists had warned. How much patience Biden has for haggling with Republicans in this moment of need remains to be seen. But what jumps out from his first days in office is both Biden's resolve and his aggressive use of the tools at his disposal to take decisive action. He seems uniquely clear about the perils of this political era and what is required to meet them—a distinct break from the centrist dogma that has hung over Democrats for the better part of 30 years. And congressional Democrats across the liberal-to-moderate spectrum seem entirely bought into Biden's vision. Republicans, for their part, are playing very small ball. The best any of the saner ones can manage is clinging to the same tired Reagan-era talking points that left the party open to hijack by a vulgar populist demagogue. It seems safe to say that it's going to require a lot more inspiration and creativity than what we are currently witnessing for the Republican Party to build an electorally viable coalition of voters over the next several years. If President Biden continues to rise to the moment, the unity he engenders may ultimately be less about winning GOP votes for his policies than it is about unifying some 65% of Americans against a factionalized but dangerous party of seditionists.

During the Democratic primary, Biden talked a big “bipartisan” game, echoing many of the same bromides we heard from Obama about “reaching out across the aisle” and other such nonsense. It really did seem as though he was setting up “Obama, the sequel.” Yet that’s not what we’ve seen, not even for a second. When 10 supposedly “moderate” Republicans paid him a White House visit, presenting him with a $600 billion counteroffer to his own $1.9 trillion proposal, they were essentially laughed out of the room. “I think it’s — they put their ideas forward. That’s how the President sees it,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said when asked about the GOP’s ridiculous counter-offer. “He felt it was, you know, an effort to engage, and engage on a bipartisan basis, and that’s why he invited them to the White House today. But his view is that the size of the package needs to be commensurate with the crisis — crises we’re facing — the dual crises we’re facing, hence why he proposed a package that’s $1.9 trillion.” Not only did Biden dismiss the Republicans, he didn’t even bother to engage in negotiations. No, “Would $1.3 trillion work? No? $1 trillion? $800 billion?” Because we know that not only would that have dragged out this process for way too long, delaying critical work on election reform, immigration reform, and other Democratic priorities, but in the end, you know those assholes would’ve voted against the legislation anyway. It’s what Republicans have always done, and there was zero reason for Democrats to believe that this time, with a party beholden to Donald Trump of all people, that things would've ended up differently. It is impossible to overstate just how momentous this accomplishment is. Biden proposed a $1.9 trillion rescue plan, and Congress passed a $1.9 trillion rescue plan. Democrats delivered not just a massive boost to a recovering economy, but also passed the most comprehensive anti-poverty initiative in generations. Joan McCarter recapped the elements of the bill here, and really, go read it. Really appreciate just how amazing this moment is. My favorite? It cuts child poverty nearly in half, providing direct monthly payments to lower-income parents. x How many Americans benefit from the American Rescue Plan? Nearly everyone. Tell your senators: Pass this bill NOW. pic.twitter.com/EJKoUULHzp — CAP Action (@CAPAction) March 3, 2021 This legislation is so amazing that it has unprecedented popular support. A recent PPP poll spelled out some of the numbers, and these are all within the polling mainstream (which is 70%+ approval overall, and 50-60% approval among Republicans). Lowering healthcare costs for people who lost their coverage due to job loss during the pandemic: 77% of voters support this American Rescue Plan provision, including 58% of Republicans for people who lost their coverage due to job loss during the pandemic: 77% of voters support this American Rescue Plan provision, including 58% of Republicans $1,400 relief checks for middle income and working families who need it the most: 74% of voters support it, including 61% of Republicans who need it the most: 74% of voters support it, including 61% of Republicans Capping insurance premiums for millions so none pay more than 9% of their income for health coverage: 72% support, with 57% support among Republicans (only 11% of voters overall oppose this provision) so none pay more than 9% of their income for health coverage: 72% support, with 57% support among Republicans (only 11% of voters overall oppose this provision) New funding to surge vaccine distribution and COVID-19 testing: 71% of voters favor it, including 51% of Republicans and 72% voters over 65. And get this: These approval numbers are even before people get their checks. There’re the stimulus checks and the monthly child credit checks for tens of millions of parents. There’s the funding to accelerate vaccine distribution, and the funding to help businesses keep their employees on the job—such as airlines cancelling planned furloughs, and desperately needed assistance for restaurants and bars. You can tell Republicans are in a bind because Fox News didn’t focus on this law. Instead, they spent the last month crying about Mr. Potato Head and racist anti-Asian Dr. Seuss books pulled out of commission. That’s a far cry from 2009, when Fox News was obsessed with “You are going to lose your doctor” storylines in attacking and undermining the ACA. And that’s why this isn’t 2009 anymore, yet Republicans are trapped with that playbook. They’ve decided to vote, en masse, without a single defection, against the most momentous and popular piece of legislation since who knows when. And their message and media machines are afraid to touch it. They’re not even trying to undermine the law in the public’s mind. The best they can do is weak sauce like this: x Our country has endured one of the most painful years in memory. But the dark times have spotlighted the best of America. This year’s recovery will ride an already turning tide. Not because of a Democrats’ latest partisan bill, but because of the resilience of our people. pic.twitter.com/2JC1V8ic30 — Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) March 12, 2021 “All the good stuff happening isn’t happening because of the bill. Hey, is that Dr Seuss over there?” is pretty much their operating message right now. How is that going to sustain them through an election cycle where the economy will be booming? People have been hoarding cash, with household savings rates well above historical norms. Makes sense in times of economic uncertainty when people are unsure whether they’ll have jobs in the months ahead, as well as diminished opportunities (like leisure travel) to spend earnings. But there is massive pent-up demand. As economic anxiety eases, jobs feel more secure, stimulus checks hit bank accounts, and people shake off cabin fever with joyful abandon (I know I will!), that spending will be rocket fuel for the economy. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has just upgraded expected economic growth this year to a blistering 6.5%, and 4% next year. They had projected 3.2% in December. Goldman Sachs projects an even higher 7.7% growth rate in a report titled, joyfully, "The Coming Jobs Boom." Fox News knows this, of course. Its reaction to an unfriendly reality is simply to quit the news business. It’s all culture-war nonsense at this point, and manufactured nonsense at that. It’s hard to stand for something when the party they all back couldn’t even muster a policy platform at the Republican National Convention last year. “Whatever Trump wants” was much easier to stamp on a single piece of paper while letting his lackey Sean Hannity rule the roost. But how does that better prepare Republicans for 2022? How does “oppose everything Democrats do, even the stuff everyone loves” win them votes? Even Q adherents will have to think twice in 2022 if they have to choose between surrendering their $300 or $360 monthly check per child, or voting for a Republican promising to undo that help. And what message will they have for a booming economy as the nation returns to normalcy after Trump’s gross mismanagement of the pandemic response? Layer that on top of demographic changes—Republicans still depend too much on old, white, rural men who are methodically, er, exiting the electorate. And what’s left? A hope for an ACA-style backlash that they aren’t even trying to spark? The unified Republican opposition to the $1.9 trillion rescue package is the best gift Republicans could’ve handed Democrats. Second best? Not even trying to undermine it publicly. Dr Seuss won’t win them any elections.

This week, Majority Whip Dick Durbin took to the floor with the strongest anti-filibuster speech yet. He spoke at length about returning to a talking filibuster, saying the current procedure "has turned the world's greatest deliberative body into one of the world's most ineffectual bodies." The filibuster used to require deliberation, or at least it forced the senator opposing a bill to make their case on the floor in debate, sometimes lasting for hours and hours. That's not how it works anymore. All it takes is one senator to say they are opposed to a bill moving forward—they don't even have to say it on the floor—and they've started a filibuster. A bill can't progress in the Senate without 60 senators saying they want it to, no matter if it has majority support—59 senators could support it, but if they can't find one more, they won't have the opportunity to vote on it. For example, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin teamed up with Republican Sen. Pat Toomey on a gun background check bill following the 2012 massacre of little school children at Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut. Republicans blocked it with just 46 votes—a majority of 54 Republican and Democratic senators supported the bill but it failed. No Republican had to stand on the floor and say why they felt the slaughter of little children did not demand a change that would keep weapons of war out of the hands of domestic terrorists. They just voted "no." So it seems that Democratic leadership, including Biden, have coalesced behind the idea of a talking filibuster, and that might even have been negotiated with at least one of the recalcitrant Democrats, Joe Manchin. Following his day of obstruction on the COVID-19 relief bill, Manchin made the rounds of Sunday shows saying he'd be okay with making the filibuster "a little bit more painful, make them stand there and talk, I'm willing to look at any way we can." But here's the rub with that: In subsequent interviews on following days, Manchin made it clear that he still wants to keep a 60-vote margin. He told Politico that there still has to be a 60-vote majority to overcome a filibuster, or a way that forces the opposition to come up with 41 votes to sustain it. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema goes even further, saying: "I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work," including all judicial and executive confirmations. That's a problem. Yes, it would force Sen. Mitch McConnell to make sure that he always has 41 Republicans at his beck and call, but he's a spiteful enough bastard with enough spiteful bastards in his conference to do just that. But democracy is not going to be restored unless the most basic principle—majority rule—is restored in the Senate. Biden was careful in his comments not to saying anything about abolishing the 60-vote requirement, as Durbin pointed out in an interview Wednesday morning. "He didn't say that and as a student and creature of the Senate he certainly knows how to choose his words carefully on this subject. But I think he's acknowledging the obvious: the filibuster has really shackled the Senate." Biden was being "vague" about what exact remedy to use, Durbin said, "but that's alright. I think he is acknowledging the fact that the filibuster has become institutionalized by Sen. McConnell. We now accept the premise that everything needs 60 votes." It is an accepted premise—a false one. Even the Capitol Hill press corps, who should know better, talk about the 60-vote margin required to pass anything as the norm, as though this has always been how it is. It's not. When Biden entered the Senate in 1973, the filibuster was a rarity. From 1917 to 1970, there had been a total of 49 filibusters. In 53 years, 49 filibusters. Since McConnell's takeover of the Republican Senate conference, there's been an average of 80 votes each year to end filibusters. That doesn't just block legislation, it ties the Senate in knots. Every cloture vote requires 30 hours of floor time, in which nothing else can be done. So when McConnell threatens, "Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like," it's not anything we haven't already seen from him. Which is Durbin's exact response. "He has already done that. He's proven he can do it, and he will do it again." The filibuster fight is going to happen soon, so we'll see how it plays out. On the Senate floor Wednesday morning, Schumer promised he would bring the elections reform bill, the For the People Act, to the floor. The Senate hearing for the bill is scheduled for next week.

For the first time since President Joe Biden took office, the White House has officially backed D.C. statehood. Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Biden’s stance Thursday. Download our NBC Washington app for iOS or Android to get alerts for local breaking news and weather. “He believes they deserve representation, that’s why he supports D.C. statehood,” she said. Mayor Muriel Bowser seemed excited to get the support, tweeting, "Let’s get it done Mr. President." A congressional hearing on statehood is set for Monday. “This hearing will accomplish important work in making the case for the D.C. statehood bill and educating the public about the need for it, and I encourage all D.C. residents to watch it,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said. Last June, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would make D.C. the 51st state and give 700,000 residents voting representation in the legislature. It was the first time a chamber of congress ever voted in favor of statehood, but the measure went nowhere in the Republican-controlled Senate. The latest statehood bill was introduced with a record 202 original cosponsors and is almost guaranteed to pass in the House. The Senate bill, which has 40 cosponsors, faces another uphill battle.

But his actions and those of his fellow activists embody a realization that many progressives have had: It wasn't enough to elect historic Democratic majorities to Congress and place a Democrat in the Oval Office. This was a revelation that began to dawn on many gay rights advocates sometime in 2009. I'm not exactly sure why we were one of the first progressive constituencies to conclude that we needed to make our voices heard loud and clear to President Obama and Democratic lawmakers -- that we needed to let them know in no uncertain terms that we weren't going to sit by quietly while they abandoned campaign promises only to reemerge like an impulsive suitor come 2012. Maybe it's because we were tired of paying the same taxes and not being able to pursue our happiness with equal fervor. Maybe it's because for decades we had been told by Democrats, "Elect us and we'll help you," yet we had only seen discriminatory measures like "Don't ask, Don't tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act enacted into law. Maybe it's because once your intelligence has been insulted flagrantly enough and your humanity denigrated deeply enough, you've got nothing left to lose. Whatever it was, many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans had had enough. And that's why LGBT activists started handcuffing themselves to the fence that forms the perimeter around the White House, showing up at presidential events and sometimes shouting down Obama -- even at fundraisers for progressive allies like California Senator Barbara Boxer. In fact, nothing seems to provoke the president more than being challenged by the progressive base. After studying Obama as a member of the press corps for nearly four years, the only time I have seen the fire of true indignation flare in his eyes is when he feels as though the left is questioning the authenticity of his progressive ideals. To be candid, not all gay rights advocates agreed with these tactics -- some found them unseemly. But in retrospect, "Don't ask, Don't tell" was essentially the only piece of legislation passed during President Obama's first two years to address the concern of a specific progressive constituency. The one exception to that rule was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that relaxed the statute of limitations on when women could file a complaint for not being compensated at an equal level to men. That sailed through Congress in the first couple weeks of Obama's presidency. The politics of ensuring women equal pay for equal work was a no-brainer for Democrats. But the politics of climate change, immigration reform, enabling labor unions to organize, ensuring access to abortion, and advancing LGBT equality -- those issues proved tricky. Lawmakers and the White House -- which had enormous sway over the congressional agenda in Obama's first two years -- needed to be convinced that they were worth the effort. Before they would act, they needed to see that the progressive left could be just as loud and boisterous and electorally essential as the conservative right. And that's what some queer activists set out to prove.

Already placed Warren allies/alums include: Bharat Ramamurti: Deputy director of the White House National Economic Council Julie Siegel: Treasury deputy chief of staff Julie Morgan: a senior adviser at the Education Department Sasha Baker: senior director of strategic planning at the National Security Council Leandra English, a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alum (CFPB), is chief of staff for the National Economic Council Nominees include: Adewale "Wally" Adeyemo, who helped Warren launch the CFPB, has been nominated to be deputy Treasury secretary FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, another CFPB alum, has been nominated to lead the bureau Gary Gensler, who aggressively regulated big banks after the financial crisis, has been nominated for Securities and Exchange Commission chair—"a position that in the past Warren and her staff have invested significant effort trying to influence," writes Politico. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is also a close ally and confidant of Warren, who helped mount a pressure campaign to get Yellen appointed as Federal Reserve chair under President Obama. Warren also reportedly has an open line of communication with Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain. According to Karolina Arias, a former Democratic Senate aide and partner at Federal Hall Policy Advisors, the appointments "confirm that Sen. Warren will be the most influential voice in the financial policy debate under the new administration." Richard Hunt, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, appeared to offer a more sour grapes perception of Warren's handiwork. "No one should be surprised Sen. Warren has virtually hand-picked the financial and other regulatory nominations she cares deeply about," said Hunt, who has gone toe-to-toe with Warren over financial industry regulation in some cases. Warren, who has always advocated a "personnel is policy" approach, told Politico in December that "getting the right people in those slots is really important." "It's not only the top slots, it's also the deputies and assistants," she said, "The people who do the hard work day in and day out to develop policies and then to execute them." Warren's far-reaching network in the Biden world gives her key allies as she pushes the administration to take action on everything from student debt cancellation to increased government financing of child care and potentially raising taxes on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations. The prominent placement of those allies also represents a distinct change in bent from many of the people who occupied those posts within both the Clinton and Obama administrations. "Warren has become the center of gravity for people who think the economy has gotten out of whack and that better governance could set things right," said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the watchdog group the Revolving Door Project. Though Hauser said many of Biden's top aides are more traditional Democrats, "it makes sense that when trying to staff an executive branch that can produce real results for people and a legacy for their boss, they looked to people associated with Warren."

Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters. Elizabeth Warren wanted Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White out, and she wanted her out immediately. Over the course of 12 pages and 57 footnotes in an October 2016 letter to President Barack Obama, Warren excoriated White for—among other transgressions—using SEC resources to push an anti-disclosure initiative “cooked up by big business lobbyists.” That was the last straw in a yearslong clash between the Massachusetts senator, a ferocious critic of Wall Street, and White, who had defended banks as a private attorney. Never mind that Obama had just three months left in his term and, a week after the November election, White would announce her own departure. White’s “brazen conduct,” Warren told Obama, had undermined Congress, his administration, the SEC, and the investors it serves. “Enough is enough,” Warren wrote. White was just one in a long line of Obama-appointed financial regulators who incurred Warren’s wrath. She’d been incensed by the revolving door between the banks and federal government ever since she was a law professor studying personal bankruptcy at Harvard. That same revolving door had kept Warren from running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency she’d created, because bank-sympathetic Democrats and Republicans alike worried what such a strident critic would do as its head. Instead, she settled for helping to launch the agency before returning home to Massachusetts. But over the past four years, Warren’s standing has shifted, and her views have earned a hard-fought place of respect within her party. Warren likely won’t clash as much with the next SEC chair, pending Senate confirmation: Biden nominated Gary Gensler, a former investment banker and Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair who has become an unlikely but loyal ideological ally for Warren. And the people who helped to advance Warren’s argument have earned their places, too: Bharat Ramamurti, her former top economic policy hand who helped craft those letters against White’s SEC, is now a deputy director of the National Economic Council, the White House’s nerve center for economic policymaking. Ramamurti is far from the lone Warren acolyte who has landed a prime job now that Biden is president. The administration has also tapped a number of her first hires to the CFPB, such as Rohit Chopra, a likeminded progressive who has been named to lead the agency. Some of her former Senate aides have been appointed to key roles across the federal agencies, such as Julie Siegel, who helped develop Warren’s aggressive private equity proposal and now holds a top post at Treasury. Others have decamped to jobs at Health and Human Services, the National Security Council, and the Education Department. Over her eight years in the Senate, Warren has mentored a fleet of former staffers who now hold roles in the Biden administration, a peak expression of her mantra of “personnel is policy.” And despite the fact that she didn’t win the presidency, she is having a tremendous influence on how the Biden administration will operate. “I can do so much as a senator,” she tells me, “but the people who’ve come from my office will be able to do so much more, far more.” Gene Sperling, a former NEC chair under Obama and one of the economists who advised Warren on her campaign’s central wealth tax proposal, recalls Warren describing the Senate’s levers of power as a tier system. The first level is using the platform to change the political debate; the second is pushing legislation; and the third is “fighting in the trenches at every level,” work that requires getting deep in the legislative and regulatory weeds. “She knows that everyone pushes hard on the second level,” Sperling said, “but that she could have a uniquely powerful impact by fully throwing herself into the first and third levels as well.” As the leader of a congressional panel overseeing Congress’ $700 billion bank bailout in 2008, the Harvard law professor turned a toothless committee into a massive platform for her plainspoken explanations of how the government had abetted a financial system rigged in favor of the few. When she spent a year setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, Warren emphasized “talent and culture,” a former Obama official told Politico. When she entered the Senate instead of becoming the CFPB’s first chair, Warren decided to keep focusing on building up a network of allies by hiring the right people to be her staff. “I thought about, ‘What are all the resources available to a senator to make change?’” Warren says. “One of the important things is the chance to build a team.” She hired a number of people who had unconventional resumes and no congressional experience, including former students from her Harvard law school classes, such as Ganesh Sitaraman, who also served as an adviser on her presidential campaign, and Dan Geldon, who eventually served as chief of staff to both her Senate office and campaign. “Part of our agenda was about pushing bills, but also getting the executive branch to do more and do better,” recalls Jeremy Bearer-Friend, a professor at George Washington University Law School who led Warren’s tax work from 2015 through 2017. “That meant spending a lot of time thinking through the pitfalls inside agencies, why things were moving slowly, and pressing them to do more.” Those who rose through Warren’s ranks proved themselves as highly trained professionals as thirsty for “blood and teeth left on the floor” as their boss—and shared her penchant for digging into the details to pave the way for change. Ramamurti, Warren’s former banking counsel now at the NEC, played a lead role in preparing Warren’s infamous excoriation of former Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf in 2016 over the bank’s fake customer account scandal. Her cross-examination is best remembered for its vitriolic one-liners—she pointedly told him he “should resign”—but it was just one of many tactics Ramamurti and his colleagues deployed to force regulators to take action. The effort led to the resignation of not only Stumpf, but also his successor, Tim Sloan, and finally, penalties from the SEC and Federal Reserve. Julie Margetta Morgan, whom Warren calls “another data nerd” like herself, spent two years working in the Senate digging into the particulars of who carries student loan debt. What she discovered, Warren recalls, was “a job that called for oversight” of the Education Department’s administration of the loan program. They identified an obscure provision in the Higher Education Act called “defense to repayment,” and pushed the department to wipe out the loans of 30,000 students defrauded by for-profit colleges, which it did in 2015. Morgan is now focused on loan debt as a senior counsel at the Department of Education, which is in the midst of studying whether that same provision grants the department the authority to do the sort of mass debt cancellation Warren has advocated for. (Both Morgan and Ramamurti declined to comment for this story.) Beyond hiring the “smartest, most aggressive people” she can, the former professor still sees herself as a mentor. “My job, while they’re in the Senate office, is to help them sharpen their tools, so when they leave, they’ll be more effective,” Warren tells me, noting she’s deliberate in “help[ing] them find the next job so they can make a difference.” Sometimes, that includes helping them find a new role in government—a place where they can showcase their skills. In 2018, Warren pushed her fellow Senate Democrats to tap Chopra to serve on the Federal Trade Commission, where he championed anti-trust policy. And last April, when Congress created another congressional oversight panel in the wake of yet another financial crisis, then–Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer nominated Ramamurti. “She realizes that if you’re going to get a big job, you need to show you have experience in governing and politics,” Sperling says. “She encourages her people to get into positions where they can grow from, where they can get a track record for getting stuff done.” During the Obama years, Warren torpedoed NEC Chair Larry Summers’ expected ascent to the Federal Reserve, and, the following year, led the charge against Antonio Weiss, an executive at boutique asset management firm Lazard when Obama nominated him to serve as Treasury’s undersecretary of domestic finance. That veto power hung over Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations, and Warren exercised a quieter pressure on Clinton to avoid similar choices. The way Warren has nurtured her staff is not unrelated to her broader personnel project: It’s one means for preparing a slate of progressive-minded experts to be worthy alternatives. Warren has been a private but constant voice to the Biden administration on personnel decisions. “I think she’s an enormous resource for the administration,” Damon Silvers, the policy director for the AFL-CIO and a friend of Warren’s. “She’s both a political power that has to be answered at some level, but she’s also a partner with great insight who offers a lot of help.” In Biden’s transition, Warren found a likeminded ally in Ted Kaufman, Biden’s longtime chief of staff when he was in the Senate. Kaufman is best known for briefly taking over his old boss’s Senate seat when Biden ascended to the vice presidency in 2009. Less known is the fact that he later replaced Warren on the congressional panel overseeing the 2008 bank bailout and inherited her staff. “Elizabeth Warren really knows what she’s talking about, and Elizabeth Warren can pick good staff people,” Kaufman says of the lesson he took from the experience. It was the “unconventional reason,” he tells me, why people who had worked for her were given a “head start” in their consideration for administration posts. His approach to key economic posts across the administration echoes Warren’s priorities. “Something I personally brought up at every personnel meeting we had: Do something about the revolving door, and pick people who are sensitive to inequality and wealth.” Warren demurs when I ask how much she talks to her former staffers about their new posts. “I don’t want to say anything about that,” she tells me. “I let them do their jobs.” Indeed, they work for the president now, and it’s too soon to say whether these progressive personnel additions are having any influence. They are, after all, just a fraction of the posts across the administration, most of them in crucial, albeit lower-level posts. Though heartened to see several Warren alumni serving Biden, the senator’s allies are closely watching to see who the White House names to some still-open positions—the antitrust jobs in the Department of Justice, for example, and who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an obscure but influential post that oversees the White House’s implementation of executive actions. Progressives are pushing Biden to choose another Warrenite for the role: Sitaraman, the former Warren aide who’s now a professor of constitutional law at Vanderbilt University. Warren, meanwhile, continues to be Warren, cutting the new administration little slack. She has already sent letters to a number of Biden’s agencies demanding investigations into one thing or another, including one to the SEC requesting details on how the agency will “crack down on years of distortion in securities markets” that benefit the “wealthy few” in light of the recent volatility in the stocks of GameStop and other companies. As the White House turns its attention to a jobs and infrastructure plan, she reintroduced her wealth tax, her trademark campaign proposal that would tax 2 percent of individuals’ net worth above $50 million, to pay for it. She’s already gearing up for a fight with the president, who conspicuously rejected a wealth tax during his campaign: Last week, Warren hosted a roundtable with vocal progressive activists—including those from the Sunrise Movement, Working Families Party, and others—and liberal wonks to kick off a pressure campaign for her proposal. Still, it’s a marked change from where Warren sat at the start of the last Democratic presidency. Over dinner at the Bombay Club in April 2009, Larry Summers told Warren, then in charge of the oversight panel, that she had a choice to make. “I could be an insider or I could be an outsider,” Warren recalls in her 2014 memoir. “Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas.” Insiders also followed one “unbreakable” rule: “They don’t criticize other insiders.” Warren is now, decidedly, an insider, a status she achieved by breaking that directive when necessary. As for Summers, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post last month undermining the White House’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package, warning it could “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Summer’s attacks drew a swift and sharp rebuke from all corners of the White House. Among the dissenters: Ramamurti. “The president and the administration have a lot of respect for Professor Summers,” he told CBS Radio. “But we disagree here.”

Yesterday morning, on a bike ride—one of those physical activities I have yet to see the world’s healthiest orange president do—Joe Biden was asked a question by Fox News’ Peter Doocy: “Mr. Vice President, have you picked a running mate yet?” Biden, in response, answered “Yeah, I have.” Doocy, believing he had a scoop, asked: “You have? Who is it?” Biden responded: “It’s you,” and continued to ride away. The obvious truth is that it is incredibly likely Biden does have a running mate, but why give that to Fox New? Rather than accept the answer tongue-in-cheek, though, Fox News continued to report as though they had a big scoop on hand. Let’s roll the tape. Doocy tries to salvage their reporting: “Okay, so he didn’t know the follow up was coming, but he did answer with a direct ‘yes.’ He has picked a running mate.” Apparently too ashamed to admit that Joe Biden had just made them look like fools, Fox News continued with their “News Alert” until Biden’s spokesman, TJ Ducklo, had to chime in with the obvious. This incident establishes a few things all at once. Biden can clearly ride a bike, and the mask doesn’t impede him, despite conservative claims; Biden can think on his feet fast enough to spin a Fox News reporter around and leave him in the dust; Fox News is still having a very difficult time landing anything on the Biden campaign. P.S. Everyone who is ever asked the question “Have you chosen a running mate?” knows the follow-up is coming. I could watch this over and over and laugh every time.

Donald Trump, Jr. on Friday received harsh criticism after posting a video on social media showing his father physically attacking the current president of the United States. On Friday, President Joe Biden tripped while walking up the stairs to board Air Force One for a trip to Atlanta to mourn those killed in the Asian massage parlor shoots and celebrate 100 million vaccination shots. Trump, Jr. posted a video purporting to show Biden tripping after being hit in the head by a golf ball hit by the former president. Here's some of what people were saying about the social media post:

Judge Rosemarie Aquilina sentenced a Michigan restaurant owner to jail Friday for flagrantly violating state health laws regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. That came less than 48 after Fox News agitator Tucker Carlson had tried to make the defendant one of his endless tales of national grievance. Aquilina threw Holland, Mich. restaurateur Marlena Pavlos-Hackney in jail Friday after a raucous hearing. Aquilina ruled that Pavlos Hackney will remain in jail until the state is assured her restaurant -- Marlena's Bistro and Pizzeria -- is closed and she pays a $7,500 fine, the Detroit News reported. Pavlos-Hackney has become a cause celebre among Michigan Republicans since the state took away her license for refusing to comply with even the most basic COVID-19 mitigation measures. The restaurant stayed open during a state shutdown and refused to follow mask requirements, seating limits or other social-distancing rules, according to various published reports. Also, Pavlos-Hackney was charged with contempt in court for failing to show up when ordered. Pavlos-Hackney has been openly defiant of authorities, proclaiming "they can arrest me" and appearing on Carlson's show Thursday and others (including Glenn Beck's "The Blaze") to complain that Michigan "was acting like the Communist state (Poland) I escaped from." But Friday in Aquilina's court, it was the judge who was making the best sound bites in dressing down the defendant: "We're in the midst of a pandemic," Aquilina said. "You have selfishly not followed the orders. You've not followed them for your own financial gain and apparently for the publicity that comes with it." "Aquilina threatened supporters in the courtroom with contempt of court when they made noise during the court hearing. The judge gaveled down Pavlos-Hackney when the restaurant owner tried to interrupt the judge. "This isn't Burger King," Aquilina said. "When the sign changes to Burger King, you can have it your way." "After the hearing, two supporters of Pavlos-Hackney stood outside the courthouse with bullhorns, calling Aquilina a "tyrant judge." But Friday, Aquilina spoke with the assurance of a celebrity judge. She had drawn widespread recognition in 2018 in presiding over the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal case involving team doctor Larry Nassar. Here's how BBC.com reported it: "The judge who has sentenced disgraced USA gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar has given a voice to over 150 women who chose to confront their abuser face-to-face. "'I just signed your death warrant," Aquilina said as she told him he would serve up to 175 years. She listened patiently as survivors shared their stories of abuse during the multi-day-long sentencing. At times acting as more of a therapist than a judge, the 59-year-old did not hide her empathy for the women. "'Leave your pain here," she said. "She said she had received media requests from around the world but insisted the story was not about her." Aquilina, first elected as a judge in 2004, had previously "become the first female Judge Advocate General (JAG) in the Michigan Army National Guard where she earned the nickname "Barracuda Aquilina," the BBC reported. She had not lost her bite as of Friday, as the News reported: "During Friday's hearing, Aquilina also ordered a man attempting to represent Pavlos-Hackney as "assistance of counsel" to be arrested for contempt of court because he allegedly had represented himself as a lawyer when he was not licensed to practice. Richard Martin, who described himself as a constitutional lawyer and is the founder of the Constitutional Law Group, was ordered to serve 93 days in jail. Not having been allowed the legal services of non-lawyer Martin was among the grievances spouted by Pavlos-Hackney during media interviews. The News reported that "Pavlos-Hackney is believed to be the first restaurant owner in Michigan to be arrested for non-compliance with COVID-19 orders, according to Attorney General Dana Nessel's office. Others have complied after receiving court orders." Carlson had criticized Michigan's "out of control" Attorney General Dana Nessel, consistent with messaging of the Michigan GOP, as reported by the News. "The Michigan Republican Party criticized Nessel's office for arresting the restaurant owner while refusing to investigate COVID-19 nursing home deaths in Michigan. About 35% of all COVID deaths have occurred among nursing home residents and employees. "Nessel is eager to spend taxpayer-funded resources going after small business owners trying to stave off bankruptcy but refuses to investigate the deaths of thousands of nursing home residents potentially caused by policies implemented by her political-ally Gretchen Whitmer," GOP spokesman Ted Goodman said in a Friday statement. "It's a massive abuse of power and shows what her priorities are." Notably, the Republicans' political attack was void of any substantive defense of Pavlos-Hackney's inalienable right to spread infectious disease. Here's what Nessel's office had stated on that front: "Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development suspended Marlena's food establishment license on January 20, 2021. The restaurant has been operating without a license since then - in violation of the Michigan Food Law. An administrative hearing was held on February 1 to determine if the suspension was proper and on February 11 the Administrative Law Judge issued a decision and an order continuing the summary suspension of Marlena's food license. "This owner has continued to willfully violate the state's food laws, public health orders and the order of the court - a dangerous act that may have exposed dozens of diners and employees to the virus following the discovery that one of Marlena's customers tested positive for the virus within two days of eating there." There was a small gathering of supporting protesting on behalf of the jailed restaurateur Saturday. Neither that, nor Tucker Carlson, is likely to hold much sway with Barracuda Aquilina, however.