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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Hasan played the clip of his Fox News interview in which he said, "This happened overnight, okay, when President Biden rescinded the remain in Mexico policy when they rescinded the asylum cooperation agreements with the northern triangle countries.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.

A 55-year-old Holland restaurant owner operating in defiance of a court-ordered closure and the state's COVID-19 restrictions, including Michigan's mask mandate, will remain in an Ingham County jail for up to 93 days. Marlena's Bistro and Pizzeria owner Marlena 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. Assistant Attorney General Eileen Whipple told Ingham County Circuit Judge Wanda Stokes earlier this month that the restaurant would not allow inspectors on site and would not comply with social distancing or state mask mandates. Pavlos-Hackney, arrested shortly before 6 a.m. Friday during a traffic stop in Ottawa County, will remain in jail until the state is assured her restaurant is closed down and she pays $7,500, Ingham County Circuit Judge Rosemarie Aquilina said during a raucous Friday court hearing. "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.” Pavlos-Hackney's lawyer, Robert Parker, said the owner was prepared to pay the fine and close the restaurant, but Aquilina said she wanted proof of the closure. The restaurant was boarded up Friday afternoon after shutting at its usual 2 p.m. closing time. 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. 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." Pavlos-Hackney was held in contempt of court earlier this month for continuing to operate Marlena's Bistro and Pizzeria after her license was revoked by the state for weeks and months of failing to comply with COVID safety protocol, including masks, social distancing and capacity. Pavlos-Hackney was contacted by the state police on March 11 and told to turn herself in by March 18, Nessel's office said. “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,” Nessel said in a statement. The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development suspended the restaurant's food establishment license on Jan. 20, but it has continued to operate since. An administrative law judge upheld the suspension Feb. 11, according to Nessel's office. Pavlos-Hackney's supporters said she has been made an example by the state, but argued her actions were legal because of the Oct. 2 Michigan Supreme Court decision overturning Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's executive orders. The high court ruled that Whitmer failed to comply with an existing state law and decided a World War II era law was an unconstitutional grab of legislative power by the governor's office. COVID-19 regulations have since been issued as epidemic orders under the state Department of Health and Human Services and have not faced any successful court challenges. Pavlos-Hackney escaped communist Poland to achieve the American dream said Angela Rigas, a friend of the restaurant owner. "The state of Michigan is oppressing the people and they've become tyrants," Rigas said. "We can operate our businesses as we see fit. The First Amendment gives us the ability to petition grievance against the government, to assemble and freedom of speech. All of these things here have been used against Marlena." 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." But Whipple from the Michigan Attorney General's Office told Stokes that "Marlena’s is not employing even the most basic COVID-19 mitigation measures." "Marlena’s has rebuffed repeated attempts by the Allegan County Health Department to work with them to bring the defendant’s establishment into compliance," she said. Pavlos-Hackney told WOOD-TV Thursday she had a constitutional right to remain open. "We don't want in this country (a) communist regime who's going to dictate what we can do and what we can't do," Pavlos-Hackney said. "If I have to go to prison or jail, I'm willing to take the fight." The restaurant owner's state representative also criticized Nessel's decision. "Marlena simply wants to work to support her family and the families of her employees," said state Rep. Mary Whiteford, R-Casco Township, in a statement. "She reminds me of my dad, never wanting government handouts. Every one of her customers has chosen to eat in her restaurant. They refuse to let government dictate their lives. Gov. Whitmer must order her agencies to back down." [email protected]

Ms Aquilina, though admitting she is not a therapist, offered advice and empathetic words to the women as they confronted Nassar directly, who has sat to her left in the courtroom with his head bowed for the majority of the sentencing.

AG Nessel Announces Arrest of COVID-Defiant Holland Restaurant Owner AG Nessel Announces Arrest of COVID-Defiant Holland Restaurant Owner March 19, 2021 LANSING - Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced the arrest today of Marlena Pavlos-Hackney, the owner of Marlena's Bistro and Pizzeria in Holland. Pavlos-Hackney has continued to willfully violate the state's food laws, public health orders and a court-ordered Temporary Restraining Order which was converted into a Preliminary Injunction. Pavlos-Hackney, 55, Holland, was taken into custody by the Michigan State Police (MSP) today at 5:45 a.m. on an outstanding Ingham County Civil Warrant for Contempt of Court, for failing to comply in a civil case filed by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD v. Zante Inc.,dba Marlena's Bistro and Pizzeria). She was arrested, without incident, following a traffic stop on Lakewood Blvd and 160th in Ottawa County. MDARD 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," said Nessel "MDARD is particularly concerned because the potential exposure happened at a restaurant that refuses to comply with basic COVID-19 measures required by the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services." The Allegan County Health Department issued a news release notifying the public about their potential exposure to COVID-19. Pavlos-Hackney was advised by MSP via phone on March 11 that a warrant had been issued for her arrest and she was advised to turn herself in by March 18; she failed to do so. Pavlos-Hackney was observed driving and a traffic stop was initiated , at which time she was positively identified and arrested without incident. She was transported and is now lodged at the Ingham County Jail while awaiting court proceedings. ### Please note: A charge is merely an allegation and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. The Attorney General's office does not provide booking photos; however, one may be available upon request via email from the Michigan State Police. Kelly Rossman-McKinney 517-512-9342 Attorney General

Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., the unelected multimillionaire facing a tight runoff against Democratic rival Rev. Raphael Warnock next week, has submitted a number of irregular last-minute contribution reports with the Federal Election Commission, failing to disclose employment information for hundreds of donors in the final weeks of the campaign. For some donors, the reports show what appears to be misleading information about their employer or their position — including lobbyists and executives — some of them with notable names or corporate or personal ties to the appointed senator. One of the more glaring irregularities is a last-minute donation from Loeffler herself, in the amount of $67,200. While the wealthy former financial exec has made a public show of funding her own campaign, those donations have so far come in injections of millions of dollars. This $67,200 contribution is notable in that it parcels out to 24 donations of exactly $2,800 — the maximum allowable amount. Because the candidate is by default an agent of the campaign, Loeffler can match donor contributions and can accept checks from donors on behalf of the campaign. However, if she does accept checks on someone's behalf, the campaign must still report the donor's identity to the FEC. And if those donors have already given the maximum $2,800, their donations would be illegal. If Loeffler were knowingly acting as a fence for those donors, that too would be illegal. The Loeffler campaign did not respond to Salon's request for comment. Loeffler's conflicts of interest are inescapable: She worked for more than a decade at a top global financial firm, Intercontinental Exchange, which was founded by her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, and owns the New York Stock Exchange; now Loeffler sits on the Senate committee that has direct oversight of that business. A number of donors this year have raised eyebrows, including several million dollars from billionaire Ken Griffin, whose company closed a major deal in November that required NYSE approval. Salon recently reported that among the donors Loeffler failed to identify were several members of the Asplundh family, owners of the eponymous multibillion-dollar infrastructure clearing company, which one of Loeffler's committees oversees, and who have properly identified their employer in other FEC reports this election cycle. This week, Karl and Randall Meyers, listing themselves as CEO and CFO at XPO Last Mile — a subsidy of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's former company XPO Logistics — made Christmas Eve donations to Loeffler. The Meyers brothers also gave this month to the other multimillionaire Republican Senator under federal scrutiny while facing a runoff in the Peach State, David Perdue, as well as the Senate Battleground Georgia fund, but neither brother appears to have made any donations to any other candidate or committee this year. Each appears to have made only three other contributions ever — an amount they doubled this month alone. Earlier this month, XPO announced plans to spin off the Meyers' former subsidy of XPO into a new publicly traded company, and both companies will be traded on the NYSE — which Loeffler's husband's company owns. However, an XPO spokesperson told Salon that the Meyers brothers had not worked for XPO in several years. It is unclear why they listed XPO as their employer, and their specific positions as CEO and CFO. The irregularities come despite what the Loeffler campaign describes as its "best efforts" — as well as readily available public information, including from the donors' own recent FEC contribution history — her joint fundraising committee, which shares the same treasurer as the Loeffler campaign, responded just this month to to an FEC notice that it had not reported employer information for dozens of donations over the summer. Indeed, the campaign failed to identify employers for hundreds more donors in several reports filed since responding to that notice — for example, here; here; here; and here. Recent FEC reports from Perdue are also missing employer information, though not to the same extent as Loeffler (e.g., here; here; and here). By comparison, none of the recent reports for either Democratic candidate in the Georgia runoffs — Loeffler challenger Rev. Raphael Warnock, and Perdue rival Jon Ossoff — are missing any employer information. An analysis of Loeffler's three most recent reports reveals a number of significant omissions, and shines a light on who might want to fund her fight from the shadows. Kirsten Chadwick, of the lobbying firm Fierce Government Relations, gave Loeffler $2,500 on Dec. 27. She is listed as a "consultant" but is in reality the president of the firm, which does about $13 million in lobbying work annually, including for industries under Loeffler's purview, such as forestry, healthcare and finance. She has also worked as a registered lobbyist for both Facebook and Apple, companies Loeffler has trashed recently when she sided with President Trump against "Big Tech." A similar story applies to Christopher Bravacos, who gave Loeffler $1,400 on Christmas Eve, and lists his job at Bravo Group as "public relations." Bravacos' Wikipedia pages identifies him as the founder and CEO of the prominent communications and lobbying firm, which in 2020 lobbied on behalf of the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America — an area where Loeffler conducts oversight. Anthony Dinovi, who reports being "investment manager" at Thomas H. Lee Partners, gave a max $2,800 on Christmas Eve as well. Dinovi is in reality the chairman of that Massachusetts firm which focuses "primarily on North America middle-market buyouts" for financial services and healthcare, both of which intersect with Loeffler. W Russell Carothers, III, chair of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta gave along with his wife a total of $5,000 to Loeffler on Dec. 28, but his employer is not disclosed "per best efforts." The Director of Corporate Development for Sprecher's company, Intercontinental Exchange, came there from FHLB Atlanta. John Pasquesi, whose occupation is listed as "self-employed," is actually the Chairman of Arch Capital Group, a Bermuda-based global real estate insurance underwriter with about $11 billion in capital. Pasquesi is also the managing member of Otter Capital LLC, a private equity investment firm he founded in 2001, according to the Wall Street Journal. He and his wife, Meredith, each gave Loeffler $2,900 — one hundred dollars more than the legal limit, which the campaign will need to return or redesignate. Loeffler donor John MacGregor Fox listed his employer as "none," and occupation as "retired," but in earlier FEC reports this year he is identified as the Executive Chairman of Trona Energy. He is also Chairman of the Board of Kona Mountain Coffee, the Hawaii-based coffee farm. His $5,000 donation is over the maximum limit. Melanie Foster gave $1,000 to Loeffler on Dec. 24, and listed her occupation as retired. Foster ran multiple commercial landscaping companies, but currently serves on the financial advisory board of the Michigan State University board of trustees. According to survivors of the sexual assault scandal involving Larry Nassar, the Olympic gymnastics team doctor, Foster worked in her capacity as a trustee to block an independent review of thousands of pages of documents related to sexual assault cases. The survivors allege Foster "continually demonstrated a complete lack of moral conviction to pursue the truth and ensure that what Larry did to hundreds of women and children never happens to anyone again on MSU's campus." Another $2,800 Christmas Eve gift came from James H. Drew III of Augusta, Georgia. Drew says his employer is "Continental GA Corp," but he is perhaps more well known in Georgia for operating traveling carnival and midway company Drew Expositions, which issued a denial in 2019 after nationwide reports that the company employed a serial killer. In 2003, Drew pleaded guilty to giving $5,000 in illegal campaign contributions to Georgia's former agricultural commissioner. This fall, Loeffler's husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, completed a major acquisition of a real estate firm that marked the first foray into the mortgage industry for his company, Intercontinental Exchange. A striking number of donations have come to Loeffler from executives that industry. One max-out donor, Edward Inman, is listed as self-employed, but has worked for more than a decade at Atlanta-area investment firm Ashford Advisers, according to his LinkedIn page. And Lincoln International's Lawrence Lawson, who contributed $1,700 to Loeffler on Dec. 27, says his occupation is "entrepreneur." He is the chairman and global co-CEO of the multinational financial firm. Douglas Neff lists his occupation as "real estate investment" at IHP Capital Partners. He is the chairman and CEO of the prominent real estate equity firm, and gave $1,000 to Loeffler on Dec. 27. John K. Castle gave Loeffler the maximum allowable $2,800 on Christmas Eve, and lists his occupation as "merchant banker." He is the billionaire founder and CEO of private equity firm Castle Harlan, according to his own Wikipedia page. In 2016 he sold his Palm Beach estate, once known as the "Winter White House" for former president John F. Kennedy, for $31 million. The buyer was billionaire real estate mogul Jane Goldman, who also gave Loeffler $2,800 on Christmas Eve. Loeffler also received a Dec. 24 contribution from Pat Deon, who lists Progressive Management as his employer, and his occupation as "real estate." A 2019 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Deon is subtitled, "Meet the most influential man in Pennsylvania you've never heard of." Loeffler donor Chuck Ames identifies himself as an energy trader at Vitol, a firm whose energy futures business intersects with Loeffler's government oversight role and the primary functions of her husband's business at both Intercontinental Exchange and the NYSE. This month, Vitol agreed to pay $163 million to settle civil and criminal charges that employees paid bribes for oil bids in Brazil, Mexico and Ecuador. Indeed, a great number of last-minute contributions come from wealthy and influential donors with patent conflicts of interests: The CEO of Woodforest Financial; the co-founder of industrial real estate investment firm Black Creek Group; the chief strategy officer of Payroc, an Atlanta-based global payment processing firm whose business overlaps neatly with Loeffler's crypto payment platform firm, Bakkt; a principal at real estate equity firm Huizenga Capital Management; a partner at venture investment firm Rock Creek Capital; the head of fund and brokerage operations & technology at Fidelity; and a V.P. at NextEra Energy Resources, which uses Sprecher's ICE platform to handle payment processing. George Archer Frierson II, who contributed a max donation on Christmas Eve, reports as a "self-employed investor," but for other donations this election cycle is listed as an agent for Vintage Realty. The Dec. 24 maximum donation from John Ginger lists him as a retiree, but as recently as Dec. 8 he was identified in press as the CEO of J. Ginger Masonry, one of the largest masonry outfits in the Western U.S. Another "retired" West Coast donor, Jim Godfrey, is the founder and CEO of Chateau Retirement Communities, according to the company's website. Caroll Neubauer's $1,000 Christmas Eve contribution says that the longtime CEO of the U.S. branch of the healthcare and pharmaceutical multinational corporation B. Braun is now retired. But a news release this October names him as a new executive advisor at the firm Water Street Healthcare. Loeffler oversees healthcare. Finally, Loeffler received $1,000 from former U.S. Senator Connie Mack, R-Fla., but the campaign could not seem to retrieve his employment information, "per best efforts."

He told George Stephanopoulos he wants to return to the "talking filibuster." President Joe Biden on Tuesday said he supports changing the Senate’s filibuster rule back to requiring senators talk on the floor to hold up a bill, the first time he has endorsed reforming the procedure the White House has for weeks insisted the president is opposed to eliminating. The comments, made in an exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, could galvanize reform advocates who argue that the legislative filibuster is stymying Biden's agenda in the narrowly divided Senate. "Aren't you going to have to choose between preserving the filibuster, and advancing your agenda?" Stephanopoulos asked Biden in their interview outside Philadelphia. "Yes, but here's the choice: I don't think that you have to eliminate the filibuster, you have to do it what it used to be when I first got to the Senate back in the old days," Biden said. "You had to stand up and command the floor, you had to keep talking." "So you're for that reform? You're for bringing back the talking filibuster?" Stephanopulos asked. "I am. That's what it was supposed to be," Biden said. "It's getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning," Biden told Stephanopoulos. As recently as Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted that Biden preferred "not to make changes" to the filibuster but was "open to hearing" ideas on the topic. Currently, 60 votes are needed in the Senate to end debate and pass legislation, a threshold that requires Democrats to have the support of at least 10 Republicans to advance bills through the 50-50 Senate. Many Democrats, worried that the filibuster could hold up major agenda items such as voting rights and immigration reform, have pressured Democrats to use their majority to eliminate the filibuster or alter the rules. One proposal referenced by Biden on Tuesday, would revert back to the "talking filibuster" used decades ago that required senators to speak on the Senate floor to sustain a challenge to legislation. While moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have objected to changing the filibuster, Manchin recently raised the possibility of making the tactic more "painful" for Republicans – a comment seized on by the reform advocates. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Tuesday warned Democrats against changing the legislative filibuster. "This chaos would not open up an express lane to liberal change. It would not open up an express lane for the Biden presidency to speed into the history books," he said. "The Senate would be more like a hundred-car pile-up. Nothing moving." McConnell said Republicans would take advantage of any rule changes the next time they retained the Senate majority. "This pendulum would swing both ways — hard," he said. Watch more of the interview with President Joe Biden on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, March 17, at 7 a.m. EDT.

It's hard to imagine literally talking for an entire day, but that is what happened during the longest filibuster in Senate history. The year was 1957 and Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina white supremacist best known for running as a third-party presidential candidate nine years earlier, talked for 24 hours and 18 minutes to stall a major civil rights bill. It was the first major civil rights legislation since the 19th century, so Thurmond droned on and on and on. Nothing he said was particularly memorable, but he was determined to stop even the modest voting reforms contained in the proposed legislation. On two occasions, however, Thurmond hit a snag: He had to go to the bathroom. Advertisement: Fortunately for Thurmond, an Arizona senator named Barry Goldwater stepped in on those occasions to talk about a military pay bill so the staunch segregationist could relieve himself. (Goldwater later transformed the Republican Party into the far-right organization it is today through his 1964 presidential campaign.) Fortunately for America, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 wound up passing despite Thurmond's obstructionism, laying the foundation for voting rights and creating both the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. Unfortunately for America, the filibuster still exists — and may still be used to strip people of their voting rights. In fact, the filibuster itself could be fairly described as the single worst feature of U.S. Senate procedure. It exists because of a thoughtless error and has only infrequently been used for positive ends. It's not an exaggeration to say that our Senate's version of the filibuster was basically created by mistake. As Brookings Institution senior fellow Sarah A. Binder explained when testifying before the Senate in 2010, both the Senate and House of Representatives used rule books tracing back to 1789 that were virtually identical. These included a "previous question" motion that is today interpreted in the House as meaning a simple majority can cut off debate. The Senate no longer has that rule, however, because Vice President Aaron Burr suggested in 1805 that the Senate's rulebook needed to be streamlined. It had not occurred to either chamber of Congress at the time that the rule could be used to cut off debate, so the Senate followed through on Burr's suggestion in 1806. (All of this happened after Burr's 1805 indictment for murdering Alexander Hamilton.) Advertisement: Even so, it didn't occur to senators to abuse this oversight by filibustering bills to death until 1837. After that, the filibuster was rarely used until the mid-19th century, when the Senate became more polarized and issues (often involving voting rights) heightened partisan passions. By the 1880s filibusters were common, frustrating presidents and politicians on both sides who found that a single senator could destroy legislation supported by overwhelming majorities if they were willing to be shamelessly voluble. In 1917, when a group of senators filibustered a bill to arm merchant ships during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson decided enough was enough. With his prodding, the Senate adopted Rule 22, which said that two-thirds of senators could forcibly end a filibuster and bring a bill to vote (a process known as cloture). That threshold was later reduced to three-fifths in 1975, meaning that today you need 60 senators to shut up a filibusterer. Since the 1970s senators have been able to filibuster without even talking; all they have to do is say that they plan on launching a filibuster against a given bill or motion to grind the Senate to a screeching halt. While some senators still seize the opportunity to grandstand (Ted Cruz memorably did this when opposing the Affordable Care Act in 2013, speaking for more than 21 hours and at one point reciting Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham"), it isn't required or essential. This made it easier for Mitch McConnell to obstruct much of Barack Obama's agenda, even as minority leader in the Senate. That brings us to the present. Even though President Biden's COVID-19 stimulus relief package is wildly popular, not a single Republican senator voted for it. McConnell, it is obvious, plans on trying to thwart Biden's agenda in the same way that he made life miserable for Democrats during the Obama era. While Democrats were able to push Biden's bill through via the budget reconciliation process, they won't be able to do so for most of the new president's agenda. Their only option, if they hope to get anything meaningful done, is to repeal the filibuster entirely, much as Republicans repealed it in 2017 relating to the confirmation of Supreme Court justices. Advertisement: But in a 50-50 Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as the tiebreaker, Democrats can only repeal the filibuster if every single Democratic senator votes to do so. That is where a specific faction of the Democratic Party — let's call them the "delusional centrists" — comes into play. That group mainly comprises two senators, West Virginia's Joe Manchin and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, who have repeatedly said that they love the filibuster and will never vote to ditch it. (Manchin suggested last weekend that he might be open to returning to a talking filibuster, then walked that back.) They claim that this is because they believe in the importance of bipartisanship and debate. It also seems likely that they say this because it further cements their status as swing votes in the Senate, forcing leaders from both parties to curry their favor. Advertisement: Either way, by pretending that the filibuster serves some noble purpose, Manchin and Sinema ignore that its most conspicuous uses have been for evil causes. American University historian Allan Lichtman provided Salon with a list of "harmful filibusters" by email. In 1946, "Southern Democrats successfully filibustered to stop consideration of a bill to create legislation to combat racial discrimination in employment," he wrote, and that certainly wasn't the beginning: In 1846, Southern Senators successfully filibustered against an amendment to a bill for purchasing land from Mexico that prohibited slavery. Southern senators also used filibusters to stop anti-lynching bills in 1922, 1935, 1938, 1948 and 1949. Two filibusters during the Obama Administration blocked legislation to establish the DREAM Act for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. Eric Schickler, co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies, wrote by email that "a lot of important legislation has been killed by the filibuster." He cited as one example "a bill protecting voting rights for southern Black voters" that was defeated by filibuster in 1891, and a legendary 1935 filibuster by Huey Long of Louisiana, who spoke for more than 15 hours to stop Franklin D. Roosevelt from removing a provision that would require Senate approval of senior employees in the National Recovery Administration. Long's goal was to stop his political enemies in Louisiana from obtaining powerful government jobs — to do so, Long even resorted to reciting his mother's recipe for pot liquor. Advertisement: It's not true that the filibuster has always been used for bad causes, although the overall trend is certainly in that direction. "While the most prominent and important uses for much of its history was to uphold Jim Crow and white supremacy in the South," Schickler said, "it has been used for other purposes as well — and now is used routinely by both parties. One of the early cases of it being used by liberals was to kill the Supersonic Transport plane project in 1970." Lichtman also cited occasions when the filibuster was used toward more benevolent ends, including when it "stopped 2003 legislation that would have limited class action suits," when a 2005 filibuster of the Patriot Act resulted in "additional provisions to protect civil liberties," when a 2006 filibuster blocked a bill that would have permanently repealed the inheritance tax and when a 2018 filibuster blocked a bill that would have made it illegal to perform an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Advertisement: Yet while these examples suggest that the filibuster can occasionally be beneficial, its origins as a freakish mistake and its more common use as a tool for reactionary obstructionism — particularly to maintain white supremacy and stop voting rights — make it clear that it needs the old heave-ho. For one thing, Republicans are using Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election as an excuse to pass new voter suppression laws, with 253 restrictive bills already being considered in 43 states. Between that and the anticipated wave of Republican gerrymandering, the GOP is clearly hoping to distort and undermine future elections such that it holds national and state power for the foreseeable future, regardless of the people's will. Democrats are trying to pass the For the People Act, which would ban partisan gerrymandering, establish automatic and same-day voter registration, allow people without voter ID to cast ballots as long as they swear on an affidavit and permit formerly incarcerated citizens to vote. If this bill passes, elections will be much fairer and Republicans will have to win by actually earning more votes than their opponents (well, save in presidential elections, where the Electoral College still reigns). Naturally Republicans will filibuster this bill to death — and it boggles the mind that Manchin and Sinema, who would be just as vulnerable as every other Democrats to the erosion of democracy, appear ready to go along. These are not the only important aspects of Biden's agenda that are at stake. Raising the minimum wage, fighting climate change, combating racism, protecting women's and LGBTQ rights, rebuilding infrastructure and enacting meaningful economic reform all depend on dumping the filibuster. Otherwise Republicans will make sure none of that happens. If the filibuster were actually some venerable bulwark of democracy, enshrined in the Constitution and protecting good government, maybe a case for it could be made. None of that's true: It was born of absent-mindedness and has mostly been used as a tool of oppression. To preserve democracy — and basic human decency — the filibuster has got to go.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., drew immediate backlash after escalating a fight over a bill that would extend civil rights protections for the LGBTQ community by taunting a Democrat who has a transgender child with an anti-trans sign outside her office. Freshman Rep. Marie Newman, D-Ill., said in an emotional speech on the House floor Tuesday that she had a very personal reason to co-sponsor the Equality Act, which would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Advertisement: "I rise today on behalf of the millions of Americans who continue to be denied housing, education, public services and much, much more because they identify as members of the LGBTQ community," said Newman, who last year defeated conservative Democrat Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., an opponent of the Equality Act. "Americans like my own daughter, who years ago bravely came out to her parents as transgender. I knew from that day on, my daughter would be living in a nation where [in] most of its states, she could be discriminated against, merely because of who she is." Newman later put up a transgender pride flag outside her door, which is across from Green's, after Greene tried to block a vote on the bill. "Our neighbor, @RepMTG, tried to block the Equality Act because she believes prohibiting discrimination against trans Americans is 'disgusting, immoral, and evil,'" Newman tweeted. "Thought we'd put up our Transgender flag so she can look at it every time she opens her door." Advertisement: Greene, a QAnon booster who earlier this month lost her committee assignments after pushing conspiracy theories and calling for Democrats to be executed, quickly escalated the dispute by putting up a sign attacking transgender identity to taunt Newman outside of her own office. "Thought we'd put up ours so she can look at it every time she opens her door," Greene tweeted with a video of her putting up a sign saying "There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE" and "Trust the Science!" Greene later posted a transphobic attack aimed at Newman's daughter, writing, "your biological son does NOT belong in my daughters' bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams." Advertisement: Science shows that gender is far less binary than Greene, who espoused conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers, would have people believe. Her stunt quickly drew bipartisan condemnation. "Your sign is incorrect because it's not what the science says," tweeted Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., quoting a column in Scientific American that said, "the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real." Advertisement: "Sickening, pathetic, unimaginably cruel," Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill., tweeted in response to Greene. "This hate is exactly why [the Equality Act] is necessary and what we must protect [Newman's] daughter and all our LGBTQ+ loved ones against." "This is sad and I'm sorry this happened. Rep. Newmans daughter is transgender, and this video and tweet represents the hate and fame driven politics of self-promotion at all evil costs," tweeted anti-Trump Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill. "This garbage must end." The Daily Beast's Scott Bixby noted that Kinzinger's tweet came after he voted in support of Greene's motion to block the vote, "a motion she explicitly proposed to attack trans people." Advertisement: Kinzinger voted in favor of Greene's motion to adjourn for the day instead of voting for the bill, which she said would allow her colleagues to "rethink destroying #WomensRights and #WomensSports and #ReligiousFreedom." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., responded, "you could just vote 'no' instead of trying to get out of work early." "You should probably stop using those hashtags because women's rights include trans women," Ocasio-Cortez added. Advertisement: Despite objections from Greene, the Equality Act is expected to pass the House, as it did in 2019. Despite Democrats winning control of the Senate, they would still need support from multiple Republicans to avoid a filibuster after it was rejected by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., last time around. Greene, meanwhile, faces renewed scrutiny in connection to the deadly January 6 Capitol riot after CNN reported that Anthony Aguero, who bragged about invading the Capitol, "worked closely" with Greene for years and described the freshman congresswoman as "one of my closest friends."

• The filibuster’s emergence had nothing to do with racial legislation, and it has been used against a wide variety of bills. However, historians agree that the filibuster was closely intertwined with anti-civil-rights efforts in the Senate for more than a century, thanks to repeated efforts by southern senators to filibuster civil rights bills. Former President Barack Obama made some news when he delivered a eulogy for John Lewis, the civil rights activist and congressman from Georgia who died on July 17 after battling cancer. In his eulogy, Obama said he was open to ending the filibuster, the longstanding rule in the U.S. Senate that allows a minority of 41 senators to block action on a bill. Obama’s declaration during the July 30 church service in Atlanta came as he argued that Lewis’ top issue – the right to vote – was under attack. "You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for," the Voting Rights Act. Obama said he supported such policies as automatic voter registration, additional polling places and early voting, making Election Day a national holiday, statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and an end to partisan gerrymandering. "And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster – another Jim Crow relic – in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do" Obama said. A former Obama speechwriter, David Litt, had used almost identical language more than a month earlier when writing in the Atlantic, calling the filibuster "another relic of the Jim Crow era." We wanted to know more about the history of the filibuster and its role in the Jim Crow era. Historians told PolitiFact that the filibuster did not emerge from debates over slavery or segregation. However, they agreed that the parliamentary tactic was closely affiliated with opposition to civil rights for more than a century. "The histories of the filibuster, civil and voting rights, and race in America are intertwined," said Steven S. Smith, a political scientist and Senate specialist at Washington University in St. Louis. Where did the filibuster come from? The filibuster was never "established" by a specific act; it emerged essentially by accident. In her book, "Minority Rights, Majority Rule: Partisanship and the Development of Congress," Sarah Binder pegs the origins of the filibuster to a revision of Senate rules in the first decade of the 19th century, when senators mistakenly deleted a rule empowering a majority to cut off debate. "Bereft of a rule to limit debate by majority vote in the 19th century, senators learned to exploit the rules to obstruct, delay, and take measures hostage for action on favored bills," said Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It took until 1917 for the Senate to enact a "cloture" rule that disempowered a single senator, or small group of senators, from stopping debate on their own. The 1917 rule empowered a two-thirds majority of senators to cut off debate and proceed to the business being blocked. That fraction was lowered to three-fifths in 1975, where it remains today. (More recently, both parties have moved to eliminate the filibuster for appointments, but it remains in place for legislation.) Sen. Strom Thurmond, D-S.C., demonstrates his oratory minutes after he emerged from the Senate chamber where he spoke a record-breaking 24-hours, 18 minutes, against the compromise Civil Rights bill, on Aug. 29, 1957. (AP) How the filibuster has been used against civil rights legislation "Exploitation of the filibuster repeatedly undermined adoption of measures supported by majorities to protect and advance the rights of African Americans for much of Senate history," Binder said. The first period when this happened was in the pre-Civil War era, when filibusters were used against the admission of states depending on their slavery status, including California in 1850 and Kansas beginning in 1857, said Gregory Koger, a political scientist and congressional specialist at the University of Miami. Then, during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, senators launched filibusters against civil rights bills, deployment of federal troops in southern states, and repayment of income taxes from the Civil War, Koger said. "The last gasp of Republican efforts to ensure the political rights of southern blacks was the 1890-91 elections bill, which died in a Senate filibuster," Koger said. "The Republicans were chastened after this last effort. They were surprised by the vehemence of Southern opposition to the bill, and found that northern interest in civil rights was low." Civil rights largely faded from the congressional agenda between the 1890s and the 1930s, but even then, the filibuster was used to block anti-lynching bills in 1922 and 1935. (Efforts to belatedly enact an anti-lynching law have been under way during the current Congress, but no law has been sent to the president yet.) "It wasn’t until the 1950s that weak civil rights legislation was passed, and it wasn’t until 1964 and 1965 that legislation with real teeth was enacted," Smith said. Generally speaking, pro-civil rights senators did not resort to filibustering, Koger said. One exception came in 1937, when pro-civil rights senators threatened to filibuster the resolution to adjourn for the year until Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley promised to bring an anti-lynching bill up for a vote. Barkley relented, but the bill that came to the floor died due a filibuster. Pro-civil-rights senators could have used filibusters to hold hostage bills valued by southerners, Koger said. But they didn't, he said, in part because northern senators had a much smaller proportion of African American constituents at the time, making the issue seem less immediately salient. By contrast, "once southern states had imposed a vast array of voting and election advantages for white citizens, there were few politicians in the South whose careers depended on representing southern Blacks, including restoring their political equality," Koger said. With whites strongly in favor of the Jim Crow status quo, southern senators went all in on blocking civil rights legislation, including the use of the filibuster, he said. Even the Civil Rights Act of 1965, the landmark bill that finally broke the logjam, was almost blocked by the filibuster. The bill’s proponents were able to win passage only after securing 71 votes, including 27 Republicans, to end a filibuster. Other targets of the filibuster Civil rights legislation has not been the only type of Senate action to become subject to a filibuster. The very first Senate filibuster was over a bridge across the Potomac River, Koger said, and trade, tariffs, and monetary policy inspired some 19th and early 20th century filibusters. "During the 1920s and 1930s, many filibusters were waged by progressives against perceived government handouts to big business, and for neutrality in foreign affairs," Koger said. "The 1939 movie 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' in which a simple prairie patriot filibusters against a corrupt political machine, embodies this progressive image of filibustering." For most of congressional history, Koger said, "legislators have had to invest effort and pay political costs to filibuster, so the set of issues being obstructed at any time is a record of what politicians and voters really cared about. This included race, slavery, and civil rights, but also trade, foreign affairs, monetary policy, and internal parliamentary rights." Who favors the filibuster? On balance, Smith said, conservatives tend to like the filibuster more than liberals do, since the filibuster makes it harder to create new federal programs, which is a fundamental goal of small-government conservatism. Liberals, by contrast, are more likely to feel constrained by the filibuster in their efforts to expand the government’s role. Even so, "situational ethics" also play a role, Smith said. One argument in support of continuing the filibuster is that any majority is eventually going to be back in the minority and will rue the day it made life harder for its future self. Another argument against eliminating the filibuster is that it gives any single senator greater power within the chamber. Getting rid of the filibuster would require a tradeoff of each senator’s individual leverage. That said, historians say that the filibuster’s decades of use in opposition to civil rights has bequeathed it a historical stain. "The repeated filibusters against civil rights legislation provide clear examples of how filibustering can be used to defend horrendous status quo policies," Koger said.

Washington, D.C. – Oregon’s Senator Jeff Merkley’s proposal known as the “talking filibuster,” that would have required Senators to remain on the floor in order to block legislation gained 46 votes in the Senate today, short of the two-thirds required, with five Senators absent. Merkley released the following statement after the vote: “In the last two years, we’ve seen unprecedented obstruction that has repeatedly brought the Senate to a standstill and hampered all branches of government from functioning. Hundreds of executive and judicial nominations never saw the light of day. We didn’t even pass a single appropriation bill last year. Senators have silently blocked legislation from being debated and have stood in the way of the American people’s agenda without needing to explain themselves. “While I’m disappointed that stronger rules reforms did not pass today, we have come a long way in a very short time. With the leadership of Senators Tom Udall and Tom Harkin, we brought this issue to the forefront. And while we did take some steps forward in reforming the Senate rules today, there is so much more work to be done. “We now have forty-six senators on record supporting making the filibuster real. We will build on that support in the future to restore deliberation to this chamber. Until the Senate returns to being a deliberative body where debate is encouraged and obstruction is rare, I’ll continue waging the fight to make the institution serve the American people the way it ought to.”

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says ‘we need to get a lot of things done’ and calls for killing the filibuster: "The country's better off having a real democracy, not a fake democracy. 60% is not a real democracy."

Reid is furious that Republicans have thwarted the president's nominations. | AP Photos Senate goes for 'nuclear option' The Senate approved a historic rules change on Thursday by eliminating the use of the filibuster on all presidential nominees except those to the U.S. Supreme Court. Invoking the long-threatened “nuclear option” means that most of President Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominees no longer need to clear a 60-vote threshold to reach the Senate floor and get an up-or-down vote. Speaking at the White House, Obama praised the Senate action, accusing Republicans of attempting to block his nominees based on politics alone, not on the merits of the nominee. “This isn’t obstruction on substance, on qualifications. It’s just to gum up the works,” he said. ( PHOTOS: Harry Reid’s career) Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used the nuclear option Thursday morning, meaning he called for a vote to change the Senate rules by a simple majority vote. It passed, 52 to 48. Three Democrats voted against changing the rules — Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Mark Pryor of Arkansas. “It’s time to change the Senate before this institution becomes obsolete,” Reid said in a lengthy floor speech on Thursday morning. A furious Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who tried to recess the Senate for the day before the rules change could get a vote, said after the minority’s power was limited by Democrats: “I don’t think this is a time to be talking about reprisal. I think it’s a time to be sad about what has been done to the United States Senate.” But McConnell quickly noted that Republicans could fix the problem in the upcoming midterm elections if they regain the majority: “The solution to this problem is an election. The solution to this problem is at the ballot box. We look forward to having a great election on 2014.” The debate over the filibuster — and specifically its use on D.C. Circuit nominees — has been raging for nearly a decade, stretching back to when George W. Bush was president and Democrats were in the minority. But changing the Senate rules has always been avoided through a piecemeal deal, a gentleman’s agreement or a specific solution, not a historic change to the very fabric of the Senate. ( Also on POLITICO: Reid: GOP playing with fire on judges) But since Obama’s nomination, the “nuclear option” has reared its head three times in less than a year — each time getting closer to the edge. Many in the Senate privately expected that this go-round would be yet another example of saber rattling, but Reid said pressure was increasing within his own party to change the rules. The blockade of three consecutive nominees to a powerful appellate court was too much for Democrats to handle — and Reid felt compelled to pull the trigger, explaining that “this is the way it has to be.” It didn’t take long for Republicans to begin circulating both Reid’s and Obama’s past statements opposing a rules change. But the majority leader said that things escalated to a level that even he had not thought possible in 2005, when a “Gang of 14” banded together to stop a rules change. “They have done everything they can to deny the fact that Obama has been elected and then reelected,” he said. “I have a right to change how I feel about things.” ( Earlier on POLITICO: Court nominees: Battleground for partisan politics) Senate Democrats were quick to use their newfound powers, voting in the early afternoon to end the filibuster on Patricia Millett’s nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The vote was 55-43, with two senators voting present. Before the change earlier Thursday, Millett would have needed 60 votes to clear the procedural hurdle and move on to a confirmation vote. But now, she needed just 51 to advance. In his speech, Obama noted that in the few decades before he took office, about 20 nominees were filibustered. Since he took office, close to 30 judicial and political nominees have had their nominations blocked. “It’s no secret that the American people have probably never been more frustrated with Washington, and one of the reasons why that is, is that over the past five years, we’ve seen an unprecedented pattern of obstruction in Congress that’s prevented too much of the American people’s business from getting done,” Obama said. “Today’s pattern of obstruction just isn’t normal. We can’t allow it to become normal.” Obama also cited the filibuster of a gun control bill earlier this year, although Thursday’s rule change would preserve the filibuster for Supreme Court picks and legislation. The Senate’s vote to push the button on the “nuclear option” is unprecedented and is likely to lead to a further erosion of the filibuster in the future. But for now, Senate Democrats haven’t pursued eliminating the filibuster on lawmaking, partially because Republicans control the House and frequently choose not to take up Senate-passed bills anyway. Underscoring the historic nature of Reid’s action, nearly all 100 senators were seated at their desks in the chamber — a rare sight, particularly when the Senate opens in the morning for business. McConnell was quick to criticize Reid’s plan, accusing Democrats of trying to divert attention from the embattled health care law that has been a drag on the party. McConnell said Democrats were cooking up a “fake fight over judges that aren’t even needed.” “You’ll regret this and you might regret it even sooner than you might think,” McConnell warned. And on the other end of the Capitol, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) charged that Reid is trying to distract the public away from the rollout of the Affordable Care Act. “Sounds to me like Harry Reid is trying to change the subject,” he told reporters at his weekly news conference.“If I were taking all the incoming fire that he’s taken over Obamacare, I’d try to change the subject, too.” Privately, Senate Democratic leaders insist they preferred confirmation of Obama’s nominees rather than a rules change. And lawmakers have been at this point before. But increasingly even longtime protectors of the Senate’s rules have been changing their tune, including Vice President Joe Biden, who said he supported Reid’s effort on Thursday morning. The Senate’s new rules will also pave the path toward smoother confirmation for two more key Obama nominees: Janet Yellen to lead the Federal Reserve and Jeh Johnson to helm the Department of Homeland Security. Another nominee blocked by Republicans, Rep. Mel Watt’s pick to helm the Federal Housing Finance Agency, will likely benefit. Republicans are publicly warning that the change would simply be a path to eliminating the filibuster on everything, even on legislation — which would mean when the GOP takes the majority, Democrats will regret pushing the nuke button. “You always have to take it seriously. I just think it would be incredibly short-sighted,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the Republican whip. “It just seems to be something they keep coming back to when [Democrats] don’t get their way.” The Senate came to the brink of a more narrow rules change that would have affected only executive nominees this summer but longtime lawmakers like Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) were able to agree to help move a series of stalled nominations and avoid diluting the minority’s power. This time around there hasn’t been as strong an effort to head off the rules change. McCain made an offer on Wednesday that Democrats found insufficient because it didn’t include all three judges; Reid has long said he won’t settle for less than filling out the 11-seat court’s three vacancies. But not all Democrats have been wedded to a rules change, and some worked proactively to figure out if the “nuclear option” could be avoided. For instance, Pryor helped avoid the “nuclear option” in 2005 when Republicans were trying to change the rules to circumvent Democratic filibusters of George W. Bush’s judicial nominees and again tried to find a solution this time around. Facing a difficult reelection bid next year, Pryor voted against the sweeping change on Thursday and quickly sought to distance himself from his party. “Today’s use of the ‘nuclear option’ could permanently damage the Senate and have negative ramifications for the American people,” Pryor said. “This institution was designed to protect — not stamp out — the voices of the minority.” In addition to Wilkins, Pillard and Millett, Republicans also blocked the elevation of Watt and a fourth D.C. Circuit nominee in March, Caitlin Halligan. A fifth nominee, Sri Srinivasan, was confirmed to the court unanimously in May. Manu Raju and Jennifer Epstein contributed to this report.

Neil Gorsuch was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court Monday morning, which gave President Trump something he has lacked for much of his still-young presidency: a chance to gloat. “I've always heard that the most important thing that a president of the United States does is appoint people . . . to the United States Supreme Court,” Trump said at a Rose Garden ceremony for Gorsuch on Monday. “And I got it done in the first 100 days!” he added. Advertisement: “You think that’s easy?” Well, no. Nobody really thinks Supreme Court nominations are easy, and I’m pretty confident that no person of sound mind believes this particular nomination was an easy one. Trump’s boasting aside, the real credit for Neil Gorsuch’s installation on Supreme Court goes to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, who did all the very dirty work required for Trump’s little victory lap. Advertisement: It was McConnell who kept Gorsuch’s seat empty for more than a year through flagrant dishonesty and a cynical, indomitable drive to retain power at any cost. And it was McConnell who exercised the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster of Supreme Court nominees, thus enabling Gorsuch to ascend to the court on a narrow, largely partisan vote. McConnell busted through just about every governing norm he could to give Trump his first victory in office. McConnell's Senate confirmed Gorsuch last week after Republicans changed chamber rules to block the minority party from being able to filibuster. With Gorsuch on the bench, the highest court in the land returns to being a body of nine — with the majority of its justices having been appointed by Republican presidents. That’s not to say Trump didn’t play his own significant part in filling the empty court seat. After all, he was the one who stumbled into the presidency, which put him in the position to pick a name from a list of Federalist Society-approved judicial nominees. Now Neil Gorsuch, a nominee selected by a president who lost the popular vote by a huge margin, will occupy a seat that had been kept open by unprecedented obstruction — after the Senate rules have been altered so he could be confirmed. Advertisement: Trump is right: None of that was “easy.” And we should all keep in mind just how much hard work and unyielding dishonesty went into stealing this Supreme Court seat.

On Sunday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) — who previously was one of the few Democratic senators who said he was not open to filibuster reform — opened the door to making filibusters less potent. “If you want to make [filibustering] a little bit more painful — make them stand there and talk — I’m willing to look at any way we can,” Manchin told Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd. He later told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that the filibuster “should be painful if you want to use it.” As a brief dive into the filibuster’s history reveals, reforms to this obstructionist tactic are not uncommon. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson successfully urged the Senate to create a process, known as “cloture,” that would allow a two-thirds majority of the Senate to break a filibuster and bring a matter to the Senate for a final vote. The number of votes necessary to end a filibuster, whether on a piece of legislation or on a confirmation vote, was reduced to three-fifths of the Senate (ordinarily 60 votes ) in 1975. In the 1970s, Congress created a process known as “budget reconciliation,” which allows many taxing and spending bills to become law with a simple majority vote, bypassing the filibuster. In 1996, Congress enacted the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn recent federal agency regulations without having to deal with the filibuster. And in the present-day Senate, filibuster reforms have been enacted fairly often. In 2011, a narrow Senate majority voted to strip away some of the minority’s power to force votes on amendments to a bill. In 2013, the Senate enacted a temporary measure that limited the minority’s ability to delay confirmation votes once the Senate agreed to end debate on a particular nominee, and a version of this rule was made permanent in 2019 (though nothing is truly permanent because a future Senate could always change this rule again). The Senate voted to allow non-Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority vote in 2013, and it voted to allow Supreme Court justices to be confirmed by a simple majority in 2017. Indeed, this brief account of the filibuster’s history drastically undersells how often Congress creates exceptions. In her book Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the US Senate, the Brookings Institution’s Molly Reynolds writes that “a careful review of the historical record has identified 161” provisions of law that prevent “some future piece of legislation from being filibustered on the floor of the Senate.” This includes legislation fast-tracking votes on trade negotiations, expediting votes on military base closures, and allowing Congress to bypass the filibuster for certain regulatory and budgetary matters. Filibuster reforms, in other words, are quite normal. Congress took its first steps to curtail the filibuster more than a century ago, and the modern Senate has frequently placed limits on the filibuster. If the current Senate were to make additional changes to the rules governing the filibuster, that would be very much in line with the Senate’s recent practice. Democratic senators like Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), who say they oppose eliminating the filibuster, do not need to eliminate it in order to build a more functional Senate. Before I get into several ways the filibuster can be altered without abolishing it, however, it’s helpful to understand some of the procedural details behind the filibuster. Sign up for The Weeds newsletter Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s unprecedented burst of policymaking. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday. How filibusters work The Senate filibuster is one of the most unfortunate accidents in American history. In 1805, fresh off the duel where he killed Alexander Hamilton, Vice President Aaron Burr returned to the Senate and proposed streamlining the body’s rules by eliminating something called the “previous question motion,” a process that was rarely invoked in the early years of the Senate. As Sarah Binder, a Brookings Institution expert on Congress and a professor at George Washington University, explained in 2010 testimony to the Senate Rules Committee, Burr’s intent was to produce a “cleaner rule book” that wasn’t too thick with duplicative procedures. And he thought the previous question motion was the kind of superfluous rule that could be eliminated. Unfortunately for the nation, the previous question motion wasn’t the least bit superfluous. This motion turned out to be the only way to force the Senate to move off a particular topic. When the Senate took Burr up on his suggestion, it allowed senators to lock the Senate into endless, pointless debate — halting progress even if a majority of the Senate wished to move forward to a vote. The filibuster was born. How does a filibuster actually work? Setting aside exceptions to the filibuster rule such as the reconciliation process, which can only be used infrequently and has its own set of gratuitously complex rules, there are normally two ways to bring a matter to the Senate floor for a vote. The first is unanimous consent, a process that is used quite often for noncontroversial matters or for matters where both parties have already negotiated an agreement. If every single senator agrees to hold a vote, then the vote can be scheduled right away. If just one senator objects, however, the Senate may not hold a final vote on a matter unless cloture is invoked. Which brings us to the second way to bring a vote to the Senate floor. Cloture is a lengthy process. To invoke cloture, the majority must first present a petition, signed by at least 16 senators, which seeks to end debate on a matter. Then senators have to wait. According to the Congressional Research Service, a cloture petition must wait “until the second calendar day on which the Senate is in session. For example, if the motion is filed on Monday, it lies over until Wednesday, assuming the Senate is in session daily.” After this waiting period ends, the Senate will vote on whether to end debate and proceed to a vote on a matter — it takes 60 votes to end debate on most legislation, and 51 votes to end debate on a nominee. Thus, even though nominees can be confirmed by a simple majority vote, a confirmation vote may still be delayed by a filibuster. Most Senate Republicans, for example, recently used the filibuster to delay the confirmation of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Although the Senate voted 55-42 to end debate on Mayorkas’s nomination on January 28, the final vote to confirm him did not happen until five days later. Without unanimous consent to hold an immediate vote on a matter, in other words, a fairly small minority of the Senate can delay a final vote for several hours or potentially even several days. Even after the Senate invokes cloture on a particular matter, the minority can force the Senate to hold up to 30 hours of post-cloture debate, although the number of hours varies greatly depending on what kind of matter is being considered. When Barack Obama took office in 2009, he needed to appoint approximately 1,000 Senate-confirmed Cabinet jobs, sub-Cabinet positions, ambassadors, judges, federal prosecutors, and US marshals. At the time, Senate rules allowed the Republican minority to force 30 hours of post-cloture debate on each of these nominees. The result was that if the Senate worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and did nothing but confirm Obama’s nominees, Republicans still could have forced the Senate to do nothing else for more than three years before the last nominee was confirmed. Indeed, a 2012 law allowing the president to appoint officials to about 170 executive branch positions, without going through the Senate confirmation process, is best understood as a reaction to widespread filibusters of President Obama’s nominees. To prevent more such systematic delays, a 2019 amendment to the Senate rules reduced the amount of post-cloture debate to two hours for federal trial judges and for executive branch officials outside of the Cabinet (Cabinet secretaries, circuit judges, and Supreme Court nominees still receive the full 30 hours of debate). Thus, while the filibuster can still be used to delay confirmation votes, it is a far less potent tool of obstruction than it once was. Four ways to reform the filibuster In any event, as this brief discussion of filibuster procedure indicates, there are four broad ways that senators can weaken the filibuster without eliminating it altogether. Make fewer bills subject to the filibuster: The Senate can create carveouts and exempt certain matters from the filibuster altogether, as it does with bills subject to the reconciliation process. The Senate can create carveouts and exempt certain matters from the filibuster altogether, as it does with bills subject to the reconciliation process. Reduce the power of individual rogue senators: The Senate could make it harder to initiate a filibuster. Right now, unanimous consent is required to hold a vote without invoking the time-consuming cloture process. But the rules could be changed to allow an immediate vote unless a larger bloc of senators — perhaps two or five or 10 — objected to such a vote, instead of just one. The Senate could make it harder to initiate a filibuster. Right now, unanimous consent is required to hold a vote without invoking the time-consuming cloture process. But the rules could be changed to allow an immediate vote unless a larger bloc of senators — perhaps two or five or 10 — objected to such a vote, instead of just one. Make it easier to break a filibuster: The Senate could reduce the number of votes necessary to invoke cloture. This could be done as an across-the-board reform, like the 1975 change to the filibuster rule that reduced the cloture threshold from 67 to 60. Or it could be done by creating a carveout for certain matters, such as the 2013 and 2017 reforms that allowed presidential nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote. The Senate could reduce the number of votes necessary to invoke cloture. This could be done as an across-the-board reform, like the 1975 change to the filibuster rule that reduced the cloture threshold from 67 to 60. Or it could be done by creating a carveout for certain matters, such as the 2013 and 2017 reforms that allowed presidential nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote. Reduce or eliminate the time it takes to invoke cloture: The Senate could reduce the amount of time necessary to invoke cloture and conduct a final vote. This could be done by allowing a swifter vote on a cloture petition, by reducing or eliminating the time devoted to post-closure debate, or both. The Senate may effectively change its rules whenever it wants by a simple majority vote, using the same process that Congress used in 2013 and 2017 to allow presidential nominees to be confirmed with only 51 votes. (Technically, when the Senate uses this process, which is colorfully known as the “nuclear option,” it merely reinterprets an existing rule, but the effect is the same as a rule change.) So if the Senate’s narrow Democratic majority wishes to weaken the filibuster, it has the votes to do so. With that in mind, let’s take each of the broad categories of reform listed above and lay out some specific filibuster reforms that this Democratic Senate could enact. Make fewer bills subject to the filibuster As mentioned above, the reconciliation process permits Congress to pass at least some taxing and spending legislation without having to worry about a filibuster. Another law, known as the Congressional Review Act, allows Congress to override a recent regulation created by a federal agency, and to do so through an expedited process that bypasses the filibuster. So it can be and has been done — the Senate could create additional exemptions to the filibuster, either through legislation enacted by both houses and signed by the president, or by creating such exemptions through a simple majority vote in the Senate. Allow certain types of legislation to be enacted without a filibuster Because a simple majority is all that is necessary to effectively change the Senate’s rules, senators could create any carveout they want to the filibuster. They could exempt any legislation that is co-sponsored by a certain number of senators, for example. They could exempt legislation that touches on certain subjects. They could even exempt any legislation whose title begins with the letter “J,” if that’s what a majority wants to do. One especially salient possibility here: Democrats in both houses are largely united behind legislation that would strengthen the Voting Rights Act, require states to draw congressional districts using bipartisan commissions, and otherwise make it easier for citizens to exercise their right to vote. But such legislation has no chance of passing so long as a Republican Senate minority can filibuster it. A simple majority of the Senate could, however, exempt any bill that expands voting rights from the filibuster, a possibility that Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) floated in an interview with the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein. That would preserve the filibuster for all other legislation, while allowing Democrats to pass fundamental democratic reforms at a time when democracy has come under attack from the right. Exempt statehood bills and other legislation that is not subject to meaningful debate Senate Democrats voted to allow most nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote in 2013, largely due to their frustration over Republican efforts to keep certain vacancies open forever — or at least until a Republican moved into the White House. But there is a logic to treating confirmation votes differently than votes on legislation. The ostensible purpose of a filibuster is to allow senators to continue debating a legislative proposal until they can agree whether to pass that proposal with or without amendments. Unlimited debate means unlimited time to offer amendments to a bill. Nominees, however, cannot be amended — it’s not like Republicans who objected to the Mayorkas confirmation could have introduced an amendment to change Mayorkas’s views on immigration policy. So it makes sense that the filibuster should apply with less force to unamendable matters such as a confirmation vote. A similar logic could be applied to statehood votes. Although there are some debatable questions whenever Congress votes to admit a new state — such as what the state should be called or what its precise borders should be — the fundamental question before the Senate is similar to a confirmation vote. Either Washington, DC, becomes a state, or it doesn’t. There really isn’t much room for amendments in a statehood bill. For this reason, the Senate could decide to exempt statehood votes from the filibuster, as well as other matters where debate is unlikely to change the shape of a legislative proposal in any significant way. A Congressional Review Act for the Supreme Court Congress used to provide a significant check on the Supreme Court. As a 2012 study by University of California Irvine law professor Rick Hasen found, between 1975 and 1990, Congress enacted “an average of twelve overrides of Supreme Court cases in each two-year Congressional term.” (Hasen defines the term “override” to include acts of Congress that “overturned, reversed, or modified a Supreme Court statutory interpretation holding.”) But Congress rarely engages in such review of the Court’s decisions anymore. Hasen’s study found that between 2001 and 2012, the number of overrides dwindled to a mere 2.8 per two-year term. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has a 6-3 Republican majority with aggressive plans to move American law to the right, even though the American people voted for a Democratic government in the last election cycle. Republicans in the Senate can filibuster nearly any bill seeking to override a judicial decision that misreads a federal statute. Writing in the Atlantic, Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman proposes one solution to this imbalance of power — a kind of Congressional Review Act for legislation overriding a Supreme Court decision. Under Sitaraman’s proposal, “if the Court issued a decision interpreting a statute or regulation, Congress would have 30 days to vote on whether to open a reconsideration process.” If Congress voted to open such a process, a special committee would then draft legislation overriding the Court’s decision. Neither the vote to open the reconsideration process nor the vote to enact the special committee’s legislation would be subject to a filibuster. Reduce the power of rogue senators It takes 60 votes to pass most bills through the Senate, but it takes 100 votes to do much of anything quickly. Because unanimous consent is typically the only way to bypass the lengthy cloture process, a single senator can unilaterally delay most votes. When the Senate’s calendar is packed, moreover, such delays might put off certain votes indefinitely. If the Senate majority leader is racing to enact multiple major bills, to pass appropriations for the coming year, and to confirm a bevy of nominees all at the same time, then the Senate may not have 30 hours to spend confirming a Biden circuit court nominee. (Although after cloture has been invoked, the Senate rules provide that “no Senator shall be entitled to speak in all more than one hour on the measure, motion, or other matter pending before the Senate” — in other words, the minority’s ability to delay a matter is more limited if only a few senators participate.) The need to get all 100 senators on board in order to move quickly also creates a perverse incentive for many senators. Senators like Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) can present themselves as lone warriors, willing to stand up for conservative causes important to people who watch Fox News or Newsmax, when every other senator agrees to a unanimous consent request. And once a single senator objects to a unanimous consent request, many of that senator’s fellow partisans are likely to join the crusade against a bill or nomination to avoid being attacked by partisan media outlets. A bipartisan group of senators is reportedly discussing ways to mitigate this problem. According to the Hill’s Jordain Carney, these senators are interested in reforms that would have the effect of “freeing up bills that are held up by one or two senators.” It’s not yet clear whether a specific reform will emerge from these talks, but it probably wouldn’t be hard to design a new rule that would eliminate Cruz or Hawley’s power to unilaterally take hostages. Instead of requiring unanimous consent to move quickly to a final vote on a matter, for example, the rules could be changed to allow a swift vote unless a small group of senators — perhaps five or 10 — all object to such a vote. This reform wouldn’t just speed up matters that enjoy overwhelming (but not unanimous) support in the Senate. It would also change the incentives for senators who want to puff up their reputations as lone wolves, as it would no longer be possible for a single senator to unilaterally delay progress. Make it easier to break a filibuster The 60-vote threshold is not written in stone. It doesn’t even apply to nominations or to reconciliation bills. And the threshold was reduced from 67 votes to 60 in the fairly recent past. There’s no reason this threshold can’t be reduced again, if not outright eliminated. There’s also no reason the filibuster process can’t be changed to place additional burdens on a bloc of senators who wish to maintain a filibuster. Reduce the threshold The simplest filibuster reform would be to reduce the cloture threshold from 60 to a lower number — just as the Senate reduced the threshold for nominees to 51 votes in 2013 and in 2017. The Senate could reduce the threshold for all legislation. Or it could reduce it for bills touching on subject matters such as voting rights or statehood, for the reasons explained above. Alternatively, the filibuster threshold could be reduced over time. As far back as 1995, for example, then-Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced a proposal that would have gradually reduced the number of votes required to break a filibuster. Initially, 60 votes would be required, under Harkin’s proposal, but this number would drop to 57 after several days of debate, and then to 54, and again to 51 after a total of eight days. Thus, senators who strenuously objected to a bill could hold up that bill for up to eight days — potentially delaying other matters on a crowded Senate calendar in the process. But they couldn’t kill the bill altogether without majority support. Require “talking” filibusters The filibuster is often misrepresented in popular culture. The 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington climaxes in a scene where the titular character speaks for 25 hours straight — a so-called “talking filibuster” — in order to block passage of a corrupt bill. The show Parks and Recreation more recently recreated this scene, albeit on a much smaller scale. In reality, however, senators do not need to hold the Senate floor in order to maintain a filibuster. They simply have to withhold unanimous consent, and then they can do whatever they want with their time. In 2012, Sen. Merkley proposed actually requiring senators to speak continuously on the Senate floor in order to maintain a filibuster. Under his proposal, “senators who feel that additional debate is necessary would need to make sure that at least one senator is on the floor presenting his or her arguments.” If at any point no senator were present on the floor who wished to maintain a filibuster, “then the presiding officer of the Senate would rule that the period of extended debate is over. The Majority Leader would then schedule a simple majority cloture vote on the bill.” Reverse the presumption in favor of filibusters The Senate’s current rules place the burden of breaking a filibuster on the majority. In order to invoke cloture on most legislation, senators who support that legislation must find at least 60 votes (out of a total of 100 senators) to end the filibuster. Among other things, placing this burden on the majority can put the entire Senate at the mercy of random events. The majority may have 60 votes to break a filibuster, but it may be unable to do so because a single member of that 60-vote supermajority is stuck at home in a snowstorm. In 2009, Democrats briefly held 60 seats in the Senate, but their ability to legislate was curtailed because Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) spent his final months at home in Massachusetts while he was dying of a brain tumor. This presumption in favor of a filibuster could be flipped. Instead of requiring 60 affirmative votes to break a filibuster, the Senate could require the minority to produce 41 votes in order to maintain a filibuster. Thus, the burden would fall on obstructionists to ensure that they had enough senators present to block legislation. Reduce or eliminate the time needed to invoke cloture Finally, even if a majority of the Senate wants to keep in place a supermajority requirement to enact legislation, there’s no reason the minority should be able to delay matters that already enjoy majority support. Nothing useful was accomplished, for example, by forcing 30 hours of post-cloture debate on the Mayorkas nomination after it was already clear that Mayorkas had enough votes to be confirmed. Eliminate all post-cloture debate on nominees As explained above, there’s really no reason that debate on a nominee needs to continue after a majority of the Senate already voted to invoke cloture on that nominee. The nomination cannot be amended, and senators who already voted in favor of cloture are unlikely to change their minds because a few of their colleagues give floor speeches opposing the nominee. A simple reform, in other words, would be to eliminate post-cloture debate on all confirmation votes (or, alternatively, to eliminate the cloture process altogether for nominations and allow the majority leader to call up any nomination for an immediate confirmation vote). Such a reform would prevent the minority from delaying confirmation votes simply to eat up floor time that could be spent on other matters. Streamline the process of invoking cloture The Senate could also reduce or eliminate the time between when a cloture petition is filed and when the Senate can actually hold a vote to invoke cloture. This reform would also reduce the minority’s opportunities to delay bills and confirmation votes that already enjoy majority support. There is diminishing support for the filibuster within the Senate’s Democratic majority. Indeed, some senators who were recently strong proponents of the filibuster have grown increasingly critical of the minority party’s power to block legislation. But with the Senate split 50-50, and with Vice President Kamala Harris holding the key tiebreaking vote, Democrats need every single one of their members to support a measure eliminating the filibuster. And at least two of those members, Manchin and Sinema, appear determined to keep the filibuster in place. But even if Democrats lack the votes to eliminate the filibuster altogether, they still may be able to reform the Senate’s rules. After all, the Senate voted to weaken the filibuster in 2011, in 2012, in 2013, in 2017, and in 2019. Filibuster reforms are not rarities. If a majority truly values getting something done in the face of the filibuster, it has other avenues to do so short of abolishing the tactic. Sign up for The Weeds newsletter. Every Friday, you’ll get an explainer of a big policy story from the week, a look at important research that recently came out, and answers to reader questions — to guide you through the first 100 days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

This article originally appeared at Common Dreams . It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely. Calling on the Senate Democratic majority to disregard the advice of the unelected parliamentarian, Sen. Bernie Sanders late Monday announced he will force a vote this week on an amendment to include a $15 minimum wage provision in the pending $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package. "At a time when millions of workers are earning starvation wages, when the minimum wage has not been raised by Congress since 2007 and stands at a pathetic $7.25 an hour, it is time to raise the minimum wage to a living wage," Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a statement. Advertisement: The Vermont senator's announcement came as the White House and Senate Democrats signaled a retreat from the effort to include a minimum wage increase in the coronavirus relief package after the parliamentarian advised last week that the measure would run afoul of the Byrd Rule, which requires provisions of reconciliation bills to have a direct — not "merely incidental" — impact on the federal budget. Citing two anonymous Democratic aides, the Washington Post reported Monday that "Senate Democrats will move forward with a version of the relief bill that does not attempt to raise the minimum wage." Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a floor speech Monday that the chamber will begin voting on the sprawling relief package this week, with an initial procedural vote expected as early as Wednesday. In his statement Monday night, Sanders said he was "extremely disappointed by the decision of the parliamentarian, who ruled that the minimum wage provision was inconsistent with the Byrd Rule and the reconciliation process." Advertisement: Echoing the calls of progressive House Democrats and dozens of grassroots advocacy groups representing millions of people across the U.S., Sanders said his "own personal view is that the Senate should ignore the parliamentarian's advice, which is wrong in a number of respects." "I am not sure, however, that my view at this point is the majority view in the Democratic caucus," the Vermont senator added, alluding to opposition from Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). "Obviously, as soon as we can, we must end the filibuster that currently exists in the U.S. Senate. Given the enormous crises facing working families today, we cannot allow a minority of the Senate to obstruct what the vast majority of the American people want and need." Progressives in recent days have pushed Vice President Kamala Harris to overrule the parliamentarian's advice, which she has the constitutional authority to do. Should the vice president opt to use that authority, it would take 60 votes in the Senate to overrule her. Advertisement: But White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was adamant during a Monday briefing that Harris will not attempt to overrule the parliamentarian, the official tasked with interpreting Senate rules. Asked by NBC News reporter Geoff Bennett why the White House appears to be fighting harder to salvage the collapsing nomination of budget office pick Neera Tanden than to keep the minimum wage increase in the coronavirus relief package, Psaki accused Bennett of "mixing a few things kind of irresponsibly." Advertisement: Sanders made clear Monday that he will continue pushing to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour if his coronavirus relief amendment fails to pass this week. Following the parliamentarian's advisory ruling against the proposed pay raise last week, Sanders and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) began crafting a backup plan that would impose tax penalties on large corporations that don't pay their employees $15 an hour. But Sanders and Wyden reportedly dropped the plan after it became clear that the measure would be too difficult to implement and that there wouldn't be sufficient support to include it in the emerging Covid-19 relief package. Speaking to the press about his new $15 minimum wage amendment, Sanders said Monday that "there will be a roll call vote, and we'll see who votes for it and doesn't." Advertisement: "I would suggest that those who vote against it from a political point of view, that's a mistake. The American people want to see that minimum wage raised," Sanders continued. "Let me be very clear—if we fail in this legislation, I will be back."

Once the Covid-19 relief bill heads to the Senate, the $15 minimum wage will face two big tests: one procedural, and one political. On the procedural front, Democrats need to convince the Senate parliamentarian — an in-house expert who advises on the rules of the upper chamber — that the $15 minimum wage has a significant enough effect on the budget that it can be part of the reconciliation process. Because of a practice known as the Byrd Rule, any policy that’s not seen as sufficiently budget-related can be flagged for removal by the parliamentarian. (Democrats don’t have to abide by this decision, but there have been few breaks with such guidance in the past.) “We think we have a strong argument on the minimum wage being a real whole-of-government policy that touches a range of budget areas,” a Democratic aide tells Vox. Beyond the procedural question it poses, the $15 minimum wage push could soon be the first big test of party unity as well. With just 50 votes to work with to pass this bill, Democrats need every single member onboard in order to reach the simple majority threshold required for the budget measure. Already, however, statements by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have thrown the likelihood of such consensus into doubt when it comes to the wage increase. “I’m supportive of basically having something that’s responsible and reasonable,” Manchin told The Hill, while noting that he does not back a $15 minimum wage. For now, Democrats are just trying to overcome the process challenge and deal with their internal conflicts later. As the House votes on its version of the relief bill this week — both parties have a chance to present their final arguments to the Senate parliamentarian in a practice called the “Byrd bath.” Upon hearing their respective cases, the parliamentarian — Elizabeth MacDonough — will determine what can be included in the legislation and what needs to be removed. As soon as mid-week, MacDonough could reach a decision about the minimum wage. Then, the political pressure ramps up: If MacDonough greenlights the measure, Democrats will need to navigate the dissent within their caucus to get it passed. If she doesn’t, they’ll have to decide if they’re willing to ignore her ruling and move ahead with it anyway. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer thus far has kept the focus squarely on immediate next steps. “We’re trying to work as well as we can with the parliamentarian to get minimum wage to happen, that’s all I’m going to say,” Schumer noted at a recent press conference. After her decision comes through, however, Democrats will have to wrestle with their own divides on the matter. The first step is getting the bill past the parliamentarian Democrats are in the process of making their case to the parliamentarian — and they’ve emphasized that their first priority is getting the legislation past this hurdle: MacDonough’s decision, expected this week, could play a critical role in determining what the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill contains. Democrats have prepared several arguments — and they think there are strong grounds for inclusion of the minimum wage, according to two aides. For one, the recent report from the Congressional Budget Office highlights exactly how the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 over the course of five years, would have a direct effect on the budget. That CBO report found the measure would increase the budget deficit by $54 billion within 10 years, and that it would alter government spending on social safety net programs like food aid, since fewer people would be using them if they had higher wages. As noted in the bill, additional increases to the minimum wage would be pegged to gains in the median wage after the fifth year, in order to keep pace with inflation. To gain parliamentarian approval, Democrats will have to show that the proposal’s impact on taxing and spending is not “merely incidental” to the implementation of the policy. And aides see this report — which found that wage changes would also affect tax revenues — as important proof of that. “The CBO has demonstrated that increasing the minimum wage would have a direct and substantial impact on the federal budget,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said in a recent statement. “What that means is that we can clearly raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour under the rules of reconciliation.” Democrats also intend to draw a comparison between the changes to the minimum wage and the zeroing-out of the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act. In 2017, when Republicans used reconciliation to pass major corporate tax cuts, they also eliminated the individual mandate — or penalty for not having health insurance — by reducing it to $0. The logic behind the increase to the minimum wage is similar, an aide explained. “Republicans were able to dial this [individual mandate] penalty down to zero,” the aide said. “We are not creating a federal minimum wage, we are dialing the wage up.” They’ll also point to past uses of reconciliation that had less budgetary effects than the proposed minimum wage increase, such as the establishment of a program for drilling in the Arctic in 2017. “Increasing the minimum wage would affect more budget functions than ... the [Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] provisions would,” the CBO concluded in a letter. Republicans, meanwhile, are expected to emphasize the constraints of the Senate’s reconciliation process — and highlight how increases to the minimum wage would only have a tertiary effect on the budget, a concern some Democrats have voiced, too. President Joe Biden is among those raising similar questions. “I put [the minimum wage] in, but I don’t think it’s going to survive,” he told CBS News in early February, citing the limitations of the Senate rules. He reiterated this position in a recent conversation with governors and mayors when he warned them that the measure would likely be tabled. Experts note that the lack of precedent for the use of reconciliation on minimum wage changes makes this question a truly untested one. “Would the minimum wage increase fall prey to the incidental test? No one yet knows,” says George Washington University political science professor Sarah Binder. The $15 minimum wage is also a political test for Democrats Democrats face a political test regardless of what the parliamentarian ends up deciding. If the parliamentarian determines that the minimum wage can’t be included in the bill, then Democrats have the option of ignoring this decision — and forging ahead regardless. It’s a path that’s backed by some progressives, which is likely to face resistance from moderates in the party. “The parliamentarian doesn’t rule. She gives advice. If Democrats want to ignore advice that the minimum increase violates the Byrd Rule, then they would go ahead and include it in the bill,” says Binder. After the minimum wage provision is included, any senator is then able to challenge it when the bill hits the floor, and Vice President Kamala Harris, or whoever is presiding, is able to overrule that challenge. If 60 lawmakers don’t vote to push back on this decision, Harris’s ruling would stand. Sinema and Manchin have already said they would not go for this approach, however, suggesting that Democrats will probably avoid it. “There is no instance in which I would overrule a parliamentarian’s decision,” Sinema told Politico. “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work.” Manchin, too, told CNN that he’s intent on preserving the sanctity of the Byrd Rule. Because of their pushback — and because this would be a more partisan move in an already partisan process — it’s seen as a less likely route. “I don’t see much room for that just because of the politics that Joe Biden represents,” says Josh Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute. White House press secretary Jen Psaki has signaled as much at a recent briefing as well. Were the parliamentarian to rule the minimum wage a violation of the Byrd Rule, the measure would probably be tabled for now. The pressure on moderates is even higher, however, if the parliamentarian decides that the minimum wage qualifies for the reconciliation bill. In that scenario, Manchin, Sinema, and any others who’ve stated their opposition to the $15 minimum wage will face significant public scrutiny over their positions. And at that point, they’ll be holding up something concrete, without the ability to cite process arguments as the rationale for doing so. Senate Democrats would have to grapple with whether they can get all 50 lawmakers in line on increasing the minimum wage to $15, or if they’d negotiate it down to Manchin’s $11 proposal, or another option. “I do support a $15 minimum wage,” Biden noted in a recent town hall, while acknowledging the challenges it could pose for some businesses. “It’s totally legitimate for small-business owners to be concerned about how that changes.” Democrats are having to go it alone because Republicans aren’t open to it A key reason Democrats are operating on such narrow vote margins is because Republicans are widely expected to oppose the proposed minimum wage increase. “We are getting Republicans on the record,” one of the Democratic aides told Vox. “I think it will be difficult for them to say thank you to our frontline heroes who’ve been risking their lives and say, we think $7.25 [an hour] is an appropriate salary.” As Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains, there’s been a longstanding debate over whether increases to the minimum wage lead to outsized losses in employment. With regard to the recent bill, the CBO report states that it’s expected to lift 900,000 people out of poverty and bolster the pay of 27 million people. (Another estimate from Democrats notes that the measure would increase the pay of as many as 32 million people.) At the same time, the CBO estimates it could potentially cost 1.4 million jobs, a figure that’s garnered pushback from some economists who argue that’s an overestimate. Republicans have raised concerns that such wage increases would put extensive pressure on small businesses that are already struggling during the pandemic, and that they should be tailored to the living costs in different states. Sens. Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton have announced plans to introduce their own bill that would increase the minimum wage, though they intend to tie such changes to immigration enforcement. Romney and Cotton haven’t yet revealed how much they would raise the minimum wage by. In order to pass a $15 minimum wage, or even a compromise measure, Democrats will have to first clear the procedural hurdle of the parliamentarian, and then deal with the fracturing among themselves. As Sanders has emphasized, navigating both challenges is pivotal for this future of the minimum wage increase: Because of Republican opposition, this could be the party’s one shot to advance this proposal in the near term. “Let’s be clear. We are never going to get 10 Republicans to increase the minimum wage through ‘regular order’,” Sanders said. “The only way to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour now is to pass it with 51 votes through budget reconciliation.”

POLITICO Dispatch: March 19 A crisis? Not exactly. POLITICO’s Sabrina Rodriguez looks at how and why migration is surging — and explains why we should pay more attention to the stories of asylum seekers. Plus, Sen. Coons considers calling for testimony from Facebook and Twitter’s CEOs. And more New Yorkers want Cuomo gone, just not immediately. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who supports filibuster reform, as well as Democratic Sens. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Mark Warner of Virginia and Mark Kelly of Arizona are also part of the cohort. In addition to Young, Republicans in the group include Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Mitt Romney of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Jerry Moran of Kansas. It’s a motley crew, but it’s essentially the only bipartisan game in town two months into Biden’s presidency. Two House members who lead the Problem Solvers Caucus, Tom Reed (R-N.Y.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), also attended Wednesday’s meeting. “What the group wants to do is figure out how to get the Senate to work better in a bipartisan way,” Portman said. “We have done nothing this year except nominations, which [take] 50, and the Covid bill, which [took] 50.” Shaheen added that senators are eager for the chamber to return to its days before partisan polarization took hold, when legislation and amendments could be brought to the floor: “Everyone I know in the Senate, Republican and Democrats, wants to get back to that place.” But wrenching the Senate back to legislative life in a political environment that's plumbing new, bitter lows won't be easy. Some members of the group are privately doubtful that big breakthroughs are around the corner. They're working against snowballing energy for retooling the filibuster as activists cite an ever-growing list of House-passed bills now stymied in the Senate — including legislation to enact police reform and expand voting rights, which many Democrats view as an existential issue to their party. There are already signs that previously bipartisan policy ideas could soon hit a wall. Members of both parties say deals can be cut on issues like immigration, particularly given the current surge of migrants at the border, but no glimmers of topic-specific bipartisan alliances have emerged so far in the Senate. And although both parties have long claimed infrastructure as a potential area of collaboration, some Democrats are already signaling they want to use reconciliation to muscle through a package along party lines. Members of the G-20 insist they're not specifically focused on preserving the filibuster. But there is precedent for a bipartisan group holding substantial sway when it comes to determining how the Senate functions. In 2005, the so-called “Gang of 14” brokered a compromise under which Democrats agreed not to filibuster judicial nominees and Republicans agreed they would not deploy the “nuclear option" to kill the 60-vote threshold. Sixteen years later, the filibuster for nominees is long gone and only two senators from that defunct group remain in office: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Collins. “It was very valuable for us to get together,” Collins said after Wednesday’s meeting. “And everyone’s very committed to working together on a host of issues. I could tell you that we solved all the world’s problems and that we straightened out Congress. But that would be an overstatement.”

Former President Barack Obama delivered a passionate and deeply political tribute to the late Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) at Lewis’s funeral service on Thursday. Lewis was one of the nation’s foremost civil rights leaders beginning in the 1960s, and Obama spoke of how even as a very young man, Lewis endured beatings and other violence to advance the cause of voting rights for Black Americans. Obama called for legislation restoring the Voting Rights Act, much of which was gutted by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Abbott v. Perez (2018). He also endorsed other democratic reforms, including an end to partisan gerrymandering, extending statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, and making Election Day a national holiday. And then he called upon the Senate to remove an obstacle that has consistently stood in the way of civil rights legislation throughout American history. “If all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do,” said Obama. The filibuster typically allows a bloc of 41 senators to prevent legislation from passing, and Republican filibusters stymied much of Obama’s policy agenda during his presidency. A common metric used to measure how frequently filibusters occur is the number of “cloture” motions filed by the majority in order to break a filibuster. The number of such cloture motions more than doubled after Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) became the Senate Republican leader in 2007, and McConnell continued to use the filibuster aggressively after Obama took office two years later. Obama has criticized the widespread use of the filibuster in the past. He told Vox’s Ezra Klein in 2015 that the Senate should eliminate “the routine use of the filibuster in the Senate,” for example. But Obama’s remarks at Lewis’s funeral — in which he didn’t just oppose the filibuster but also noted the role it played in preserving Jim Crow — is probably his strongest statement in opposition to the filibuster to date. The filibuster is a historical accident that became a tool of white supremacy The filibuster itself predates Jim Crow and was created entirely by accident. In 1805, shortly after he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Vice President Aaron Burr returned to the Senate to deliver a farewell speech and suggested that the Senate make changes to its rules. Burr proposed eliminating the “previous question motion,” a process that was rarely used prior to his speech, and the Senate followed Burr’s advice in 1806. But the previous question motion was hardly superfluous. Indeed, this motion was the only process allowing the Senate to cut off debate among members. No one recognized Burr’s error for 35 years — until 1841, when the first filibuster occurred. Without a way to end debate, rogue senators could delay Senate action indefinitely by insisting on “debating” a proposal forever. Since then, the Senate has changed the rules many times to make it easier to break a filibuster, but most legislation still cannot pass over a filibuster unless 60 senators join together to invoke cloture. That means that unless Democrats win an absolutely crushing majority in November — they would have to gain 13 seats in the Senate, a nearly impossible feat — Republicans will be able to block nearly any voting rights bill through the filibuster. Unless, of course, the filibuster is eliminated, something the Senate could do at any time with just 51 votes. If Republicans were to use the filibuster to stop legislation expanding voting rights, they would join a long and inglorious tradition of illiberal senators filibustering civil rights legislation. From 1875 until 1957, Congress did not enact a single civil rights bill, even as Jim Crow flourished in the South. Congress could not even pass civil rights legislation that enjoyed majority support. Between the end of World War II and 1957, when a modest bill finally became law, the House passed five civil rights bills. But white supremacist senators were able to block each of these five bills using the filibuster. Democrats appear to be turning sharply against the filibuster It took Democrats more than four agonizing years to realize just how severely the filibuster had hobbled their ability to govern while Obama was president, and even then they made only modest reforms to the filibuster — allowing most presidential nominees to be confirmed with just 51 votes but leaving the legislative filibuster largely intact. Indeed, just a few years ago, much of the Democratic caucus appeared committed to maintaining the filibuster. In April 2017, Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Susan Collins (R-ME) organized a letter calling on Senate leadership to “preserve existing rules, practices, and traditions” that allow senators to filibuster legislation. More than two dozen Democrats joined this letter, and a total of 61 senators signed it. Related How the filibuster broke the US Senate And yet, even Coons — once one of the Senate’s most outspoken opponents of eliminating the filibuster — is now singing a different tune. “I will not stand idly by for four years and watch the Biden administration’s initiatives blocked at every turn,” Coons told Politico in June. “I am gonna try really hard to find a path forward that doesn’t require removing what’s left of the structural guardrails, but if there’s a Biden administration, it will be inheriting a mess, at home and abroad. It requires urgent and effective action.” Likewise, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recently signaled support for eliminating the filibuster if Senate Republicans are too “obstreperous.” There is a very real chance, in other words, that the incoming Senate will have 51 votes to eliminate the filibuster — or to at least pare it back sufficiently to allow voting rights legislation to become law. If Democrats do win control of the federal government, the chances of such law becoming a reality will almost certainly hinge on whether Senate Democrats are willing to target the filibuster.

Republicans across the country responded to record voter turnout by unleashing a flurry of legislation aimed at restricting ballot access, citing concerns over unfounded allegations of rampant voter fraud that they themselves stoked for months. At least 253 bills with provisions restricting voting access have been introduced, pre-filed, or carried over in 43 states, mostly by Republicans, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, dwarfing the number of similar bills filed at this point in 2020. Advertisement: Many of these measures are in response to a "rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities" that former President Trump and his Republican allies promoted for months without any evidence, the Brennan Center report said. "We are about to be hit with a tidal wave of voter suppression legislation by Republican legislatures throughout the country," warned Marc Elias, a prominent Democratic attorney and founder of the voting rights advocacy group Democracy Docket, who batted back many of the election lawsuits filed by Trump and his supporters. Elias said in an interview with Salon that he fears this could result in a historic "contraction of voting rights like we have not seen in recent memory." "Republicans are doing this because they think they can gain an electoral advantage from making it harder for Black, brown and young voters to participate in the process," he said, adding: "This is the reaction of a party that knows it can't compete for a majority of the votes. So it is acclimating itself to minority rule through a number of tactics. Gerrymandering is one piece of it. But certainly, voter suppression is a big piece of it." Advertisement: The proposed measures largely aim to limit mail voting access, impose stricter voter ID requirements, "slash voter registration opportunities" and "enable more aggressive voter roll purges," the Brennan Center report said. "These bills are an unmistakable response to the unfounded and dangerous lies about fraud that followed the 2020 election." These types of restrictions also typically "burden voter of color more," Eliza Sweren-Becker, who serves as counsel for the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, said in an interview with Salon. "Because of the intersections of race and socioeconomics in this country, voters at the margins generally are going to have a harder time meeting whatever the requirements are, including if the requirement means it takes more time to vote," she said. Advertisement: "Voters who have less economic flexibility, less job flexibility, that's going to make it harder for them to vote," Sweren-Becker continued. "A bill that is going to require a particular kind of voter ID typically burdens voters of color. Voters of color tend not to have whatever the required voter ID is in higher numbers than white voters, for example. I think you can't divorce the current method of restricting voting access from the long history of voter suppression and racism in this country, where voter suppression measures were directly intended to stop Black voters in particular from being able to cast their ballots." Georgia and Arizona lawmakers have been particularly aggressive, introducing 22 bills in each state to restrict voting access. Even Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who debunked many of Trump's lies about the state's elections despite supporting certain voting restrictions, said many of the bills introduced in the state legislature are "reactionary to a three-month disinformation campaign that could have been prevented." Advertisement: Georgia Republicans have been particularly aggressive after Republicans lost the presidential race and both Senate races in the state for the first time in decades, although a state investigation and multiple audits have found no widespread irregularities or fraud. Georgia Senate Republicans have introduced a bill that would end no-excuse absentee voting entirely in the state and impose new ID and witness signature requirements, including one mandating that voters include a photocopy of their ID to be counted. Under the bill, only those who are required to be absent, are disabled or over 65, or observing a religious holiday can vote by mail if they meet all the other requirements. Georgia House Republicans have introduced their own sweeping bill that would drastically reduce the state's early voting period, add a voter ID requirement for mail-in ballots, reduce the amount of time voters have to request ballots and that election officials have to mail them out, and limit the use of ballot drop boxes, as well as barring counties from adding extra early voting hours. The bill would also eliminate early voting on Sundays, which is when Black churches traditionally hold "Souls to the Polls" events to bring parishioners to vote after church service. The advocacy group Common Cause Georgia called the bill "Jim Crow with a suit and tie." Advertisement: "We used 'Souls to the Polls' as a means particularly to get our seniors and other members of our congregations to vote, to gather for worship and following worship to go to the polls to cast our ballot," Georgia Episcopal Bishop Reginald Thomas Jackson said at a hearing on Monday hosted by the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, arguing that the bill "is nothing more than another attempt to suppress the Black vote." "Let's just be honest," he added. "This bill is racist." Last year, 71,764 Georgians took advantage of early Sunday voting, according to data provided by the voter registration group The New Georgia Project, and 37% of them were Black. Advertisement: "The bills as they are currently drafted are egregious in their effort to prevent free and fair access to the ballot for all Georgians, but especially people of color," Nicole Henderson, communications director at the New Georgia Project, said in a statement to Salon. "If these proposed voter suppression tactics were in place in the 2020-2021 general and runoff elections, at least 2,276,863 Georgians' votes would have been affected." Like other Republicans, Georgia lawmakers have claimed that the measures are in response to concerns among their constituents who "expressed a lack of faith and integrity in our current election system," even though the state's mail voting laws were written almost entirely by Republicans and multiple reviews found no evidence of impropriety. Henderson pointed to statements from Raffensperger and Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan rejecting baseless allegations of widespread fraud. "From these accounts, GOP lawmakers are trying to prevent something that never happened," Henderson said. "They are offering solutions where there is not a problem." Advertisement: "The only reason why voters would have concerns about election integrity is because they were systemically and repeatedly lied to by the Republican Party and Donald Trump," Elias agreed. "It is the height of hypocrisy for the Republicans to now hide behind that as an excuse having themselves lit the fire of the 'Big Lie.'" But the problem goes far beyond Georgia. Montana Republicans are pushing to end Election Day voter registration. Missouri Republicans are pushing a new voter ID requirement after their previous effort was struck down in court. New Hampshire Republicans are pushing to ban out-of-state college students from voting and ending same-day voter registration. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has also proposed measures that could be the "worst voter suppression legislation" in the country, Elias said. The longtime Trump ally is pushing measures that would ban mail-in ballots from being sent to residents who did not request one, restrict the use of drop boxes, impose tougher signature verification requirements, and restrict who can assist voters in submitting ballots. Iowa Republicans have already approved a bill that would shorten voting hours, limit the state's early voting period, restrict the use of ballot drop boxes, ban officials from sending absentee ballot applications unless they are requested, and bar the counting of late-arriving ballots. Advertisement: "Voter integrity is not telling an elderly person she has to jump through hoops," Democratic state Rep. Bruce Hunter said in response to the legislation. "This is voter suppression. The dictionary definition of it." Republican lawmakers have been laser-focused on mail-in voting after Trump and his accomplices for months sowed doubt in the integrity of voting by mail, despite a total absence of evidence suggesting it is prone to fraud, and then baselessly alleged that the election was somehow stolen without offering any proof. Nearly half of the new restrictive bills are aimed at limiting mail voting, according to the Brennan Center analysis, even though Republicans have historically supported voting by mail. Multiple bills in Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Dakota and Oklahoma are among those aiming to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting entirely. Other bills have been introduced to make it harder to obtain ballots, restrict election officials' ability to send unsolicited ballots to voters, and even bar state officials from sending absentee ballot applications without a request. Elias said that he was not surprised that Republicans have launched a campaign against mail-in voting, even though they have supported it for years. "In the Republican Party right now, the most important thing to them is to be loyal beyond comprehension to a failed one-term president," he said. Advertisement: Lawmakers have also proposed legislation to restrict who can assist voters in collecting and submitting ballots and to make it harder to satisfy witness signature requirements. Legislators in Pennsylvania and Virginia have introduced bills that would ban the use of ballot drop boxes. An Arizona bill would ban absentee ballots from being submitted by mail. Other bills aim to increase poll-watcher access, impose more burdensome voter ID and signature matching requirements, and restrict the counting of late-arriving ballots. "These legislatures saw a free, fair and secure election with record turnout that represented the will of the people, and are responding by saying 'Actually, we didn't want some of you to vote,'" Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said in a statement to Salon. "So there are real victims of this GOP fever dream, people who are losing access to the ballot because of the barriers that legislatures are putting in place — barriers specifically aimed at silencing Black and brown voices. Instead of embracing policies to attract more voters, Republican legislators across the country are very deliberately trying to dictate who can vote and who can't for their own political advantage." The new slate of election-related legislation is not all bad. The Brennan Center found that state lawmakers have introduced 704 bills that would actually expand voting access in response to increased voter enthusiasm in the last election and challenges posed by current laws. But at least 125 of these bills were introduced in solidly blue New York and New Jersey, and in some cases these measures were paired with restrictive provisions. Outside of a rare bipartisan Kentucky bill that would create a three-day in-person early voting period while scaling the length back from its pandemic levels, Sweren-Becker expressed little optimism that expansive bills would advance in Republican strongholds. "The politics remain such that those expansive provisions are unlikely to move forward," she said. Elias says that he and other Democratic attorneys stand ready to fight new restrictions in court. "If the state of Georgia or Iowa or any other place thinks that they're going to suppress voting rights and not face a fight in court over it, they're mistaken," he said. "I have proven that I am not afraid to take on states that are going to disenfranchise voters. … But beyond that, I think it's fair to say that whether it is me or someone else, states that succumb to the impulse to try to gain partisan advantage by disenfranchising minority voters and young voters, they're going to find themselves in court." Elias said he's confident many of these restrictions would not withstand a legal challenge. "We're not talking about the garden-variety voting restrictions that historically the two parties have disagreed over," he said. "We're talking about really, really extreme measures. … I'm not going to prejudge which provisions are acceptable and which provisions are not. But I do think that what we're seeing right now is just so far out of bounds." Many of these provisions, particularly in Southern states with a history of voter discrimination, would have been subject to the pre-clearance requirement under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act before it was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013. "Many of them would not have been pre-cleared because they are in fact retrogressive of minority voting rights," Elias said. But Elias also acknowledged that there are limits to how many of these restrictions can be defeated in court. "Unless Republicans either have a change of heart and a change of culture around voting, or there is federal legislation that protects voting rights, eventually enough of these will stick that it will really, really change the nature of participatory democracy in our country," he said. The For the People Act, also known as H.R. 1, is a sweeping pro-democracy bill that, among other measures, would automatically register voters, end partisan gerrymandering and make Election Day a federal holiday. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would, among other things, restore the pre-clearance requirement for states with a history of racial discrimination to get approval from the Justice Department before enacting any electoral changes. But even an expanded Voting Rights Act might not withstand the scrutiny of an ultraconservative Supreme Court majority, wrote The Nation's Elie Mystal, and the bill as currently written lacks strong protections for mail-in voting because opposition to the voting method is so new. "This means the act is already outmoded, and while I'm sure it will be rewritten and strengthened, it does go to show that, when it comes to voter suppression, Republicans practice the kind of racism that never sleeps," Mystal wrote. Some voting-rights advocates observe that the singleminded Republican focus on restricting mail-in voting could backfire. Despite a surge in mail-in voting amid the pandemic, Republican voters have historically tended to vote by mail in larger numbers than Democrats. "Restrictions on mail voting may not have the partisan impact that some of these lawmakers advancing them would hope for them to have," said Sweren-Becker, adding that Republican-led restrictions are largely predicated on the debunked idea that there's a voter fraud problem in the country. "They're using this misrepresentation as a premise to simply make it harder for all Americans to vote."

Georgia State House Republicans approved a sweeping bill that would make it harder for voters to cast ballots in response to rampant false claims about election fraud that top state officials have repeatedly debunked. The Georgia House voted 97-72 along party lines to approve a bill that would limit Sunday voting to a single day, restrict mail ballot drop boxes to early voting locations, require voter ID for mail ballots, set the deadline for voters to request mail ballots to 11 days before the election, and cut the amount of time between general elections and runoffs from nine weeks to four. The bill would also ban nonprofits from helping fund elections, ban the state from sending out mail ballot applications that were not requested, restricts the use of mobile voting buses to emergency situations, and even bars anyone from giving free food and drinks to voters waiting in line. Some Georgia voters were forced to wait up to 11 hours to cast their ballots last year. Advertisement: The restrictions come after Democrats carried Georgia in the presidential election, amid record turnout, and then won both of the state's Senate races in a runoff election, again with record turnout. It was the Democratic Party's biggest triumph in the Deep South for decades. Former President Donald Trump and his allies pushed baseless allegations of voter fraud and election-rigging that were repeatedly rejected by courts. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and multiple recounts and audits repeatedly showed that there was no evidence of widespread fraud even as Trump pressed the Republican official to "find" him enough votes to pull ahead of President Joe Biden. "Republicans in the Georgia General Assembly are trying to change the rules of the election here in Georgia, rules that you wrote, because you were handed defeat," state Rep. Kimberly Alexander, a Democrat, said during a lengthy debate on Monday. "You know that your only chance of winning future elections is to prevent Georgians from having their votes counted and their voices heard." Republicans have tried to justify the push by citing voter concerns over election integrity. Democrats say that's hypocritical, since those concerns were prompted by months of Republican lies about mail voting. Advertisement: "Our goal in this bill is to make sure that Georgia's election results get back quickly and accurately," state Rep. Barry Fleming, the bill's Republican sponsor, said on Monday. "The way we begin to restore confidence in our voting system is by passing this bill. There are many commonsense measures improving elections in this bill." Raffensperger has supported some voting restrictions but rejected the House bill and other proposed voting legislation as "reactionary to a three-month disinformation campaign that could have been prevented." Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said the Republican effort resembles "post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era laws." Former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean agreed that the state's Republicans responded to the election of its first Black senator and its first Jewish senator by "passing new Jim Crow voting laws." Advertisement: The Abrams-founded voting rights group Fair Fight Action called the bill "one of the strictest and most anti-democratic pieces of voter suppression in the country," saying it threatened to "send voting rights in Georgia back to the days of Jim Crow." The bill "does nothing but harm voters and fuel conspiracies to undermine our democratic institutions," the group said. Critics have said the weekend voting restrictions will disproportionately affect Black voters because churches traditionally hold "Souls to the Polls" events to bring parishioners to vote on Sundays. Other measures, like restrictions on mobile voting buses — predominantly used in the Atlanta area — and voter ID restrictions, threaten to disproportionately affect Black voters as well. Advertisement: "It's pathetically obvious to anyone paying attention that when Trump lost the November election and Georgia flipped control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats shortly after, Republicans got the message that they were in a political death spiral," Democratic state Rep. Renitta Shannon told the Associated Press. "And now they are doing anything they can to silence the voices of Black and brown voters specifically, because they largely powered these wins." The House bill will now head to the state Senate, where a Republican-led committee on Monday advanced its own bill that would entirely end no-excuse absentee voting, which was used by a record 1.3 million Georgians to participate in November's election. There are about two dozen restrictive voting bills pending in the state legislature. Georgia's extreme voting restriction push is the centerpiece of a national Republican push to shrink voter access after losing key elections amid record turnout. Lawmakers in 43 states have already rolled out more than 250 restrictive bills, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice. Advertisement: Democrats say many of these restrictions would have been barred if the Supreme Court had not gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of racial discrimination to get pre-clearance from the Justice Department for any electoral changes. Democrats say Georgia, which has shuttered hundreds of polling places and purged tens of thousands of voters since the Supreme Court decision, is moving backward as its demographics are rapidly becoming more diverse. "Republicans voted as a caucus to enact the most blatantly racist attacks on voting rights in the South since Jim Crow, after losing in an election system they planned, built, and oversaw," Rep. Nikema Williams, the chairwoman of the Georgia Democratic Party, said in a statement. "Let history show that instead of fighting for our democracy, these cowards betrayed Georgia voters, threw out truth and facts, and attempted to undo Georgia's legacy as a home for civil rights and accessible elections." The Biden administration has highlighted the need for federal legislation to ensure voter protections, particularly for communities of color. The administration on Monday backed H.R. 1, a sweeping election reform bill that could be voted on by the House as soon as this week, in response to "an unprecedented assault on our democracy, a never before seen effort to ignore, undermine, and undo the will of the people, and a newly aggressive attack on voting rights taking place right now all across the country." Advertisement: Still, the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate since it needs 60 votes to avoid a filibuster. A growing number of Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, have called for the Senate to eliminate the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. But while H.R. 1 would implement automatic voter registration, allow same-day registration, require at least 15 consecutive days of early voting, require voting locations to be open at least 10 hours and be located near public transportation in rural areas, and require independent redistricting commissions to curb partisan gerrymandering, many Democrats say that's still not enough. The party is also pushing to advance the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would, among other measures, restore the original Voting Rights Act provisions gutted by the Supreme Court. Abrams said both bills are critical to respond to "Republican state legislatures rolling back on the clock on voting rights." Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., agreed that without federal legislation "states will keep passing racist voter suppression laws." Advertisement: "If that means ending the filibuster, so be it," she tweeted. But centrist Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., have vowed to oppose any efforts to eliminate the filibuster, leaving the fate of voter protections under threat of Republican obstruction. "The argument that preserving the filibuster is necessary because it's an important tool in our Democracy," argued former Obama adviser David Plouffe, "falls apart when it's clearer with every passing day we won't have a Democracy without Congress passing voting rights legislation."

One of the most powerful Democrats in Washington has issued a frank warning to members of his own party, saying they need to find a way to pass major voting rights legislation or they will lose control of Congress. The comments from Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, came days after the House of Representatives approved a sweeping voting rights bill that would enact some of the most dramatic expansions of the right to vote since the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Even though Democrats also control the US Senate, the bill is unlikely to pass the chamber because of a procedural rule, the filibuster, that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. In an interview with the Guardian this week, Clyburn called out two moderate Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have opposed getting rid of the filibuster. Republicans across the country are advancing sweeping measures to curtail voting rights and letting expansive voting rights legislation die would harm Democrats, Clyburn said. “There’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights. That just ain’t gonna happen. That would be catastrophic,” he said. “If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.” If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority, they had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights Jim Clyburn Clyburn issued that warning ahead of the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day in 1965 when law enforcement officers brutally beat voting rights activists in Selma, Alabama. Clyburn and other House Democrats have been hoping the early days of Joe Biden’s administration will be marked by passage of a bill named after the late congressman John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights hero who was nearly killed on Bloody Sunday. That measure would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, gutted by the supreme court in 2013, that required places with a history of voting discrimination to get election changes cleared by the federal government before they took effect. “Here we are talking about the Voting Rights Act he worked so hard for and that’s named in his honor and they’re going to filibuster it to death? That ain’t gonna happen,” Clyburn said. But the likelihood of that bill becoming law is doubtful under current procedures. Democrats expect Republicans to find a reason to filibuster it after its expected passage through the House of Representatives and consideration in the Senate. Thus Clyburn is calling for some kind of workaround of the filibuster in the current legislative climate, in which the Senate is split 50-50 and use of the legislative obstructing mechanism is all too common. “I’m not going to say that you must get rid of the filibuster. I would say you would do well to develop a Manchin-Sinema rule on getting around the filibuster as it relates to race and civil rights,” Clyburn said. Clyburn said he has not discussed changing the filibuster with Biden, who has expressed support for keeping the filibuster in place. Joe Manchin leaves the Senate chamber last month. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The reality of their slim majority and the regularity of legislation dying through filibuster has caused Democrats to opt to pass the Biden administration’s Covid relief package through a budgetary process called reconciliation, which is not subject to the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold. Clyburn wants to see the same thing with civil rights. “You can’t filibuster the budget,” Clyburn said. “That’s why we have reconciliation rules. We need to have civil and voting rights reconciliation. That should have had reconciliation permission a long, long time ago.” He noted: “If the headlines were to read that the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act was filibustered to death it would be catastrophic.” Clyburn’s comments underscore the difficulty the federal government has in moving any bill because of arcane legislative roadblocks. Broadly popular proposals like a minimum wage increase or a voting rights bill seem dead on arrival. And that has left veteran Senate Democrats skeptical that even a bill protecting Americans’ rights to vote has a chance. First, the filibuster would have to go, and that seems unlikely at the moment. “The short-term prospects of doing away with the filibuster seem remote just because there aren’t the votes to do that,” said Luke Albee, a former chief of staff to the Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Pat Leahy of Vermont. “My gut is it will take six months, eight months, a year of total obstructionism on the Republican side for senators who are skeptical now of getting rid of the filibuster to at least have a more open mind about it.” Albee also said it was possible that a Voting Rights Act could face strong Republican opposition, despite Clyburn’s confidence. “There’s no one that hopes it passes more than me but I just worry it’s a toxic environment,” Albee added.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party do not have a Joe Manchin problem. Not yet anyway. But some leftists are already predicting the imminent fate of the president's domestic agenda, which is to say, its doom. They point to Manchin's comments about the minimum wage, the filibuster and, most recently, the nomination of Neera Tanden. They point to pretty much anything seeming to prove what they already believe to be true about the Democratic Party—that at some point it's going to betray the left. That might happen. It's not currently happening, though. What is happening is what you'd expect to see happen after a party wins a governing mandate. Pre-election, everyone left of center was focused on victory. Post-election, everyone's jockeying, bargaining and figuring out ways to exploit opportunities. When Joe Manchin, the senior United States senator from West Virginia, says he's does not support zapping the filibuster, does not support raising the minimum wage, and does not support the confirmation of Tanden to head the White House Office of Budget and Management, take it with a large grain of salt. Yes, he might mean it. As likely, though, he's signaling the desire to be seen as the Joe No. 2 that Joe No. 1 has to go through. To be sure, leftists might be proven right over time in saying this looks just like the time Joe Lieberman put himself in a position to sabotage the antiwar effort before sabotaging the Affordable Care Act. But let's keep our heads. One, Manchin is not Lieberman, the former United States senator from Connecticut. Two, 2021 is not 2009. (It sure as hell isn't 2003.) Lieberman reflected at the time the center of the Democratic Party, which was at the time closer to the center of the GOP than their respective centers are now. While Manchin is today on the party's margins, Lieberman is off the grid. But the important thing about the Manchin-Lieberman analog is not what it says about today's politics. It's what it says about the leftist view of today's politics. By that, I mean it's stuck in the '90s. President Bill Clinton merged Reaganism, and all that school of political thought was understood to mean in terms of socioeconomic policy, into the Democratic Party even as he won support of the party's traditional interest groups. That combination pushed what had been the core of the Democratic Party—decades' worth of New Deal, Great Society and social movement energies—to the margins, and that's where it stayed all the way up to and including the election of the first Black president. Barack Obama's eight years are probably best understood as a transition during which the old liberal democratic energies reasserted themselves before dominating the party during the white-backlash years of Donald Trump. Leftists, however, aren't adjusting. They see betrayal behind every bush and tree. They insist on betrayal even as other leftists, like Bernie Sanders, get on with business. Again, they might be proven right in time. But we should think about what counts as proof. It won't be, in the case of Joe Manchin, his opposition to Neera Tanden, the head of the Center for American Progress. While she'd be very good at that job, and so far Biden is sticking with her, any technocrat with the right skills could do it. More important than Tanden is Deb Haaland, who would be the first Indigenous American to head the Department of the Interior, including oversight of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If Joe Manchin votes against her, then we might have a Joe Manchin problem. (Ditto if he gets in the way of the Democratic plans to reform the voting system.) What about the filibuster? The question isn't so much does Manchin want to preserve an arcane Senate rule. Instead, does he want to 1) keep the filibuster as means of dodging hard votes and/or 2) bring home the bacon to his constituents? Only Manchin can do that calculus, but the rest of us can rest assured he'll send a message to a president ready to strike a deal whenever he's ready. Same thing goes for the minimum wage. I have zero doubt Manchin would kill off a free-standing wage bill, but there's less certainly with the president's latest gambit of shoehorning it into the nearly $2 trillion covid relief package, which is popular in West Virginia, as everywhere else. But even if that provision failed, there are other ways of raising wages—namely, trust-busting. Biden doesn't need the Congress. All he needs to do is recognize the problem of accumulated private power bending the republic in the direction of fascism, and use existing law and statutory authority to smash monopolies into pieces, thus creating business entities forced to compete for workers by offering higher wages. It would be easier if Manchin and the rest of the Congress just played ball. My point, however, is that Manchin isn't clearinghouse some of the far left are making him seem to be.

With the fate of major voting rights, minimum wage, immigration, and climate legislation likely hanging on the Senate Democratic majority's willingness to eliminate the legislative filibuster, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia on Monday yelled at reporters that he will "never" agree to scrapping the 60-vote threshold standing in the way of his own party's agenda. "Jesus Christ! What don't you understand about never?" said Manchin (D-W.Va.), an outburst that came as top progressive Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) both stressed the necessity of eliminating the filibuster in the wake of the Senate parliamentarian's advisory ruling against the inclusion of a minimum wage increase in the emerging coronavirus relief package. The parliamentarian's widely disputed opinion that the proposed $15 minimum wage provision would violate the Senate Byrd Rule—and Vice President Kamala Harris' refusal to override the unelected official's advice—lays bare the severe limitations inherent in using the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process to leapfrog obstructionist Republicans. Asked whether there's any "practical vehicle" left for Senate Democrats to raise the federal minimum wage, Warren said in an appearance on MSNBC late Monday that "of course it can happen, if we just get rid of the filibuster." "[Republican Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell, right now, has a veto over our being able to do anything, unless we can twist ourselves into pretzels and make it fit through reconciliation," Warren said. "Understand, it's not just minimum wage. It's voter protection. It's environmental crisis issues. It's immigration. It's universal childcare. It's college. It's gun safety. It's the things we need to pass to make this country work." "And I want to be clear: It's the things the majority of Americans strongly support," the Massachusetts Democrat continued. "Americans didn't send us to Washington to be some kind of debating society. They sent us here to get things done, and that's what we should do. And that means no veto for Mitch McConnell." Sanders echoed his progressive colleague in a statement Monday night, declaring that "obviously, as soon as we can, we must end the filibuster that currently exists in the U.S. Senate." "Given the enormous crises facing working families today," the Vermont senator said, "we cannot allow a minority of the Senate to obstruct what the vast majority of the American people want and need." Scrapping the filibuster would require 50 votes in the Senate plus a tie-breaking vote from Harris, a level of support that cannot be achieved without the assent of Manchin—who supported reforming the filibuster a decade ago—and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), another outspoken defender of the current 60-vote threshold required to end debate on legislation. This past weekend, Arizonans flooded Sinema's voicemail box with demands that she get on board with eliminating the legislative filibuster: While Manchin and Sinema have both claimed the legislative filibuster is necessary to promote bipartisanship, The Week's Ryan Cooper wrote in a column Tuesday that "back when 51 Senate votes were enough to pass a law, there was a lot more compromise and collaboration, because members of Congress often figured that if something was going through anyway, they might as well see what they could get with their vote." Manchin's own effort to pass a bipartisan gun control amendment with Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) in 2013 received 54 votes but collapsed due to the filibuster—an experience that appears to have had no impact on the West Virginia Democrat's view of the 60-vote rule. Cooper argued that "whether or not Democrats can overcome the Senate filibuster and their own timidity to pass H.R. 1"—sweeping democracy reform legislation backed by the White House and two-thirds of U.S. voters—"is now the most important single factor in whether they can hang on to their congressional majorities, and hence stop Republicans from cheating them permanently out of national power." "More than 250 vote suppression bills have... been introduced at the state level. I would not be at all surprised to see some state Republican Party attempt to pass a law straight-up banning Democrats from voting at some point," Cooper wrote. "Moderate Democrats in the Senate have a choice to make: They can either defend democracy and the Constitution by passing H.R. 1 or they can save the McConnell filibuster. They can't do both."

“Let me ask you a question,” Manchin implored. “Answer my question!” McConnell demanded. “In what way would the Democratic Party be disadvantaged?” “Thirty hours [of debate] or 30 days, as long as you have the votes, 51 votes rule,” Manchin said. “So the final vote is going to be on passage, whether you have to negotiate or not with us.” “Here’s the way it works!” McConnell exclaimed. “We have been fiddling around as the senator from Maine pointed out for 24 hours…” At that point, Manchin reclaimed his time, silencing McConnell. “We just have a little different opinion about this,” Manchin said. “You can’t throw enough money to fix this if you can’t fix the health care.” “My health care workers need to be protected,” he added. “But it seems like we’re talking about everything else about the economy versus the health care. That doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.” “It seems like we’re more concerned about the health care of Wall Street,” Manchin remarked. “That’s the problem that I’ve had on this.” Watch the video below from 

(CNN) It was Friday afternoon, and President Joe Biden was on the phone with Sen. Joe Manchin, the conservative West Virginia Democrat who felt blindsided by his party leaders and now was at risk of defecting and effectively torpedoing a central pillar of the White House's domestic agenda. Just a couple hours earlier as he walked onto the floor ahead of votes on Biden's $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan , Manchin was stunned about the last-minute dealings of his party's leaders with the backing of the White House. For the first time, he learned that Democrats were seeking to advance a new plan on jobless benefits that would allow people to ensure their first $10,200 was tax free. Manchin told colleagues he knew nothing about that tax provision. Yet Democratic leaders thought that Manchin was on board since their rank-and-file senators had reached out to him and reported back to party bosses that he was with them. They'd told the White House things were in good shape. But Manchin was not on board, making clear he was not going to be jammed by his party leaders into accepting something he didn't like, according to sources who talked him, underscoring the power of an individual senator to derail the new President's agenda in the 50-50 Senate. Asked why Democratic leaders' dispute with Manchin wasn't resolved ahead of time, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow said Saturday: "We thought it was." The resulting confusion and chaos -- and miscommunication between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his most important swing vote -- put Washington on edge, threatened to blow up a delicately negotiated compromise and forced Democrats to leave a vote open longer than any in modern history -- nearly 12 hours -- as they engaged in a furious lobbying campaign and horse-trading to get Manchin on board. Privately, about half a dozen Democratic senators were engaged in constant discussions with Manchin, hoping to find a way to win him back -- all as Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman was speaking with Manchin multiple times an hour about his own alternative that Manchin supported but that Democratic leaders wanted to defeat. "I was trying to be the catcher in the rye. I was trying to keep him talking to the leadership," said Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine who said he was speaking with Manchin "constantly" on Friday. "My goal was to keep him talking and not let it fall apart." For Biden, though, the approach amounted to a soft-sell. He was deliberately careful not to add pressure to the situation, instead choosing to give Manchin space and listen to his concerns, a source with knowledge of the discussion said. But Biden did underscore one overarching point: how crucial it was to reach an agreement to get the bill toward the finish line given the urgency of the current economic and public health crisis. Manchin, two sources said, was urged by the President to do what he thought was right -- in essence to vote his conscience. It was a reflection of a relationship that multiple sources said has been in a solid place since Biden took office -- Manchin of the mind that Biden is an honest broker, and Biden cognizant of the fact Manchin is his own senator and doesn't take kindly to being jammed. Manchin, who characterized his Friday conversation with Biden as "good," said Saturday the talks "took longer than it should have." But he added: "We got it done, and we got a better deal." "Let's just say we had some projects that lasted 12 hours," said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin. "It took a little longer than we thought. Manchin had privately signed off on GOP plan Days prior, Manchin had committed to backing an alternative plan by Portman, who proposed extending jobless benefits to $300 a week through July, reducing the benefit by $100 in the bill that passed the House. But Democrats, fearful that the Portman plan would pass, worked privately behind the scenes to move forward with their own proposal to head off the Portman plan. The new Democratic plan would also reduce the benefits to $300 but extend them through September. And in order to head off backlash from the left by simply slashing back on the benefits, they added a sweetener: Ensuring that the first $10,200 would not be taxed. By mid-morning Friday, Democratic leaders were feeling confident with where they were heading. They believed Manchin had signed off on the proposal, after his conversations with a fellow swing vote, Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the lead sponsor of the plan. But Manchin said Friday morning he had no knowledge of the tax provision. It's unclear how the message was lost in translation. "I never heard about this at all. This is the first time I've ever heard about it, that morning. I said, 'Wait a minute,'" Manchin told reporters Saturday about the provision. And he bluntly told his colleagues Friday he would not vote for the plan unless there were changes, prompting a day-long lobbying effort and leaving many of his colleagues perplexed. Asked by CNN why he didn't resolve his differences with Manchin on the front-end, Schumer suggested he was surprised by the pushback by his West Virginia colleague. "People have new differences all the time," Schumer said Saturday after the bill's passage. He added: "That eight hours is meaningless compared to the relief that the American people are going to get. And if it helped us get to that, great." The failure to sort out their differences on the front-end surprised many Democrats because the two men have a frank and blunt relationship. "I truly love all of my caucus," Schumer said. Even Manchin? "Yes. Absolutely," the New York Democrat said. But many were nervous that the whole effort could collapse. On Friday as Schumer, Carper and others were scrambling to fix the Manchin problem, Carper sat alone on a couch in the private Senate foyer. He was hunched over with his head almost between his knees and a phone held tightly to his ear. He looked both pained by what was happening and intent on fixing it. He later told a Republican colleague things were looking grim. "We're stuck," Carper told Texas Sen. John Cornyn in the halls of the Senate. "It was frustrating," Stabenow said when asked about the nearly 12 hours that the Senate was in gridlock. "We were trying to figure a way forward, which we did. I always felt that was possible. I always felt we would." Day-long horsetrading and arm-twisting Manchin and Democratic leaders were frantically trading proposals back and forth, multiple sources familiar with the talks said. Manchin, according to one source familiar with the matter, wanted the amendment broken up into two so that the Senate could vote separately on the weekly unemployment benefit of $300 and the tax-free component. Without the two items packaged together, however, Democratic leaders knew the tax-free piece would fail. Leadership tried to impress upon Manchin multiple times that what the senior senator from West Virginia was asking for would not pass the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi had her own narrow margin and a group of progressives was already upset that the $15 minimum wage had been stripped from the Senate bill. "It was pretty clear that there was an enormous amount of pressure," said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Republican. "In a situation in the Senate with narrow margins, every man is a king and every woman is a queen." The White House was involved and consulted throughout, with officials working through the numbers of the various proposals that were traded back and forth, officials said. But they were also aware that this was a matter being negotiated by key Senate Democrats -- and made a point of being available, but not overbearing, the officials said. Biden was available, but would only end up making one call to Manchin. He did, however, stay in touch with Schumer throughout. A senior administration official specifically pointed to Carper and Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Warner of Virginia, along with Schumer, as individuals who "deserve a huge amount of credit" for working through the final compromise. The primary focus for the White House throughout the hours of talks was ensuring any agreement did not change the overall contours of the rescue plan, the official said. That baseline, which was the driving force for the creation of the plan itself, was ensuring the help "goes to the people who really need the help and being realistic about how long it will take the economy to recover," the official said. The final agreement with Manchin, White House officials determined, would still accomplish those goals. Biden agreed. "The end result is essentially about the same, and so I don't think any of the compromises have in any way fundamentally altered the essence of what I put in the bill in the first place," Biden told reporters Saturday after the vote. Ultimately, they all signed off on a plan to cap the eligibility of the non-taxable component to households with an annual income under $150,000 and extend the $300 in weekly benefits until September 6. After the deal was struck, senators were ready to vote. But it wasn't until an hour before midnight when the Senate would begin voting in earnest on the flood of amendments that Republicans proposed, forcing senators to pull an all-nighter as Democrats rejected GOP calls to adjourn until Saturday morning. Sen. Jim Inhofe, an 86-year-old Oklahoma Republican who told CNN he suffered a concussion in the last week after falling on ice, said he stayed up all night until the final vote to pass the bill shortly after noon on Saturday. But it wasn't easy. "It made for a very difficult night," Inhofe said of his concussion. On Saturday, as they were waiting for the final passage vote to start, Manchin walked all the way over to Portman's desk and the two talked for several minutes in a very friendly and animated way. As Manchin was about to leave they gave a little bit of a Covid-inspired hug, shoving their shoulders together, and Portman very quickly put his arm around Manchin's back. Asked about the exchange later, Portman said: "We have to continue to work together and I appreciate that he kept his word and stuck to my proposal even though he was strongly persuaded not to. I looked at him one point like 12 hours ago and said, 'Joe, your arm looks kind of mangled. Was it twisted?'"

Ying Ma is a conservative Chinese American who's been appearing on Fox lately to hype her theory that liberals only became interested in anti-Asian violence when they could use it to smear Donald Trump—who, frankly, doesn't really need anyone to smear him as it's already impossible to suss out where the slime ends and the human genome begins. Oh, and she also thinks all Chinese Americans need to denounce the Chinese communist government over its failure to stop the novel coronavirus because, you know, that's their country, right? Most of my immediate ancestors were Germans who came to this country in the 1860s and '70s following the Great Cinnamon Strudel and Kartoffelpuffer Famine of 1862. Actually, I have no idea why the fuck they came here. It couldn't possibly be because they envisioned that glorious future day when one of their descendants would spend literally hours perched atop a nascent sofa sinkhole drinking Mountain Dew Baja Blast and mercilessly mowing down Nazis in Call of Duty. The point is, it was a long time ago, and my parents and grandparents never knew any other home than America—and so they were solidly on our side during World War II. So I would have found it more than a little odd if, growing up, I'd been repeatedly asked to denounce 1930s and 1940s German war atrocities just because I was a white descendant of northern Europeans. But this is the kind of shit people of color are continually asked to do, at least on Fox News. Transcript! MA: "There are two things that the Biden administration can do. One is to send Kamala Harris to Oakland, which is the city where she declared her candidacy for president, and ask her to actually just denounce, loud and clear, Black-on-Asian violence. The Oakland-San Francisco area is a place where Black-on-Asian violence has occurred repeatedly, and it's also the place where some of the most horrific attacks we've seen this year have occurred. The second thing is actually to encourage all Chinese Americans to come out and denounce China for the role that it has played in infecting the world with COVID-19, and along with that the Biden administration needs to be very firm in holding China accountable for having done this to America and having done this to the world." Hmm, this sure does sound familiar, huh? Where have I seen this kind of rhetoric before? Oh, yeah … Yup. As Chris Hayes points out in the above tweet, this is precisely the kind of thing conservatives said about Muslims in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. WHY AREN'T THEY DENOUNCING THESE TERRORISTS? As if American Muslims as a community somehow had a hand in the murderous plot against their own country. Hey, Fox News! I'm also an eighth Norwegian. Do I need to apologize the next time someone power-vomits lutefisk on Christmas Eve? Eventually coronavirus will be gone, but no one who's eaten lutefisk ever forgets that horror show. No, I won't and can't apologize, because it doesn't have shit to do with me. Then again, no one has ever asked me to do anything this ridiculous. Nobody's asked me, a white guy, to denounce the events of Jan. 6, either. Why is that, I wonder?

Fox News, March 12, 2021 Ying Ma returned to Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss the recent wave of horrific black-on-Asian attacks committed in cities like New York, San Francisco, Oakland, and Philadelphia. While Democratic politicians, including President Biden, have blamed the violence on former President Trump’s COVID rhetoric, Ms. Ma pointed out that for decades, leftwing politicians and activists have cowered before such attacks and refused to label them as hate crimes or acts of racism. Since the pandemic, however, the Left has been eagerly labeling these attacks as hate crimes–without acknowledging the race of the attackers–in order to attribute racism to President Trump and his supporters. Ms. Ma encouraged everyone to be honest even when discussing a painful reality. Please click HERE or below to view the interview. A summary and video of the full segment are also available on the Daily Caller.

Supporters of the far-right QAnon conspiracy cult were among the extremists who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, inspiring national security experts to voice concerns about QAnon possibly making inroads in the military and law enforcement. But some pundits at Fox News, including Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, don't view QAnon as a threat and are now defending the movement by equating criticism of QAnon with attacks on free speech. Carlson, during one of his angry rants on Tuesday night, mocked the idea that QAnon is dangerous. "The real threat is a forbidden idea," Carlson said mockingly. "It's something called QAnon." Carlson went on to show a collage of cable news clips describing QAnon's extremism before suggesting that those attacking QAnon are promoting "tyranny." "No democratic government can ever tell you what to think," Carlson told viewers. "Your mind belongs to you. It is yours and yours alone." This was a non-sequitur. The clips he had showed included media figures sharing fears and concerns about the belief system, not a call for the government to "tell you what to think." Carlson went on to denounce QAnon critics as a "mob of censors, hysterics and Jacobin destroyers, all working on behalf of entrenched power to take total control of everything." In a rant of her own, Ingraham showed a clip of Jen Psaki — the new White House press secretary under President Joe Biden — telling reporters that the National Security Council will try to determine "how the government can share information" on efforts to "prevent radicalization" and "disrupt violent extremist networks." And Ingraham tried to spin Psaki's announcement not as an effort to prevent domestic terrorism, but as a crackdown on conservatives in general. "Republicans need to step up in unison and demand that the Defense Department and the Biden administration clearly define what they think constitutes extremism," Ingraham declared. "Now, if a member of the military voted for Trump, does that make him an extremist? Now, what if someone complains on Facebook that the federal government wastes a lot of money? Is she an extremist? What if they say that Roe v. Wade should be overturned? Or what if they participate in the March for Life?" Ingraham continued, "What if they're conservative Baptists — they believe that sex outside of marriage is immoral? Is that extremist? What if they have guns at home and they're lifetime NRA members? Will they now be considered extremists or even terrorists? We deserve to know. You see where this is destined to lead. And it is certainly not to a freer and more united America." By suggesting there's no way to target the threat from violent extremist ideologies like QAnon without targeting other conventional conservatives, Ingraham, too, offered more cover for the conspiracist movement.

In his 2020 book, "Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth," CNN's Brian Stelter reported that Fox News' Sean Hannity was so stressed out by his relationship with then-President Donald Trump and his erratic behavior that he was vaping incessantly in an effort to calm his nerves. Trump is no longer president, and Hannity now finds himself railing against a president, Joe Biden, instead of being an apologist and sycophant. But Hannity's vaping continues. Mediaite's Reed Richardson reports that on Thursday night, March 18, Hannity "got caught on air chilling and vaping a little too long." "After the last commercial break of the show," Richardson explains, "Hannity's graphics cued up and he appeared on screen as usual. But he apparently wasn't ready, as he was still wearing reading glasses and had a vape pen in his mouth." Hannity rolled into fellow far-right Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham's show, "The Ingraham Angle," and Ingraham made fun of her colleague. "When the split screen handoff appeared seconds later," Richardson notes, "Ingraham pretended to be caught unaware as well. Holding a glass of water, she deadpanned, 'Oh, am I on camera?' The pair then laughed off Hannity's flub, with Ingraham joking that Fox viewers got a glimpse of 'the real Sean Hannity.'"

The front page of Fox News' website Thursday offered a graphic for its story about the 21-year old Georgia man who has been charged with shooting to death eight people, including seven women, six of whom are Asian American. The graphic's headline reads "'Remorseful' Sex Addict?" "Atlanta suspect had rehab, felt 'shame ' over addiction, ex-roommates say," the sub-head reads. The title has changed multiple times. On the Fox News homepage it now reads: "Ex-roommates of Atlanta massacre suspect says he attended rehab for sex addiction, felt extreme guilt." The article itself says: "Atlanta shooting suspect attended rehab for sex addiction, felt 'remorse and shame,' former roommates say." Here's how it appeared on the Fox News front page at 3:54 PM: Those who are supporting Robert Aaron Long and insisting his supposed "addiction" made him do it likely don't understand growing up in some Christian evangelical homes, according to Religion Dispatches' Chrissy Stroop. The person who most often conveys this message is the youth pastor—Long's dad in this case. Long's sex drive was likely normal, but he was taught it was evil and needed to be repressed until marriage. This leads many evangelical boys to think they have sex or porn “addictions." — Chrissy Stroop (@C_Stroop) March 17, 2021 Online outrage over Fox News protecting the white killer of mostly Asian women, was palpable. “The “remorseful" sex addict?" We need to purge Fox News pic.twitter.com/vC8DvzqDtT — Benjamin Dixon (@BenjaminPDixon) March 18, 2021 If you had any doubt about how evil Fox News can be, this is one of their website headlines today: Sadly this is not a joke. "The "remorseful" sex addict. Atlanta suspect had rehab, felt 'shame' over addiction, ex-roommates say" — Janice Hough (@leftcoastbabe) March 18, 2021 The murderer that killed 8 people in GA is a terrorist. He's not a “man who had a bad day". He's not a “good boy that attended church". He's not a “sex addict with a mental problem". He's a fucking “white supremacist terrorist". @cnn @Reuters @nypost @FoxNews — ΔDЯƐWC!FƐЯΔ (@BurnzGTM) March 18, 2021 “Osama Bin Laden, remorseful sex addict, former roommates say." I wonder how that would've played on Fox News? — Kurt Vonnegut's Sphincter (@kurtssphincter) March 18, 2021 The media's effort to turn this terrorist into a sympathetic figure is an utter disgrace. https://t.co/SzWd0ZbTmJ — Markos Moulitsas (@markos) March 18, 2021 Fox News Logic: ATL Shooter – Remorseful sex addict George Floyd – "Probably high" https://t.co/Ffcrs8ncPN — Kyle Morse (@Kyle_A_Morse) March 18, 2021 Just spitballing here but perhaps a truly remorseful sex addict with a gun could simply shoot himself in the dick rather than murdering sex workers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://t.co/T8m9RY1VLX — andi zeisler (@andizeisler) March 18, 2021

Some U.S. states want to use the economic aid delivered under the federal government's recently passed coronavirus package in order to cut taxes. The problem: The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, which provides states with hundreds of billions in assistance, bars using the emergency funding for tax relief. More than a dozen states are considering new tax credits or cuts that could be jeopardized because of the relief funds. Some of these cuts have been planned for a while, and others are just starting to be pursued. West Virginia, for instance, has been looking to cut its state personal income tax following the successful rollout of the vaccine in that state and an improving economy. "Congress may not micromanage a state's fiscal policies in violation of anti-commandeering principles nor coerce a state into forfeiting one of its core constitutional functions in exchange for a large check from the federal government," Republican West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said in a statement. Republicans press Yellen for answers Morrisey, along with 20 other republican state attorneys general, on Monday sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen questioning the provision in the pandemic rescue plan that bars states from using their stimulus funds to offset tax cuts. In the letter, the Republican state officials said the prohibition is "unclear, but potentially breathtaking" — airing concerns that any tax cut could be construed as taking advantage of the pandemic relief funds. "We ask that you confirm that the American Rescue Plan Act does not prohibit states from generally providing tax relief," wrote the coalition, led by Georgia, Arizona and West Virginia. The aid plan, approved by Congress in close party-line votes and signed by President Joe Biden last week, includes $195 billion for states, plus separate funds for local governments and schools. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that Mr. Biden doesn't expect the relief funds to be used to lower taxes. "The original purpose of the state and local funding was to keep cops, firefighters, other essential employees at work and employed, and it wasn't intended to cut taxes," she said at a briefing. The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment. In West Virginia, Republican Gov. Jim Justice has applauded Congress for passing a massive stimulus but railed against the provision amid his push to cut the state personal income tax. "Congress may not micromanage a state's fiscal policies in violation of anti-commandeering principles nor coerce a state into forfeiting one of its core constitutional functions in exchange for a large check from the federal government," Morrisey said in a statement. Signing on to the letter were Arizona, Georgia, West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming. Three Republican members of the U.S. Senate introduced a long-shot bill on Tuesday to eliminate the provision. "If a state like Idaho wants to provide tax relief in the interest of economic recovery, and to help people return to earning their livelihoods, the American Rescue Plan says it will be financially punished by the federal government," Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho said in a statement.

Since at least the 2000 presidential election, pundits, scholars, and the general public have conceptualized the country’s partisan landscape using the blue states, red states, and swing states framework. But despite its ubiquity, this structure ignores how intrastate regional tensions and political competition imbue the divisions between red and blue America. Differences within states also anchor the long-standing urban-rural divide—a salient feature of American politics since the country’s founding. Last year, the Brookings Institution Press published our book, Blue Metros, Red States: The Shifting Urban-Rural Divide in America’s Swing States. We argue that movement toward the Democratic Party in rapidly urbanizing suburbs is shifting America’s partisan fault line from a long-standing urban-rural divide to an emerging split between metro areas and the rest of state. The book covered 13 swing states that had a 2016 presidential race margin of 10 points or less and contain at least one metropolitan area exceeding 1 million residents.1 Within-state splits derive from four interrelated influences. First are sociocultural factors often determined by initial settlement patterns and that shape values and attitudes related to diversity acceptance. Next is demographic and economic sorting that concentrates diversity and economic productivity in the country’s largest metro areas. There are also sharp attitudinal differences due to rising negative partisanship and the growing saliency of cultural, racial, and other diversity-related issues. The attitudinal differences also have implications for perceptions of status loss, particularly among white residents. Finally, institutions such as the U.S. Senate and the Electoral College; policies and processes such as redistricting, home rule, and preemption; and metro area fragmentation often disadvantage urban and suburban interests. The end result, as journalist Ron Brownstein noted after the 2016 election, has been a decoupling of demographic and economic power from political power.2 Blue Metros, Red States placed these tensions in a common geographic framework—the million-plus population metro area compared to the rest of a state’s population—and considered how these economic and demographic powerhouses navigate their state’s often hostile political terrains. By focusing our analysis on swing states, we examine these dynamics in contexts that determine the partisan balance of power at the federal level. In this brief, we assess how well the book’s main hypotheses fared in the 2020 presidential and the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoff elections. We find that the elections accelerated the trends we identified. Indeed, while it has long been the case that density and diversity predict Democratic support,3 the results suggest that another “D” can be added to that axiom: degrees. Democrats’ increasing support among higher-educated voters helped the party push further into the suburbs—particularly those that are diverse, urban, and well educated. In the election’s aftermath, the role of density and the exodus of college-educated suburbanites from the GOP has received significant attention.4 The same can be said for the migration of Democratic-leaning voters from places such as California into red state major metro areas (such as Austin, Texas) and the impact the new residents have on statewide election outcomes.5 Within-state geographic shifts are significant given that in many swing states, the metro area vote share is so large that if the Democrats win enough urban and suburban voters, Republicans cannot count on enough exurban and rural voters to win statewide elections. As such patterns strengthen over successive election cycles, the urban-rural divide that for generations nourished Republican majorities will be eclipsed by a divide between major metropolitan areas and the rest of the state—an emerging dynamic that favors Democrats. A contrast exists between Sun Belt swing states, where the new pattern is ascendant, and Rust Belt swing states, where the components of the emerging Democratic coalition are less prevalent due to fewer diverse and college-educated voters. To prevail in the Rust Belt, Democratic candidates must cut Republicans’ margins in smaller cities and rural communities, while running up large wins in the million-plus population metro areas. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was unable to patch together enough Rust Belt and Sun Belt states to secure an Electoral College victory. Four years later, Joe Biden successfully did so. Clinton was trapped between a weakening Rust Belt “blue wall,” and the yet-to-emerge Sun Belt blue states.6 Biden’s coalition, on the other hand, secured the blue wall in the Midwest while adding two Democratic-trending, fast-urbanizing Sun Belt swing states: Arizona and Georgia. Metro area swings between the 2016 and 2020 elections The analyses below summarize shifts in the 2020 presidential vote compared with 2016. The main unit of analysis is metro areas with a population over 1 million. We define metro areas using the census-designated metropolitan statistical area (MSA)7 and with the exception of Northern Virginia, refer to the MSA using the leading principal city instead of the formal MSA title.8 For each of the 13 swing states, data was collected from secretary of state websites after election results were certified. The data was aggregated for the counties in each of the 27 million-plus population metro areas in these states to generate the partisan voter margin. We also use the data to measure each metro area’s share of the total state vote. Data for counties that are not part of the metro areas was aggregated to generate the “rest-of-state” measure. Table 1 summarizes the partisan margin for the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in 27 swing-state metro areas and the inter-election shift in partisan support and change in vote share. Metro areas are grouped in terms of state and region using a Sun Belt/Rust Belt framework. For Sun Belt states, we group Florida and Texas together as “Big Sun Belt” states due to their large scale and the fact that each contains four metro areas with populations over 1 million. Eastern (Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia) and western (Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada) “New Sun Belt” states also are clustered together. Table 1 further groups the “Rust Belt East” (Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) and “Rust Belt Central” (Minnesota and Wisconsin) states. Figure 1 uses data from the “difference” column in Table 1 and orders the 27 metro areas by their inter-election partisan shift from most Republican to most Democratic. Among the 13 states, Florida clearly bucked the expectations of our Blue Metros, Red States thesis. While Biden’s margin did increase relative to Clinton’s in Orlando and Tampa, these improvements were offset by President Donald Trump’s surge in Miami, delivering him the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes by a greater margin compared to 2016. The result in Jacksonville was also a surprise; we predicted that it was poised to move toward Democrats, and in so doing, nudge Florida blue. While Biden narrowly won Duval County, including the city of Jacksonville (where Trump won in 2016), Republicans carried the metro area due to overwhelming support in surrounding suburban counties. Consequently, Jacksonville had the second-largest swing to Republicans among the 27 metro areas, following Miami (see Figure 1). Among Florida’s other million-plus population metros, only Orlando’s share of the state vote increased relative to 2016—meaning that Biden’s stronger performance in Orlando provided a bump in Democratic support compared to Clinton. Texas provides the clearest example of our thesis. In 2016, Clinton only won Austin, while in 2020 Biden carried all four of the Lone Star State’s million-plus population metro areas. He picked up nearly 8 points in Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth, while making modest gains in Houston and San Antonio. As detailed in Figure 1, Biden’s improvements in Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth were the largest metro area swings for Democrats in 2020. Moreover, Biden’s surge in Texas’s million-plus population metro areas carried even more punch given that the total vote shares increased in each. But even though Democrats cut Republicans’ margin from 16 percentage points to less than 6 over the course of the last two presidential elections, Biden fell short of winning the state, which we speculated was possible, but unlikely. Heavily Latino- or Hispanic-populated counties along the Mexican border—long a Democratic stronghold—saw Biden’s margins decline sharply compared with Clinton in 2016. Had the border county margins held steady, Biden would have lost Texas by perhaps less than 4 percentage points. If Texas eventually moves to the Democratic column, then the GOP’s path to 270 electoral votes narrows significantly, particularly given that Texas (like Florida) is poised to gain multiple electoral votes after the 2020 census-based reapportionment. Among the three “New Sun Belt East” states, Biden further strengthened the Democrats’ hold on Virginia due to an even stronger showing in its three metro areas with populations over 1 million—two of which (Northern Virginia and Richmond) also gained in statewide vote share. Biden’s win is the party’s fourth consecutive presidential election victory in the state, a string that was last accomplished by Democrats in the 1930s and 1940s, when Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman carried Virginia five times in a row. In North Carolina, Biden cut Trump’s 2016 margin by nearly 2.5 percentage points, but still narrowly lost the state. Biden’s improved performance was driven by 5-point increases in the state’s two metro areas with populations over 1 million (Charlotte and Raleigh), each of which accounted for a larger share of the total vote compared to 2016. Georgia is one of the five states that Biden flipped. Democrats nearly doubled the party’s margin in metro area Atlanta—the third-largest Democratic gain (see Figure 1) among the 27 million-plus population metro areas in the 13 swing states. In total, the party improved its performance by 5.5 percentage points, making Biden the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992. Biden’s support in Atlanta was even more potent due to the increase in the metro area’s vote share relative to 2016. Georgia is on track to add an electoral vote this year, driven almost entirely by population growth in the booming Atlanta metropolitan area. Farther west, Biden won all three of the “New Sun Belt West” states and became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Arizona since 1996, when Bill Clinton carried the state with a plurality of the vote. Biden’s Arizona victory was highlighted by 5-point swings in the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas, as well as nearly doubling the raw vote advantage in Coconino County (home to Flagstaff) and improving upon Clinton’s margin in Apache County (including the Navajo and Hopi Native American reservations). Winning metro area Phoenix was even more significant given its increased vote share and the fact that more liberal Tucson’s statewide vote share decreased. Like Georgia, Arizona is due another electoral vote after reapportionment. And, as with Atlanta, most of the state’s population increase occurred in metro area Phoenix. Biden more than doubled the Democratic margin in Colorado due in large part to a nearly 6-point swing in metro area Denver. Like Virginia (which also features high shares of college-educated voters and growing diversity), Colorado’s status as a swing state appears to be waning given the pace at which the Democrats are consolidating their support. And, again, Colorado will gain an electoral vote based mostly on suburban growth around Denver. Despite favorable demography and strong Democratic showings in recent elections, Biden’s margin of victory in Nevada replicated Clinton’s. This inter-election stability is even more surprising given that Biden lost ground in Las Vegas, the state’s big blue metro area. Biden’s stronger showing in the state’s rural counties and in Washoe County (home to Reno) offset the increase in Trump’s Las Vegas support, even as its share of the vote increased by 1 percentage point. Las Vegas has both density and diversity but lacks degrees, thus failing to hit on all cylinders that drive Democratic gains. Biden carried all of 2020’s Rust Belt swing states except Ohio, the only swing state besides Florida where Trump’s margin improved compared to 2016. Among the three “Rust Belt East” states, Biden made modest gains in the Detroit and Philadelphia metropolitan areas and larger gains in Grand Rapids and Pittsburgh on his way to flipping both Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump won Ohio even though he lost support in two of the state’s three metro areas with populations over 1 million. Trump did perform better in Cleveland, but the metro area’s vote share decreased compared to 2016. Biden returned Wisconsin to the Democratic column due to increased support in Milwaukee and the smaller, but still relatively large and heavily Democratic Madison metropolitan area. Although the Trump campaign targeted Minnesota after narrowly losing the state in 2016, the campaign’s efforts were to no avail. Biden won Minnesota by nearly 6 percentage points and boosted the Democratic margin in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area by nearly 7 points as turnout in the Twin Cities surged. To put the inter-election data in context, Figure 2 compares the Democratic metro area margins against the Democratic margins in the rest of the state (all counties outside of million-plus population metro areas) and the state margin. Positive values indicate a Clinton or Biden advantage, while negative values indicate a Trump advantage. For states with multiple million-plus population metro areas, the “Metro” values combine the data for all such metro areas. The 2020 and 2016 presidential election data demonstrates the degree to which Democratic victories in the 13 swing states depend upon the largest metropolitan areas, and just how much these regions’ partisan support differs from the balance of their state. In four of the five states that Biden flipped (Pennsylvania being the exception), his aggregate support increase in the million-plus population metro areas exceeded the statewide margin. Equally important, though, is the fact that Biden cut into Trump’s voter margins outside of the states’ largest metropolitan areas. While the shift was 1 point or less in Arizona and Wisconsin, Biden’s “rest-of-state” gains equaled or exceeded 2 points in Georgia and Michigan, and were more than 2.5 points in Pennsylvania—roughly twice as large as his million-plus population metro area percentage point gains. Only in Ohio and Texas did Trump’s margin improve outside of those states’ largest metropolitan areas. In sum, while outsized support in million-plus population metro areas powers Democratic vote totals, the party’s candidates also need pockets of support in smaller cities and towns to push them over the top in statewide races. As we detail in Blue Metros, Red States, where these votes come from reflects the uniqueness of each state’s political, demographic, and economic landscape. For instance, in Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Twin Ports region on Lake Superior continues to deliver Democratic majorities. In Arizona, strong support among Native Americans in the northern part of the state was critical to flipping it blue, while high-amenity resort towns in the Rockies fortified Democratic support in Denver to deliver Colorado for the party. Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania—largely regarded as the 2020 “tipping point” state—was aided not just by swings in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but by squeezing out majorities in Lackawanna County (home to Scranton) in the east and Erie County in the west. Georgia delivers the U.S. Senate for Democrats Coming just nine weeks after the presidential election, the runoff elections to fill Georgia’s two U.S. Senate seats provide another opportunity to evaluate the partisan divergence between metro area Atlanta and the rest of Georgia. To facilitate these comparisons, the data presented in Table 2 reports the margin of victory for the state, the Atlanta metropolitan area, and the rest of Georgia, as well as the share of the vote that was cast in metro area Atlanta and the rest of state for the November presidential and January Senate contests. While participation in the runoff elections approached 90% of the turnout of the general election, the drop-off was greater outside of Atlanta. As a consequence, metro area Atlanta’s share of the vote increased by just over a half a percentage point, as turnout in some Trump strongholds declined. Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won by larger margins than Biden, even though both candidates’ vote shares in Atlanta decreased. Ossoff and Warnock improved their showings outside of Atlanta relative to Biden by making small but consistent gains in vote share in the counties that contain Georgia’s smaller cities, including Augusta (Richmond County), Columbus (Muscogee County), Macon (Bibb County), and Savannah (Chatham County). Still, without double-digit margins in the Atlanta metropolitan area, neither Democratic candidate would have won and secured the party’s narrow majority in the U.S. Senate. This data also suggests the degree to which turnout among some rural voters may be dependent upon Trump’s presence on the ballot. Akin to the 2018 midterm elections—when Democrats gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives, flipped two Senate seats, and picked up seven governorships—without Trump atop the ticket, some of his supporters stayed home. For Republicans contemplating if the party should double down on Trumpian-style populism or work to win back voters who moved toward Democrats in the past four years, turnout patterns in 2018 and in the Georgia runoff elections should be front and center in these conversations. A new dynamic emerges for statewide elections In 2016, Hillary Clinton cut Republicans’ margins in Arizona and Georgia, but she was unable to move both states’ electoral votes into the Democratic column. At the time, Republicans held all four Senate seats in Arizona and Georgia. Four years later, Biden won both states, and Democrats hold their Senate seats. Democrats also gained Senate seats in two other Sun Belt states—Nevada (2018) and Colorado (2020)—both of which have been carried by the party in the last four presidential elections. As of 2020, Democrats hold all U.S. Senate seats in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, and Nevada. In contrast, among the three Rust Belt seats that flipped back to the Democrats in 2020, only Michigan is represented by two Democratic senators.9 Biden would have won the presidency without taking Arizona and Georgia. Yet, without the inroads Democrats have made in the Sun Belt during Trump’s presidency, Republicans would have maintained majority control of the Senate. Indeed, even with a net gain of six Sun Belt Senate seats since 2016, the Democratic majority rests on Vice President Kamala Harris’s authority to break tie votes. As we argue in Blue Metros, Red States, the outcomes in Arizona and Georgia are consistent with the emergence of a pan-metro-area identity anchored by a single large, dense, and more politically cohesive metro space. The same level of metro area cohesion does not exist in Florida or Texas (each with four metro areas with populations over 1 million), or North Carolina, where the states metro areas—Charlotte, Raleigh, and the Piedmont Triad—are splintered across a nearly 200-mile swath along I-85. In fact, among the 13 states in our analysis, Biden won the five states—Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, and Minnesota—where a single metro area constitutes over half of the state population. This also goes for blue states such as Illinois, New York, Oregon, and Washington. In 2016, Clinton won every state in the conterminous United States where a single metropolitan area accounted for more than half the state’s total population—the only exceptions being Arizona and Georgia. In 2020, Biden swept all such states. In Blue Metros, Red States, we predicted that swing states with a major metro area exceeding half the total population were more likely to vote Democratic than states with more divided urban systems such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. The 2020 election validated our point, with deep ramifications for future statewide elections as the urban-rural divide that anchored many Republican victories gives way to a metro area/rest-of-state dynamic more favorable to Democrats.

The passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is devastating, and represents the loss of an extraordinary human being and woman who was an icon of gender equality and the intellectual and moral center of the Supreme Court's diminishing core of true liberal democrats. Her loss is a blow to human decency and constitutional democracy at a time when these things are profoundly in jeopardy. And it sets in motion a real political contest, within the broader electoral contest, in which the results could be terrifying—a Mitch McConnell-led rush-job to affirm a Donald Trump nominee who would surely be young, ideological, and committed to rolling back a range of constitutional liberties, including reproductive freedom and voting rights. Even more terrifying, such a person could represent a pivotal court vote in throwing a contested election to Trump, and such a move could even be a quid pro quo of nomination. I might once have described such a result as unimaginable. But nothing is now unimaginable. I strongly support those—Neal Katyal, Michelle Goldberg, my friend Jeffrey Tulis—who are now calling for the Democrats to play "constitutional hardball," and use every constitutional means at their disposal to prevent a Trump nominee from being confirmed in the run-up to the election. Democratic threats to employ a range of legislative tactics including the elimination of the filibuster rule are entirely legitimate. Serious discussion of using a Democratic majority next year to increase the number of justices on the court, or to legislate statehood for Washington, D.C. or Puerto Rico—these are constitutionally legitimate possibilities. And there is no reason for Democrats to be reticent to consider, to threaten, and eventually to employ these remedies at a time when the Republicans are doing anything and everything to dominate the political process. At the same time, I think that the metaphor of "constitutional hardball," while containing real insight, has now lost its usefulness. This metaphor trades on an implied contrast between two ways of playing the game of baseball—"hardball" and "softball"—that involve some real differences but basically involve playing the same game by the same rules. The Republicans have been bringing hardballs to the Democrats’ softball game for many years. But recently the Republicans have been doing much more than using smaller and harder balls and employing fastball pitching. They have been feeding their players performance-enhancing steroids; stealing signs; paying off umpires; and bugging their opponent's dugout and locker room with the assistance of surly foreigners who do not know the game of baseball but are experts in espionage. Indeed, lately they have taken to using every means at their disposal to literally assault their opponents, directing their pitchers to routinely throw at the heads of opposing batters; directing their baserunners to stray from the base paths to attack opposing fielders and to spike them whenever possible; and starting brawls in which leather-clad bikers surprisingly emerge from their dugout wearing MAGA caps to beat their opponents with baseball bats and tire irons. This is not baseball. It is a different game, played by other rules, and indeed played by rules that are changed at will by the ruthless Republicans in control of the White House and the Senate. It is thuggery. And it is not a way of manipulating the Constitution. It is an assault on the Constitution itself, and on the very character of partisan political competition and free and fair elections in a constitutional democracy. Jiujitsu is not about standing head to head with a thug, trading blow for blow. It is ideally a form of self-defense that out-maneuvers an opponent and then defeats them. The handling of the Merrick Garland case in 2016, and the likely handling of Ginsburg's replacement now, is important but only the tip of the iceberg. Trumpism is an assault on liberal democracy. I have neither the time nor the desire to once more recount the ways. I will simply offer a single word, "impeachment," followed by an observation: everything that happens between now and January 21, 2021 takes place under the shadow of the effort of Trump, his "Justice" Department, and his congressional Republican allies, to hold onto power by any means necessary, which include a bogus "Durham investigation," bogus Senate hearings about "the Russia hoax," and the various ways that the Trump administration is deploying force, inciting violence, threatening political opponents, sabotaging the election, and setting the stage to contest a Joe Biden electoral victory. This an assault. And it needs to be seen for what it is, and to be countered appropriately. We need to fight back, in self-defense and in defense of the Constitution. The question is how. And this is why I have used the analogy of jiujitsu. Because jiujitsu it is a way of fighting–a martial art—that is strategically and tactically clever, and typically employs an opponent's force, along with positionality and leverage, to great advantage. Brazilian jiujitsu extends this logic a bit further, incorporating techniques of wrestling and judo to take bullies down to the ground, where their size and their punches can be neutralized through the use of joint locks and, yes, chokeholds, to defeat an opponent who only knows how to brawl. Jiujitsu is not about standing head to head with a thug, trading blow for blow. It is ideally a form of self-defense that out-maneuvers an opponent and then defeats them. The Democrats need to practice jiujitsu now. Flailing at the Republicans, issuing a flurry of threats, promising to eliminate the Electoral College, etc.—such moves are not clever now. Democrats need to be clever now. What does this mean? I submit the following as proposals: The Senate Democratic leadership should strategize about the entire range of legislative tactics that can be employed, now, to forestall a rushed SCOTUS replacement appointment. This includes possible threats to eliminate the filibuster if the Democrats win back the Senate in November. Democratic congressional leaders need to prepare a range of possible measures that might be taken up in 2021-22, including D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood, and including the expansion of the size of SCOTUS. These are legitimate possibilities; threatening them might supply some effective leverage on Senate Republicans; but more importantly, these may well be democratizing moves that should be taken up legislatively on their own merits.But while these ideas must be seriously considered, this does not mean that they ought to be treated as central political themes or promises in the run-up to the election. For such promises could backfire electorally. Indeed, Trump and William Barr have already started saying that the Democrats seek to upend the Constitution. There is no reason to furnish these demagogic despots with rhetorical ammunition. And indeed, some of the more radical measures—which I would support—probably require at least some sustained political work, within the Democratic party and among some of its base, in order to explain and make them popular.Obviously, who says what now matters. It may be wise for some more "radical" Democrats—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, Jamie Raskin, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, etc.—to publicly articulate these possibilities, to invoke them as leverage, and to place them on the agenda for future action. It is also probably wise to expect Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to be more "moderate" in their rhetoric. For this is who they are. And they are now the leaders of congressional Democrats. Could that change? Yes. Might an unfolding crisis lead to a change in 2021? It's possible. But right now, it makes sense for the leadership to be very tactical. They should not be expected to lead the call for a set of robustly democratic institutional changes at this moment. It is good that Schumer has declared that if a Trump nominee is confirmed by this Senate, then "everything is on the table." But it is likely that a Trump nominee will be confirmed by this Senate, and in that event one should not hold one's breath waiting for Schumer to start waving around Daniel Lazare's very fine 2017 piece in Jacobin calling for "A Constitutional Revolution." And Joe Biden should not be expected to be anything other than Joe Biden. He is what he is. The passing of RBG will not transform him into a firebrand, nor will such a transformation do any good for his candidacy or for the party's chances of retaking both the White House and the Senate in November. Biden needs to play this as the defender of the Constitution and of constitutional democracy. He needs to keep emphasizing Trump's murderous Covid failure, and his incitements of violence and his hostility to the Affordable Care Act and on more universal access to affordable healthcare for all Americans. Biden can denounce the hypocrisy of McConnell and Lindsey Graham. But he cannot take up the cause of broad constitutional reform, because now is not the time for him to do this, and because he is not so disposed. A different and perhaps better and more energetic or forward-looking candidate could do more. Kamala Harris—who is only the VP candidate, and who still has a role to play on the Senate Judiciary Committee—can do more, be more vocal, etc., than Biden, and this could be terrific. But the important thing now is to win in November, across the board and at every level. The sad passing of RBG underscores the stakes. Democrats must fight to win. But this is a complex fight, and it will not be settled by a single blow. Trump and his Republican enablers are not to be taken lightly. But they are vulnerable, and opportunism in responding to RBG's passing could make them more vulnerable, by mobilizing women and minority voters—including so-called "suburban" Republican women who care about reproductive freedom—to come out in droves in November. There are a range of tactics that need to be employed to position the Republican opponent in such a way that he can be decisively defeated. Trump and his party must be defeated. They must be out-maneuvered, brought down, and decisively vanquished. And once they submit, and the Democrats again are in control, the real work of renovating American society and reinvigorating American democracy can and must proceed. It would be a wonderful irony if the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who always argued that only democratic politics can ensure social justice, would help to energize the democratic politics we need now more than ever.

Editor's note: On the day after Trump's suprising victory over Hillary Clinton, we've resurfaced Robert Reich's killer essay explaining why the working class doesn't vote for Democrats anymore. Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? The conventional answer is Republicans skillfully played the race card. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act, segregationists like Alabama Governor George C. Wallace led southern whites out of the Democratic Party. Later, Republicans charged Democrats with coddling black “welfare queens,“ being soft on black crime (“Willie Horton”), and trying to give jobs to less-qualified blacks over more-qualified whites (the battle over affirmative action). The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to be as “tough.” All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class. Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last 24 years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. But they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. I was there. In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains. In addition, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners drown. Both Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown farlarger, and major industries more concentrated. Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy, and you shaft the working class. Why haven’t Democrats sought to reverse this power shift? True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations. In part, it’s because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” – so-called “soccer moms” in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s – who supposedly determine electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative Tony Coelho, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 1980s when Democrats assumed they’d continue to run the House for years. Coelho’s Democrats soon achieved a rough parity with Republicans in contributions from corporate and Wall Street campaign coffers, but the deal proved a Faustian bargain as Democrats become financially dependent on big corporations and the Street. Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that papered over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America. But to do this Democrats would have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. Will they? That’s one of the biggest political unknowns in 2016 and beyond.

The Republican Party is increasing united around the goal of suppressing voters in an attempt to gain political control in spite of the views of American voters. "Passing new restrictions on voting — in particular, tougher limits on early voting and vote-by-mail — is now at the heart of the right's strategy to keep donors and voters engaged as Mr. Trump fades from public view and leaves a void in the Republican Party that no other figure or issue has filled. In recent weeks, many of the most prominent and well-organized groups that power the G.O.P.'s vast voter turnout efforts have directed their resources toward a campaign to restrict when and how people can vote, with a focus on the emergency policies that states enacted last year to make casting a ballot during a pandemic easier. The groups believe it could be their best shot at regaining a purchase on power in Washington," The New York Times reported Friday. "Their efforts are intensifying over the objections of some Republicans who say the strategy is cynical and shortsighted, arguing that it further commits their party to legitimizing a lie. It also sends a message, they say, that Republicans think they lost mostly because the other side cheated, which prevents them from grappling honestly with what went wrong and why they might lose again," the newspaper explained. "The debate over voting laws is also part of the bigger fight over the future of the Republican Party, and whether it should continue being so focused on making Mr. Trump and his hard-core voters happy. For now, many conservative groups are choosing to side with the former president, even at the risk of feeding corrosive falsehoods about the prevalence of voter fraud."' Bill Kristol, who founded The Weekly Standard and served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, noticed the article and offered his analysis in tweet linking to the story. "Historians will cite this piece as evidence of the moment mainstream conservatism chose to go all in for an agenda of election nullification and voter suppression. Voter suppression is now a -- perhaps the -- core agenda item of today's conservative movement," he wrote. Historian and fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat also chimed in. "The GOP is now a far-right party. Its political culture has moved away from democracy and its aspiration will increasingly be electoral autocracy," she warned.

To millions of Americans, how much meat one does or doesn't consume is merely a dietary choice; to some far-right culture warriors, meat consumption is a political statement. And Colorado, according to Politico contributor Nick Bowlin, has become Ground Zero in the meat battle as right-wingers rail against Democratic Gov. Jared Polis for declaring March 20 MeatOut Day in the western state. Polis isn't demanding that Colorado residents give up meat entirely or even for a week. Rather, he is urging them to refrain from eating it for one day, and even that is a request — not a command. Restaurants in Colorado will still be free to sell beef, pork or chicken on March 20. But to far-right Colorado talk radio hosts like Dan Caplis and Ross Kaminsky (both on Denver's KHOW-AM 630), Polis isn't merely making a request — he is assaulting Colorado's core values. Caplis, Bowlin notes in an article published by Politico on March 17, has described the governor's request as a "traitorous attack" that is "vicious and callous." Republican politicians are throwing a hissy fit as well. Colorado State Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg said of Polis, "We can't have leadership in this state throw the number two industry in this state under the bus." And U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, a QAnon supporter who was elected via Colorado's 3rd Congressional District in 2020, is calling for a "statewide BBQ on March 20." Bowlin explains, "Food has long been a front in the culture wars, and no option on the menu has been more fraught over the past several decades than beef — which holds a singular spot in the iconography of the American diet and even the myth of frontier expansion. But a long-term slide in beef consumption has put the industry on the defensive. In Colorado, that perceived threat to one of its dominant economic sectors has been exacerbated by a rapidly shifting political landscape that features a widening divide between the rural, often red parts of the state and the bluer, booming metro areas on the Front Range of the Rockies, where economic and political power is increasingly concentrated." Despite his support for MeatOut Day, Polis is not a militant vegan. In fact, Polis himself eats meat, although his partner, Marlon Reis, is a vegan and an animal rights activist. And Bowlin points out that that Colorado governor "has largely tried to move on from the Meatless Day ruckus, which he has framed as blown out of proportion." But Colorado's right, according to Bowlin, will latch onto any Culture War issues it can find as the state continues to trend Democratic. Kenneth Bickers, who teaches political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Politico, "Colorado is increasingly a blue state….. The state as a whole has been trending in a blue direction for more than ten years." Bickers cited the MeatOut Day controversy as an example of Colorado Republicans turning to Culture War issues to rally their base. "It's a cultural symbol," Bickers told Politico. "Both parties have symbols. Symbols are powerful."

When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January, many of them became digital refugees, migrating to sites like Parler and Gab to find a home that wouldn't moderate their hate speech and disinformation. Days later, Parler was hacked, and then it was dropped by Amazon web hosting, knocking the site offline. Now Gab, which inherited some of Parler's displaced users, has been badly hacked too. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications. On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" siphoned that data out of Gab's backend databases in an effort to expose the platform's largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump's election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab's public posts and profiles—with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site—but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. "It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content," Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. "It's another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6." DDoSecrets says it's not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. WIRED viewed a sample of the data, and it does appear to contain Gab users' individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords. Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday. Passwords for private groups are unencrypted, which Torba says the platform discloses to users when they create one. Individual user account passwords appear to be cryptographically hashed—a safeguard that may help prevent them from being compromised—but the level of security depends on the hashing scheme used and the strength of the underlying password. Among the users whose hashed passwords appeared to be included in the data were those for Donald Trump, Republican congresswoman and QAnon-conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, MyPillow CEO and election-conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, and disinformation-spouting radio host Alex Jones. The hacked data also includes a chatlogs.txt file that appears to contain private conversations between the site's users. That file's contents begin with an added note from JaXpArO: "FUCK TRUMP. FUCK COLONIZERS & CAPITALISTS. DEATH TO AMERIKKKA." According to DDoSecrets' Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab's data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the site—a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn't differentiate between a user's input and commands in the site's code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker's reference to an "Anonymous Revival Project," they're not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do "want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists."

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin's criminal defense team is still trying to show that George Floyd died of a drug overdose or high blood pressure or something—anything—other than Chauvin's knee pressed down on his neck. In August, his defense argued that all charges against Chauvin should be dropped because, attorney Eric Nelson said, an overdose of fentanyl was responsible for Floyd's death. Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill was not convinced, but at this week's pretrial hearings, Nelson was back on this argument, asking Cahill to allow evidence about another time Floyd swallowed pills and suffered from very high blood pressure. The idea that 46-year-old George Floyd coincidentally died of natural causes exactly eight minutes and 46 seconds after Derek Chauvin started squeezing his neck is preposterous. The Hennepin County medical examiner ruled Floyd's death a homicide. A second independent autopsy confirmed the officers, and not the drug, killed Floyd. Nevertheless, right-wing media has stressed his health problems, including coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, and a long-running battle with addiction. Floyd did in fact have a significant amount of fentanyl in his system when he died. But we know he didn't die from a fentanyl overdose. An opioid overdose unfolds in a predictable order: The person drifts off to sleep and eventually stops breathing. Floyd, by contrast, was wide awake and begging for his life as the officers handcuffed him and pressed him face down into the concrete. Floyd's desperate protests that he couldn't breathe are further evidence that he wasn't overdosing. Opioids numb the agonizing feeling of breathlessness that signals you are not getting enough air. The various drugs in Floyd's system (one of which was methamphetamine), and his hardened arteries, may have made him more vulnerable to death during restraint, but this is legally irrelevant to Derek Chauvin's culpability. "This is the classic eggshell skull," Chauvin prosecutor Matthew Frank said, referring to the legal principle that a victim's fragility does not lessen an assailant's guilt. If you punch someone in the head and they die because they have a fragile skull, you're not any less guilty, even if a healthy victim would have survived. Judge Cahill agreed: "The officers have to deal with their arrestee as they find him." The defense's strategy is part of a long history of scientifically dubious attempts to blame detainees for dying. Police have been using the dubious label of "excited delirium syndrome" (ExDS) to excuse deaths in custody for decades. The label helped officers avoid charges in the deaths of Elijah McClain (August 2019) and Daniel Prude (March 2020), and other unarmed Black men who have died in police custody. In Texas, one in six non-shooting deaths in police custody was blamed on "excited delirium syndrome," and nearly 85 percent of the victims were Black or Hispanic men, according to a 2017 analysis by the Austin American-Statesman. The condition is alleged to be most common among younger men with histories of stimulant drug use and/or mental illness. The sufferer is said to be cut off from reality, impervious to pain, extremely strong, and very aggressive. ExDS is not a diagnosis recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association or the World Health Organization. Proponents of the ExDS label admit there are no standard criteria for diagnosing it, and no objective signs at autopsy. There's no there there. Above all, "excited delirium syndrome" is a narrative purporting to explain why a young healthy person might drop dead in police custody through no fault of the officers. It is alleged to be a fatal disease already well-advanced by the time the police show up. It's this so-called "disease" that causes the person's combative behavior and the "disease" that ultimately claims his life. The "excited delirium narrative" is also perfect to justify rapid escalation of force and extreme forms of restraint. As Floyd lay on the sidewalk, rookie cop Thomas Lane asked if he should be rolled onto his side, saying, "I am worried about excited delirium, or whatever" (stress added). "That's why we've got him on his stomach," Chauvin replied, using the suspicion of "excited delirium syndrome" to justify extreme and dangerous police restraint. Critics say deaths ascribed to "excited delirium" are a predictable result of hog-tying extremely agitated people: If a man is struggling, he's using extra oxygen. His adrenaline is pumping, which increases heart strain. The pressure on his torso makes breathing shallower. So he may be taking in oxygen, but unable to blow off carbon dioxide—which acidifies the blood and sets the stage for deadly complications. There's no need to posit a mysterious disease to explain why people sometimes die this way. "Excited delirium" has always been a racialized concept. The term was coined in the 1980s by a Miami medical examiner seeking to explain why 17 dead Black sex workers were found semi-nude with non-lethal levels of cocaine in their systems. Dr. Charles Wetli hypothesized that the women were done in by a lethal mix of sex and drugs. "For some reason," Wetli said, "the male of the species becomes psychotic [after chronic cocaine use] and the female of the species dies in relation to sex." These women were later found to have been strangled by a serial killer, but that didn't stop the concept from evolving into the go-to excuse for deaths of restrained people in police custody. If the police must take their arrestee as they find him, then they're legally responsible if they do something reckless that kills him—even if the same treatment wouldn't have killed a healthier person. The appeal of "excited delirium" is that it supposedly breaks the causal chain between the police officers' actions and the person's death. The Chauvin defense team's focus on Floyd's drug use and chronic health issues is just an underhanded way to invoke "excited delirium" defense by another name.

We are told that Democrats unwisely allowed themselves to be tied to the liberal activist push for marriage equality in 2004, which made it easier for President George W. Bush to win a second term despite the disaster that was the occupation of Iraq. We are told that Democrats should have told the liberal activists pushing that extreme proposal to "stand back and stand by." We are told that they should have Sister Souljah-ed the people who refused to accept anything less than marriage equality. Didn't Democrats know that Republicans, such as Karl Rove, would paint the entire party as wanting to undermine traditional marriage during a period in which polls clearly showed most Americans favored a union of one man and one woman? That's hogwash, of course, all of it. But since the 2020 election, Democrats have been told essentially that that's the way to treat activists. If Democrats had taken that advice, marriage equality would have been delayed longer, if not denied. And Democrats would have been the primary cause. It did not matter how many top Democratic candidates tried to divorce themselves from the issue. Rove ensured it would be front and center by getting it on ballots in nearly a dozen strategically-important swing states. He knew it would gin up the Republican vote and make independents and moderates think twice about supporting a Democratic Party that had taken things "too far" in the culture wars. Rove knew that the polling was on his side then just as David Shor and Harry Enten are sure polling against "woke" issues, such as "defund the police," "Black Lives Matter," Dr. Seuss and "cancel culture" favor Republicans now. Ken Mehlman, Bush's reelection campaign manager, later told The Atlantic that he knew what Rove was doing in 2004 and 2006, including distributing literature in West Virginia linking homosexuality and atheism. He was a closeted gay man while working in the Bush administration, but has since said that he wished he had spoken up sooner. This is how the Times reported those anti-gay, anti-same-sex marriage efforts: Proposed state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage increased the turnout of socially conservative voters in many of the 11 states where the measures appeared on the ballot on Tuesday, political analysts say, providing crucial assistance to Republican candidates including President Bush in Ohio and Senator Jim Bunning in Kentucky. The amendments, which define marriage as between only a man and a woman, passed overwhelmingly in all 11 states, clearly receiving support from Democrats and independents as well as Republicans. Only in Oregon and Michigan did the amendment receive less than 60 percent of the vote. But the ballot measures also appear to have acted like magnets for thousands of socially conservative voters in rural and suburban communities who might not otherwise have voted, even in this heated campaign, political analysts said. And in tight races, those voters—who historically have leaned heavily Republican—may have tipped the balance. In Ohio, for instance, political analysts credit the ballot measure with increasing turnout in Republican bastions in the south and west, while also pushing swing voters in the Appalachian region of the southeast toward Mr. Bush. The president's extra-strong showing in those areas compensated for an extraordinarily large Democratic turnout in Cleveland and in Columbus, propelling him to a 136,000-vote victory. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same narrative you would find in political news stories since November recounting the ways things like "defund the police" supposedly turned off Latino voters, for instance. They focus on short-term political outcomes to the near-exclusion of what's right or wrong, moral or immoral. The next time you come across a centrist pundit or Democratic strategist blaming a 2020 election cycle that, for whatever reason, didn't meet their expectations—even though Democrats held the House and took back the Senate and White House—on leftists refusing to relent on their push for true equality, ask them if Democrats should regret being tied to marriage equality in 2004 when it wasn't as popular as it is now. Should Democrats be ashamed that early in the Obama era they refused to listen to Rahm Emanuel and abandon the pursuit of a health care reform that had eluded the party for a century? Should they lament that they got "shellacked" in the 2010 congressional elections partly because Republicans relentlessly demonized the Affordable Care Act? Or should they be proud that they spent their political capital on a law that has helped—and continues helping—tens of millions of Americans? The goal shouldn't be to win every election. That's not even realistic. Political winds ebb and flow for reasons even the best strategists don't fully understand. The goal should be to improve the country for the most vulnerable when you have the power to. I have no idea how the 2022 midterms will turn out, whether Republicans will benefit from off-year elections like the party out of power nearly always does, or if Democrats will be able to stem the tide enough to retain one or both chambers of Congress. But I know they have the opportunity to do good right now, and that it would be a tragedy if they decided not to because they feared a future none of us can predict. Today, marriage equality seems like such a no-brainer. It is kind of astonishing how long it took for most Americans to realize it. Issues that are unpopular today are likely to follow the same trajectory. Do the right thing and let the chips fall. If Democrats take that stance, they will increase their bargaining power over time while helping millions of vulnerable Americans. How can that ever be wrong?

I was raised by a pair of wild hippies, so my heart has always been committed to liberal ideology. As a Bible-believing Christian, however, I was surrounded by evangelical theology throughout my youth, in various churches, Bible camps and so on. When I decided to enter the ministry to attempt to change that conservative theology, I attended an evangelical seminary. It was clear on my first day on campus that no reform was going to occur. If I happened to mention voting for Al Gore, I was told by my classmates that God keeps a record of my voting history and that I had voted for a man who endorses baby-killing and tearing down the American family. Honestly, I was just hoping that President Gore might help save the planet and not make up a reason to go to war in Iraq. Anyway, in my 10 years in ministry I had even less luck making any changes, which is why I left the formal ministry a couple of years ago. The truth then, and even more so now, is that we cannot separate Republicans, and now the Trumpists, from the evangelicals. I have seen my fellow "Christian left" types attempting to reform the God vote — in fact, I've done it myself — but I feel we have been too timid in our approach. Stronger language and a pure rejection of evangelical theology is needed. From a purely Christian point of view, the evangelical leadership are false teachers teaching a false doctrine. Trumpism cannot be defeated without first facing down evangelicalism. Jesus Christ, who these people claim as their savior, himself provided a warning against these religious hypocrites in Matthew 23: Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. The only real threat to Christianity is Christianity itself. Leading evangelical pastors like Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress made a passionate plea for Christian voters to ignore Trump's shortcomings as a man because he stands with the Christian church on all things that are right and true. Apparently, that means Christians must shut the door to all LGBTQ people, abortion providers, liberals, immigrants, Muslims and anyone who happens to mention taxing the wealthy. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. Many of the false American evangelical teachers demonize and look down upon the people in poorer countries. I have seen these "missionaries" in places like Haiti building their churches and making sure "proper doctrine" is followed. It is this type of modern-day colonialism that has provided foreign governments the religious authority to enact terrible anti-LGBTQ laws and restrictions on reproductive rights for women. Woe to you, blind guides! You say, "If anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing; but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath." You blind fools! Which is greater: the gold, or the temple that makes the gold sacred? False teachers have always believed that their financial wealth means favor with God. I have seen many Christian leaders give praise to God for their big homes, nice cars and million-dollar sanctuaries. This belief that God has blessed them with great stuff prevents them from ever understanding the need to fund programs that provide equality in the education, health care, justice and economic systems. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices — mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel. These false evangelical leaders may have stayed within the law, but they know nothing about being merciful. They could never understand the message to reach out to undocumented immigrants because of God's call to treat the foreigner as native born — because we were once foreigners ourselves. They only understand the language of rules and law without mercy and grace. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Many of these false evangelical leaders have spent a lot of time and money making sure their public image is clean. Ideal marriages, wonderful children, kind and loving people who are financially affluent and pay their taxes. Christ reminded his followers to be careful of such a well-crafted persona. Behind the curtain there are many filled with hypocrisy and wickedness. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, "If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets." So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started! Many of these current evangelical leaders love to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his message of love and forgiveness. Many would like to forget that most conservative Christian leaders rejected Dr. King's message while he was alive, and some believed he was a communist. It is no mystery to me why there is no picture of the great Rev. Billy Graham marching with Dr. King. These false evangelical leaders expose themselves again as they reject the Rev. William J. Barber II's message about honoring and uplifting the poor, which is far more clearly based in Christian doctrine than anything they preach. These false evangelical Christian leaders never understood Dr. King's message to follow Jesus into those places in America where poor people struggle and suffer and too often die, and they never will.

There was another skirmish on the floors of Congress this week that made no sense other than the endless outpouring of partisanship. This time it was a vote forced by Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), to drop Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, from the House Intelligence Committee. The conflict was about allegations that a Chinese spy had raised funds for Swalwell's congressional campaign in 2015. The measure lost, with all Democrats and Republicans voting on party lines. It's not a vote that would change anything. Speaker Nancy Pelosi would appoint a potential replacement. Apart from the idea that it was a futile effort if you are the minority party, it was simply a partisan slap that follows the pattern of knocking the other guy. Just what passes as Republican ideology other than saying 'No' has become massively unclear. But in this case, the underlying thought – that a foreign power is trying to have an influence on choosing our leadership – struck as particularly galling. Remember we just had that declassified national security assessment that Russia, and to a lesser degree, Iran, had a huge campaign under way to use our legislators and members of the Donald Trump campaign team to funnel disinformation to the American public. Those figures include Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who openly talked loudly about information fed him by an identified Russian agent Andrei Derkach, a Ukrainian lawmaker, and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking minority Intelligence Committee member, for work to spread disinformation about then-candidate Joe Biden and family. Both Johnson, who also has repeatedly offered his racist defense of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Nunes, who has opposed Biden's certification as president, remain active in their public damnations on behalf of Trump. These people have drawn no response from McCarthy. I'm not big on "whataboutism" as tit-for-tat partisanship is termed, but the coincidental timing here seems unusually gross. The Swalwell Case McCarthy sponsored his resolution to oust Swalwell over the fact that he has not denied "public reporting that a suspected Chinese intelligence operative helped raise money" for his campaign and helped interns seek potential positions in his congressional office. Since the fall, McCarthy has targeted Swalwell, one of the Trump impeachment managers, after Axios published information about Swalwell's relationship six years ago with a suspected Chinese operative known as Fang Fang or Christine Fang. According to the story, Swalwell was among several California politicians reportedly pursued by Fang, who did fund-raising work for his campaign and was photographed alongside Swalwell at a political function and reports that they had dated. When the FBI reported its suspicions in 2015, Swalwell cut off contact. House leaders were told in 2015, and Swalwell was allowed to serve on the Intelligence Committee. There was another review with McCarthy and Pelosi last year, with opposing views from the two. McCarthy charged that based on what has been publicly reported, Swalwell "cannot get a security clearance in the private sector" — and thus had no business being on the intelligence panel. "Only in Congress could he get appointed to learn all the secrets of America — that's wrong," McCarthy told reporters. "If you can't meet that bar, you shouldn't be able to meet a bar to serve on the intel committee." McCarthy tweeted out a picture of the form upon which individuals are required to disclose relationships with foreign nationals. Hmm. Then what are we to make of Johnson and Nunes, their staff members and non-congressional figures. Figures include: Michael Flynn, who served as national security adviser despite foreign entanglements Paul Manafort, Trump campaign chair despite his foreign contacts Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner who did not always report contacts with foreigners Republican Outliers Naturally, Swalwell and Democratic defenders noted that McCarthy failed to mention that Swalwell changed his behavior after the FBI alert to him. The same cannot be said of Johnson, Nunes and the others. Of course, all this may be in response to the vote by Democrats and 11 Republicans last month to remove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) from two committees for her extremist QAnon ideologies and threats to other members of Congress. A new effort was introduced yesterday to oust her altogether. McCarthy wrote on Twitter that "Every Democrat is now on the record. They chose politics over national security." Well, yeah, as Republicans have been doing as well. These guys seem to do so on every question, real or not. A dozen Republicans voted this week to oppose honoring police from the Capitol and the city for defending the Capitol on Jan. 6 because the resolution contained the work "insurrection." Then, yesterday, 172 Republicans voted against renewing the so-called defense against violence to women act. They found the bill unneeded even in the week following the shooting of two men and six women massage parlor workers in Georgia. The act did have an anti-gun ownership clause for boyfriends found guilty of domestic violence. Just what passes as Republican ideology other than saying "No" has become massively unclear. Even on a straight partisan basis, how does knocking Swalwell off this committee make anyone more likely to vote Republican than Democratic? What has been gained here? If anything, shouldn't we thank Swalwell for heeding an FBI alert and ask why Johnson and Nunes continued to carry water for identified Russian agents despite intelligence warnings? How does anything in all this help with coronavirus, economy, the border, education, environment or anything that we actually care about?

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In May 2019, workers in California’s Central Valley struggled to seal a broken oil well. It was one of thousands of aging wells that crowd the dusty foothills three hours from the coast, where Chevron and other companies inject steam at high pressure to loosen up heavy crude. Suddenly, oil shot out of the bare ground nearby. Chevron corralled the oil in a dry streambed, and within days the flow petered out. But it resumed with a vengeance a month later. By July, a sticky, shimmering stream of crude and brine oozed through the steep ravine. Workers and wildlife rescuers couldn’t immediately approach the site — it was 400 degrees underground, and if the earth exploded or gave way, they might be scalded or drown in boiling fluids. Dizzying, potentially toxic fumes filled the scorching summer air. Lights strobed through the night and propane cannons fired to ward off rare burrowing owls, tiny San Joaquin kit foxes, antelope squirrels and other wildlife. Over four months, more than 1.2 million gallons of oil and wastewater ran down the gully. California had declared these dangerous inland spills illegal that spring. They are known as “surface expressions,” and the Cymric field was a hot spot. Half a dozen spills and a massive well blowout had occurred there since 1999. This time, faced with news headlines and a visit by Gov. Gavin Newsom to the site, officials with the California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM — the main state agency overseeing the petroleum industry — ordered Chevron to stop the flow. Regulators later levied a $2.7 million fine on the company. Instead, Chevron profited. Amid the noise and heat, trucks arrived daily to vacuum out the oil from a safe distance. It was refined, sold and shipped to corner gas stations, bringing the company $399,000, according to state records. Chevron appealed the fine, saying while “we fully accept — and take responsibility for — our actions,” it does not believe the spill, known as Cymric 1Y, posed a threat to human health. The company has yet to pay, and CalGEM has not moved forward with an appeal hearing. Along with being a global leader on addressing climate change, California is the seventh-largest producer of oil in the nation. And across some of its largest oil fields, companies have for decades turned spills into profits, garnering millions of dollars from surface expressions that can foul sensitive habitats and endanger workers, an investigation by The Desert Sun and ProPublica has found. Since the new regulations outlawed surface expressions last year, more than two dozen have occurred in Kern County, the heart of the state’s oil industry. In the Cymric field, three spills are still running, state officials say, including one that’s spilled nearly twice as much as the one for which Chevron was fined. Dozens of older spills have also flowed for years, the investigation found. The largest, just around the bend from Cymric 1Y, started in 2003. The site, also operated by Chevron and dubbed GS-5, has since produced more than 16.8 million gallons of oil and about 70 million gallons of wastewater, a company spokeswoman said. That tops the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez, the infamous tanker that ran aground in Alaska in 1989. In the last three years alone, the crude collected from GS-5 has generated an estimated $11.6 million, according to an analysis of production data provided by the state. Chevron and state regulators say they’re trying to shut down GS-5 and they have reduced the flow by 90%. It was spilling approximately 15,000 to 23,000 gallons of fluid a day in early February, the latest date for which the state provided detailed data. Ten to 15% of that was oil, officials said. “We take our responsibility to operate safely and in a manner that protects public health, the communities where we operate and the environment very seriously,” company spokeswoman Veronica Flores-Paniagua said. “We remain committed to stopping and preventing seeps consistent with the updated state regulations.” But a close review of the state’s new rules shows they contain several large loopholes that keep oil from surface expressions flowing — the result of years of lobbying and pushback by the energy industry. For example, over stiff opposition from environmentalists, state officials explicitly allowed high-pressure “steam fracking,” a controversial extraction technique that has been linked to surface expressions. And when spills break out, there is nothing stopping producers from turning them into moneymakers. In a practice known as “containment,” companies can corral the spills with dirt berms, netting, pipes or drains; vacuum out the crude; refine it and sell it. The 2019 regulations spell out steps companies must take to try to halt the spills — mainly temporarily ceasing steam injection — but there are no deadlines for stopping them and restoring the sites. The new rules also largely exempt “low energy” surface expressions related to oil production. According to a review of state and local records, the exemption appears to cover more than 70 older spills that are still revenue generators. A cache of internal documents, photos and video obtained by The Desert Sun and ProPublica shows that over the past quarter century, CalGEM has routinely allowed oil companies to contain and commercialize surface expressions, despite warnings by staffers about environmental and human harm. The agency acknowledges that more than 160 containment structures have been built to corral spills since the late 1990s. The inland spills typically draw little attention, unlike major marine events that garner national headlines. But hundreds of them have occurred, records show. Geysers of oil, rock and mud have shot skyward 100 feet, and slopes have collapsed under smoking waterfalls of crude and wastewater. In one case, a worker died; in another, an employee had to wrench his ankle away from a sudden sinkhole; and a third had to abandon his truck as a dark stain of oil mushroomed beneath it. “Keep in mind that these eruptions are not at well sites,” wrote then-Oil and Gas Supervisor Elena Miller in a 2011 email to her boss. “These are locations where the earth opens up and spews fluids, solids and gases.” Oil company representatives defend their practices, saying surface expressions mirror natural seeps of crude and come with harvesting a product that provides thousands of well-paying jobs and fuels car-centric California. Containing the spills, they added, also costs money. Chevron, for instance, told lawmakers this year that it had spent $9 million to try to halt spills in the Cymric field. Environmentalists who fought for the regulations are furious about the loopholes and the continued spills. “It’s completely obscene that oil companies can cause an oil spill and then profit off it,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit organization. CalGEM could not provide a full accounting of how much oil has spilled from surface expressions, even though the 2019 regulations explicitly require that oil companies report production numbers. The agency also declined to provide spill maps and plans mandated by the new rules, citing, in part, “multiple ongoing legal investigations,” including a departmental probe of the Cymric spills and ongoing litigation between Chevron and another company involving the field where the worker died. “We are greatly reducing the problem. We continue to make progress, but more work is needed,” state Oil and Gas Supervisor Uduak-Joe Ntuk said in a statement. He noted that the practices had developed over decades, and that the new regulations were crafted under his predecessor and then-Gov. Jerry Brown. “This Administration has made it clear that surface expressions are unacceptable and will not be tolerated as the cost of doing business,” he said. After visiting Chevron’s Cymric 1Y spill site last year, Newsom pledged to “tighten things up.” In November, his administration placed a statewide moratorium on new permits for steam fracking, a suspected root cause of many surface expressions, and hired scientists with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to study whether the method can be used safely. Ntuk said that while that review is in progress, the agency is cracking down. He has the power to fine companies $25,000 a day for ongoing spills. But other than the one, unpaid fine against Chevron, he has not imposed any financial penalties for surface expressions, instead issuing “notices of violation” — citations that Ntuk has compared to “parking tickets.” He said that approach is working; many spills have stopped and some companies are working proactively to seal abandoned, often damaged wells to prevent future spills. Companies with existing permits, however, are free to keep steam fracking — and to scoop up any oil that cracks the surface. Some experts say the current reality is reminiscent of the 19th-century oil rush. “It reminds me of the industry back when you’re watching ‘There Will Be Blood’ and they used to let this stuff explode out of the ground and collect it,” said Deborah Gordon, a Brown University senior fellow, who researched California’s Midway-Sunset field, where many surface spills occur. Her group concluded it emitted more greenhouse gases than any oil field in the nation. “This is not where this industry needs to be.” After 150 Years, California’s Oil Gets Harder to Extract Oil production in California began in the 1850s, just as its famous gold rush was petering out. Tantalized by visible natural “seeps,” companies large and small drilled wells across the state, hoping to hit paydirt. While profits could be big, so could the spills. In 1910, a Kern County wellhead blew out. Oil skyrocketed from the ground. Over 18 months, the Lakeview Gusher spilled 395 million gallons, creating a pool so deep and wide that men rowed boats across it. It still holds the record for the largest oil spill in U.S. history, dwarfing BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, which leaked 210 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. The California Division of Oil and Gas — the precursor to today’s CalGEM — was formed in 1915. Until this year, the agency’s primary mission was clear: Maximize the production of petroleum and other energy resources. That included helping companies relocate water that interfered with oil, both freshwater supplies and the briny waste that gushes from wells along with crude. After decades of extraction, pumping California’s increasingly tarry reserves became tougher. Much of it was locked underground in diatomites — tightly packed layers of ancient, tiny sea skeletons whose algal innards compressed over milleniums into gooey crude. (Cat litter is made of diatomaceous earth scraped off Kern County hillsides.) By the 1960s, researchers discovered that flooding the subterranean reservoirs with steam or injecting it in cycles, through a process known as “huff and puff,” worked well. The huff phase involves injecting scalding steam down wellbores, then letting the heat melt the tar. The puff portion refers to softened crude, thin as heated maple syrup, rising up through production wells. When the flow slows, another steam cycle begins. The technique is called “cyclic steaming.” By the late 1990s, companies were using a supercharged version of it: steam fracking. Producers injected steam down well bores at pressures high enough to crack brittle underground formations so oil could ooze upward. Nearly half of the oil in the state is produced from cyclic steaming, according to a University of California, Berkeley, report issued in April. But blasting old, often damaged wells with steam had an unintended side effect: surface expressions. Like underground tea kettles blowing their tops, seeps of gas, mud, oil and rock erupted in a dozen oil fields. Five companies reported scores of spills over more than 20 years. Chevron alone logged 64 surface expressions between 1997 and 2010, according to a report it sent to CalGEM. Typically, CalGEM has told oil field operators to “shut in” wells near a surface expression, meaning temporarily cease nearby steam injection or drilling. Usually, the spill would stop or slow within days. If it didn’t, the agency has ordered them to stop steaming in an ever-larger radius. But some spots sprang leaks again and again or spilled large amounts for years. With CalGEM’s approval, companies turned these into de facto — but permanent — production sites, even in creeks and ravines supposedly protected by environmental laws. CalGEM got revenue too — the agency is completely funded by the industry it regulates, and this year will receive 67 cents for every barrel of oil produced. “The Earth Had Literally Cracked Open” U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Republican whose district includes Kern County oil fields, once called Sandy Creek a “ditch” and claimed it hadn’t rained there in 30 years. The creek, which in the 1800s ran miles from the Temblor Mountains to the then-vast Buena Vista Lake, is now dry most of the year. But when winter rains fall, the creek flows. State biologists documented sections that are home to breeding western toads, cliff swallows, California quail, kildeer and other birds passing through on long migrations. In 1998, near Sandy Creek’s headwaters, Aera Energy and two other companies began injecting steam into wells in the soft dirt. A web of surface expressions quickly developed, with continuous oil pools forming in the streambed. They’re still flowing 22 years later. Rather than shutting down production, Aera reshaped the landscape. It installed a 400-foot-long metal pipe, diverting rainwater from its natural path so the crude could continue to flow into the creekbed. Although the spills were still running, they were considered contained; the oil was confined to open-air pools. Nets were slung over them to prevent birds from flying in. Aera and TRC, another oil company that leased adjoining property, periodically pumped out the oil and sold it. State oil regulators later said in an internal report that Aera was producing about 3,000 gallons of crude and waste a day from Sandy Creek. Under state laws, it’s illegal to discharge any hazardous substance into a creek or streambed, dry or not. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which enforces those laws, said it can issue temporary permits for cleanup activities, but not for permanent alterations of a streambed. “The Department sees oil spills as emergencies, and its role is to respond to minimize harm to wildlife and clean up ASAP,” a spokesman told The Desert Sun and ProPublica. The department did not respond to questions about whether it has ever cited or fined companies that have spilled oil and altered the streambed in Sandy Creek. TRC did not respond to requests for comment. Aera, which has since sold its Sandy Creek leases, declined to comment on past surface expressions there, but it said in a statement that the company “uses a combination of innovation, engineering, and technology to ensure that we are producing California’s energy under the most environmentally responsible and safe conditions in the world.” The containment approach wasn’t foolproof. In fall 2010, heavy rains sparked flash floods, dismembering the metal culvert. Days before Christmas, rains fell again. The creek reclaimed its natural channel, shoving crude and wastewater 10 miles downstream, through the town of Taft and out the other end. Bruce Joab, a California Fish and Wildlife senior scientist who assesses the environmental damage wreaked by oil spills, still recalls Sandy Creek after the storms. “I was actually shocked at how torn up that upper end of the watershed was,” Joab said. Rusted pipes, steam manifolds and other heavy debris littered the bed. “It was hard to distinguish where the creek began and the oil operation began.” Field warden colleagues who’d seen many surface expressions warned him to watch his step. “There were places where the earth had literally cracked open and oil was spilling out,” he recalled. When spills occur, CalGEM employees work side by side with oil companies to investigate the causes. Chevron officials, for instance, were part of the team that responded to and probed the causes of last summer’s Cymric 1Y spill. Ntuk said that approach is required by state law. In Sandy Creek, a CalGEM staffer documented the flood damage and spills with dozens of photographs and said in a lengthy report to supervisors that the surface expressions there were caused by steam operations. CalGEM, however, did not include Sandy Creek in a tally of surface expressions it provided to The Desert Sun and ProPublica, saying the situation is “still under evaluation and has not yet been categorized.” CalGEM provided no evidence it has ever cited or fined companies for damage after the 2010 floods or after more oily floods in 2016. Sandy Creek is just one place where companies have constructed elaborate containment structures. They can carry a heavy cost. A Tragedy at Well 20 Well 20 in the Midway-Sunset field was drilled in 1927 and abandoned by Chevron in the 1980s. The company tried and failed to plug it three times. By 2011, surface expressions had broken out there regularly, and CalGEM had cited the company twice for oil field waste, though it wasn’t fined. Chevron installed a large, underground containment system — a channel with perforated drains at either end — and added devices called tilt meters to record any sudden shifts in formations beneath the surface to give warning above. The tools typically monitor volcanoes and dams for seismic activity. On the morning of June 21, 2011, Robert “Dave” Taylor and two Chevron colleagues went to the freshly graded site in response to a report of steam coming from the ground. Taylor had worked in the Kern County oil fields for 33 years, starting as a low-paid “roustabout” and working his way up to construction representative. In Taft, where he grew up and raised his family, he was a soft-spoken but beloved coach of high school and community sports teams. Years later, people in town still called him “Coach.” That June morning, the field at Well 20 looked smooth, per oil and gas agency rules. But underneath, pressure was building. Tilt meters had shown sharp shifts in ground movement, though no one seemed to notice. As the three men walked across the site, a sinkhole of hot oil and hydrogen sulfide opened beneath Taylor’s feet and swallowed him. One of the other men reached into the hole and tried to grab his arm, with no luck. He then tried to use a pipe, but Taylor was gone. Taylor’s family drove north from their home in Taft, thinking there might be a chance he’d survived. They were greeted by a geyser of steam as tall as a telephone pole shooting out of the hole. It took workers until shortly before dawn the next day to retrieve Taylor’s body. He was 54. Chevron spokeswoman Flores-Paniagua called Taylor’s death “a tragic and isolated incident.” The oil and gas agency ordered Chevron and TRC to stop nearby steam injection in an ever-widening radius. It did little good. The spill swelled. Top officials began probing more deeply and told staffers to compile a “spill binder” of fields around Bakersfield, the seat of Kern County. According to the binder, which was obtained by The Desert Sun and ProPublica, they logged 19 more surface expressions in five months. Shortly after Taylor’s death, the ground shook a few miles north and a 60-foot geyser blew skyward. A Berry Petroleum Co. worker fled as a fast-moving surface expression mushroomed under his truck, internal CalGEM documents show. ”In this week’s event, a field worker narrowly escaped injury or death by running away from the site on foot,” wrote Miller, then the oil and gas supervisor, in an email to her boss, obtained through a public records request. “He abandoned his truck which was still parked at the site two days later as it was too dangerous to re-enter.” By autumn, a slope above the site where Taylor died had collapsed into a bubbling cauldron of oil and toxic gases. Inside Chevron, Taylor’s death was taken seriously, said Lucinda Jackson, who headed the company’s global safety, health and environment division until she retired in 2016. She said company geologists had told her as long as they steamed in diatomite in California, Indonesia and elsewhere, surface expressions would occur. Several studies support this conclusion, which is an active area of research. Taylor’s death was “horrible,” she said. Her division doubled down on monitoring and detection efforts. Daily small plane flights using remote sensors were instituted. When she retired, there was a continuous, remote monitoring station in Bakersfield, 40 minutes away, tracking the company’s Kern County fields. Dozens of screens recorded underground formations for any sudden shifts. “Nobody likes these surface expressions,” she added. “They disrupt production and they’re bad for human health and the environment. But it’s just going to be an issue as long as we’re going to keep producing, if the world is still thirsty for oil.” Taylor’s family was barred from suing Chevron because of his employment contract but reached a settlement with the company that had done the grading work over the spill containment site. California’s workplace safety agency, Cal-OSHA, cleared Chevron in its investigation of Taylor’s death, but it later fined the company $350, the maximum allowed by law, for not informing workers in writing of the “necessary safeguards” for working near Well 20. Although CalGEM says Chevron has now successfully plugged and abandoned Well 20, the company told the agency it was still producing oil from a nearby surface expression. In the past month, it has pumped an average of nearly 1,400 gallons of oil and brine a day out of a cistern it installed there. The Fight for Regulation In Sacramento, Elena Miller, the oil and gas supervisor, and her deputies had started drafting surface expression regulations along with other reforms. But oil companies pushed back, complaining that she was causing unnecessary permitting delays. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown fired Miller in the fall of 2011 as he sought to revive California’s sluggish economy. New permits were quickly approved. Meanwhile, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, worried about enforcement of groundwater laws in California oil fields, had been conducting a probe of how CalGEM regulated underground injection. Among its top concerns: oil producers and the agency were not properly testing or tracking injection pressures, which if too high could fracture underground formations. A top EPA official told CalGEM that federal and state laws barred pressure that could crack formations. CalGEM officials said they’d revamp their regulations, but the effort took years. Ntuk, the current oil and gas supervisor, said that prior to 2019, state regulations did not explicitly limit steam injection. Kretzmann, an environmental attorney who’s tracked the agency and injection laws for years, said Ntuk’s position was “absurd.” As the spills continued, agency leaders in 2015 realized there was another long-standing issue: no formal training for the geologists, engineers and supervisors involved in permitting and oversight. “The training that is provided is informal and ‘passed down’ from other regulatory staff, sometimes even new staff train newer staff, and provide ‘best practice’ training,” officials wrote in a request to lawmakers, asking for funding to implement a comprehensive training program. “This method of training is not standardized, it is not measurable, and it is extremely challenging to establish accountability for errors in the field.” Since then, CalGEM has received funding for additional engineers and geologists and instituted a training program, although turnover at the agency is high. Risky Business As Taylor’s death showed, surface expressions can be dangerous. Experts say oil constantly spilling to the surface also releases fresh volatile organic compounds that are building blocks for smog and other dangerous pollution linked to heart disease, asthma and other health problems. Two new studies of pregnant women living close to California oil fields show far higher rates of premature births and low-birth-weight babies. “Every time you push oil through an open pathway to the surface, it’s like opening a bottle of soda,” said Donald Blake, a University of California, Irvine, atmospheric chemist who has tracked air pollutants around the world, including in Kern County. Studies of oil spill cleanup workers and nearby residents in six countries all showed they experienced higher rates of illness, ranging from sore throats to respiratory disease and cancer. There are more immediate risks for workers too. According to internal documents, CalGEM inspectors in 2014 mapped a 1¼-mile-long zone in the Midway-Sunset field, then co-owned by Chevron and Aera Energy. Vents in the rocks and ground were releasing more than 500 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide — levels that could cause humans to stagger and collapse within five minutes. Failed wellbores there were emitting up to 7,000 parts per million, more than three times the threshold for immediate death, according to guidelines of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. An internal CalGEM memo stated the area was “permanently secured.” Neither the agency nor Aera responded to requests for comment about the zone’s current status. Chevron’s spokeswoman said in an email that the company “took several steps to secure the property” and mitigate the risk of hydrogen sulfide. Chevron sold the property in March, she said. CalGEM staff in the Bakersfield office conducted many in-depth inspections of spill sites and wrote reports documenting them for superiors. A 2015 PowerPoint presentation they prepared, obtained by The Desert Sun and ProPublica, stated that some of the diatomite formations might have been permanently altered by steam fracking, meaning spills there might never stop. But, the presentation concluded, there was little impetus for oil companies to change their ways: “The economic benefit of increased oil … production from steam injection into shallow diatomite … has been, and will continue to be motivation for operators.” Employees familiar with the spills pushed for stricter regulation. Without it, they said, “surface expressions will remain a potential threat.” “We Didn’t Know What to Do” To the west, Santa Barbara County officials had already grappled with the consequences of surface expressions. Known for its scenic beaches, the area is also home to nearly a dozen oil fields. In 2007, Breitburn Energy began injecting steam into the diatomite-rich Orcutt field, half an hour inland from Pismo Beach. Oil cracked the surface and the company contained it and harvested more than 4.8 million gallons of oil from “cyclic steam energized seeps,” according to CalGEM’s 2008 and 2009 annual reports. Using federal prices for California oil for those years, that would mean they earned an estimated $7.3 million. Breitburn later went bankrupt. Pacific Coast Energy Corp. took over the Orcutt field in 2009 and sharply increased cyclic steaming. The number of new spills spiked. “We had spill after spill after spill after spill,” said Errin Briggs, of the Planning and Development Department in Santa Barbara County, which, like Long Beach, Los Angeles and Kern County, works with the state to oversee oil operators. County officials were stumped, and they reached out to CalGEM. According to Briggs, engineers at the oil agency said that the steam being injected into the diatomite was causing it to swell like a balloon, placing pressure on the formation above, which sprang myriad leaks. In 2011, CalGEM ordered Pacific Coast Energy to lower the amount of steam it was injecting, Briggs said. The number of new spills was halved over the next few years, he said. Neither a company executive nor CalGEM responded to requests for comment on those measures. To contain the spills, Pacific Coast Energy installed wide, short cisterns, or “cans,” stuck into the earth like straws, from which frothy water and oil can be vacuumed. Unlike many Kern County containment devices, these are sealed with large, garbage can-style tops with handles that can be hoisted open by pump trucks. County officials signed off on the construction after the fact. “Nobody in Santa Barbara had ever seen anything like this before,” Briggs said. “We didn’t know what to do.” There are currently 58 ongoing contained spills in the Orcutt field, Briggs said. CalGEM did not respond to requests for information on the Orcutt spills for months, then said there are even more — 65 “low energy surface expressions.” Environmentalists were stunned that companies were allowed to profit off the contained spills. “Wow. Wow! Wow! And we didn’t even know it. That’s just crazy,” said Katie Davis, chair of the Sierra Club Los Padres Chapter covering Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. “If they’re tapping them for oil, and they’re not even legitimate wells, it’s really going around the law.” A CalGEM spokesman said in an email that under the new regulations, “for low-energy expressions, containment … is permissible.” Because the spills were considered emergencies, there was no requirement to do environmental reviews before installing the cisterns, Briggs said. That means large coast live oak, rare flowering bushes and other plants could be ripped out when necessary. Remains of Chumash tribal life could also be moved. The company did have to pay to plant restoration trees and vegetation elsewhere on the oil field. State wildlife officials have long been concerned about the impact of surface expressions on an array of endangered animals and plants. California Fish and Wildlife records obtained through a public records request show dozens of dead and decaying birds and small mammals around spill sites. In places like Sandy Creek, the nets oil companies place over spills to protect wildlife often get tangled or torn, said Julie Vance, Fish and Wildlife’s District 4 director in Fresno, who oversaw response to inland spills for years. Many burrow-dwelling creatures are “entombed” by fast-rising crude from underground, making it impossible to ever document their loss, she said. For years, Fish and Wildlife deferred to CalGEM, but the wildlife agency has increasingly played a role in spill response since 2014, after policymakers expanded its mandate to include inland as well as marine spills, and as the oil agency came under growing scrutiny. Loopholes: “Low Energy” Spills Permitted, Containment Allowed In the fall of 2015, the California Department of Conservation announced a “renewal” plan to overhaul the state’s oil agency. Among its priorities: writing new rules for cyclic steaming. In the four years since Taylor’s death, 63 surface expressions had broken out in the Kern County oil fields, according to state records. The department pledged to finalize the regulations in a little more than a year. But the deadline came and went as special interests on various sides lobbied to influence the regulations. Environmentalists won language banning surface expressions. Several oil companies and trade groups pushed back, asking for a narrow definition of what constituted a spill. In response, CalGEM exempted from the ban what it called “low energy seeps,” defined, in part, as slower spills that are not hot and are permanently contained. What qualifies as such a seep is left up to the oil and gas supervisor. The carveout appears to preserve a lucrative form of spill. A recent thesis by a Stanford University master’s student identified 19 such “low energy” sites in the Midway-Sunset field, where spills were contained with cisterns. An analysis of production records by The Desert Sun and ProPublica found that over the past 20 years, 14 of those sites have spilled a combined 20 million gallons of oil, worth more than $19 million. “I sure would call that a loophole in the law,” said Rosanna Esparza, a retired gerontologist who did health assessments of residents near Kern County oil operations and who is fighting to cease oil production statewide. The Western States Petroleum Association, the industry trade group representing major companies like Chevron, pressed to nix the spill prohibition altogether and just preserve the longtime practice of containment. “There is an inherent conflict created by prohibiting surface expressions yet allowing for management methods,” WSPA wrote in a letter to CalGEM. “The strict prohibition should be dropped in favor of language that provides for prudent management when events occur.” In response, CalGEM staff defended the proposed ban on surface expressions “because they are inherently unsafe.” But they also provided an opening for containment. “Even when a violation has been committed,” the agency replied, “there are still protocols to safely handle that violation.” The regulations took effect in April 2019. Within months, more than a dozen surface expressions occurred, including Chevron’s latest Cymric spills. In short order, the Newsom administration announced the moratorium on new steam fracking permits and moved to bolster CalGEM. The governor’s January budget proposed 128 new positions for the agency, in part to better oversee surface expressions. Under state law, which requires potential polluters to fund oversight, the oil industry would have to pay $24 million over three years for the positions. The Tug of War Continues The permitting pause sent shocks through the oil industry, and Kern County responded with a full-throated roar. Hundreds packed the county supervisors’ chambers in Bakersfield in January for a meeting that lasted nearly seven hours. Oil workers and executives testified about the jobs that supported their families, and they lambasted “environmental extremists” and state officials. Union officials, real estate agents, Chamber of Commerce members, the county sheriff, the district attorney and even the county school superintendent spoke about how vital oil revenues are to the area. County supervisors led the charge. “Rather than the governor giving us credit for our monumental achievements … he insists on punishing us by attempting to deny our right to use the God-given natural resources in our county to support our families,” said Supervisor Zack Scrivner, whose sprawling district includes Taft and several oil fields. Scrivner showed photos of oil spills in Brazilian rainforests and a river in Colombia. This is a river full of oil, and I would offer that this is worse than a surface expression that the governor came down here to visit recently,” he said. “Why would this administration … send our jobs and our treasure to these countries with terrible human rights records, and with little to no environmental controls?” No photos of the Sandy Creek spills or the Cymric ravine flooded with oil were shown. Anthony Williams, Newsom’s legislative affairs secretary at the time, sought to reassure the crowd, saying he had grown up in Bakersfield. “I talk to the governor every single day,” he said, “and so when my voice rings in his ear, your voice rings in his ear.” Elsewhere, in the agricultural communities around Bakersfield, farmers and environmental justice groups worried. Some, who have long lived near oil operations in the Central Valley, disagreed with the industry and its supporters. The spills not only threatened the surface, they argued, but the water table — and the people and crops that rely on it. Tom Frantz, a fourth-generation farmer and activist from Shafter, began monitoring the Cymric surface expressions himself a year ago, sending a drone into the air for timely updates. He watched oil spill into the ravine there, month after month, before CalGEM issued the fine against Chevron. Since that one was stopped, he’s been tracking the company’s even bigger spills that are still running. Last November, after Chevron mopped up the Cymric 1Y flow, another cluster of surface expressions sprouted nearby. Dubbed 36W, it has since gushed more than 2.1 million gallons of oil and wastewater, according to Chevron reports filed to the state, and is being piped into large concrete culverts. Chevron’s spokeswoman said in an email that it’s part of an older spill, even though state photos and reports show them as separate events. Since late March, an analysis by The Desert Sun and ProPublica found, the 36W cluster has garnered the company an estimated $245,000. “They’re a huge source of air pollution, a huge potential source of water pollution,” Frantz said of the spills. “When I see Chevron directly violating the law for months on end, it bothers me greatly that the state is unable to effectively regulate this industry.” Chevron denies its surface expressions have had any effect on groundwater. By March, the coronavirus pandemic hit. The global oil market collapsed and California producers idled rigs, costing thousands of oil workers their livelihoods. Citing economic hardship, the industry asked the Newsom administration to scale back CalGEM’s expansion. In the end, Newsom and lawmakers approved 25 new positions, a fifth of the agency’s original request. “Rest assured that CalGEM continues to ensure full regulatory oversight,” Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot told reporters this year. State and regional water officials are also stepping in, increasingly trying to stanch surface expressions. Clayton Rodgers, assistant executive officer for Central California’s water board, said his agency had for years let CalGEM take the lead. “Based on the resources we had and the belief that (CalGEM) was doing the work to address the concerns, we did not get involved,” he said. Last year, he and his deputy toured Chevron’s spill in the Cymric field. But he said he was unaware of the massive GS-5 spill located 1,000 feet away until a Desert Sun reporter asked him about it. One of his inspectors visited the site the next day and opened an investigation into potential violations of water laws. The regional water board is also monitoring Sandy Creek, the site of the streambed disaster. Berry Petroleum gained ownership of Aera’s stretch in 2017, and water board inspectors have cited the company for violating water contamination laws. Berry first told the inspectors the spills were natural seeps, but it has since voluntarily removed major rusted pipes and other debris, and has plugged and abandoned 10 nearby wells. Berry injects no steam there, but two companies nearby still do, and the spills continue to flow. Berry has a proposal: It wants to build a channel to carry seasonal rains over the oil pools — just like Aera did 20 years ago. The efforts “are driven by our commitment to operate responsibly and protect our natural resources,” said Todd Crabtree, Berry’s manager of investor relations and administration. “Berry strives to abide by all existing California regulations regarding oil and gas production,” including the new regulations. Overall, the rate of new inland spills has slowed, possibly due to lower production, said Gordon, the Brown University expert. But if steam fracking picks up, so could the surface expressions, she said. Cathy Reheis-Boyd, president of WSPA, said she and other oil executives speak regularly with Newsom and CalGEM. She said the industry supports Newsom’s “pragmatic” approach to surface expressions, which includes the ongoing study of steam fracking. “Let’s be clear,” she said. “The best way to get oil to market is not through surface expressions.” The governor’s office declined to comment. Asked if it was considering changes to the regulations, CalGEM said “it is premature to say what new rules, if any, will result from current surface expressions or the scientific review.” The spills have been completely halted elsewhere. After reports about “flow to surface” spills from heavy tar sands in Alberta, Canada, regulators there determined that excessive steaming volumes in the Primrose field — combined with open conduits from below ground, such as wellbores, natural faults and induced fractures — were to blame. In 2016, the Canadian officials banned steam fracking within 1,000 meters —- or about 3,300 feet — of where the spills had occurred. That’s five times the maximum radius California spells out in its regulations, though CalGEM can impose larger ones if a surface expression continues. Alberta also instituted strict protocols for nearby steaming. There hasn’t been a surface expression there since. About the Data Data for surface expression oil volume estimates was provided by Chevron, the ​​​​​California Geologic Energy Management Division, or CalGEM, and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. Revenue calculations used monthly California oil barrel price averages from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Since those averages are currently only recorded through June 2020, revenue calculations for 2020 averaged oil barrel prices for the first six months of the year. Given that oil prices steeply declined for a period in March and then slowly increased in the following months, the resulting revenue estimates are likely undercounts. Low-energy seep revenue estimates used monthly well production data from CalGEM’s Well Search database, weekly summary files and CalGEM annual reports.

Progressive activist and actor George Takei on Thursday informally offered his support for a new organization being started by The Lincoln Project, the growing group of never-Trump Republicans who have unleashed devastating ads attacking President Donald Trump. The group is unveiling a "grassroots Facebook Army" called The Lincoln Project Digital Coalition. Citing Lincoln Project spokesperson Keith Edwards, CNBC reports the group's plan for the new get out the vote project "is to have thousands of Lincoln Project Facebook members reach out to Republican voters who have previously backed Trump to try to convince them to vote for Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. They have over 50,000 members on Facebook, he added." Takei, who is extremely well-known on social media and has 9,982,901 Facebook likes and 9,322,789 Facebook followers, responded to a tweet from political finance reporter Brian Schwartz: The Lincoln Project has been a steadfastly partisan enterprise whose attack ads frequently go viral. Takei is the first Democrat to offer bipartisan assistance, however informal it may be. TLPDC will target GOP voters in the battleground states of Arizona, Texas, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Senator Kamala Harris is the first Indian American and first Black woman to be nominated for vice president on a major party ticket, but, as many historians have noted, Harris is not the first Black woman to run for vice president. That distinction belongs to the journalist and political activist Charlotta Bass, who was the editor of The California Eagle for nearly 30 years, one of the country’s oldest Black newspapers, which covered women’s suffrage, police brutality, the Klu Klux Klan, and discriminatory hiring and housing practices. Bass joined the Progressive Party ticket in 1952 on an antiracist platform that called for fair housing and equal access to healthcare. Bass’s exclusion from the public narrative signals a tendency to “sideline Black radical politics,” says author and historian Keisha Blain. AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, breaking with convention. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Tonight, Joe Biden will accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, after Kamala Harris became the first Indian American and first Black woman to be nominated for vice president on a major party ticket. In her historic address, Harris paid homage to the women who came before her. SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: These women inspired us to pick up the torch and fight on — women like Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash, Constance Baker Motley and the great Shirley Chisholm. We’re not often taught their stories, but, as Americans, we all stand on their shoulders. AMY GOODMAN: As many historians have noted, Senator Kamala Harris is not the first Black woman to run for vice president. That distinction belongs to the journalist and political activist Charlotta Bass, who was the editor of The California Eagle for nearly 30 years, one of the country’s oldest Black newspapers, which covered women’s suffrage, police brutality, the Klu Klux Klan, and discriminatory hiring and housing practices. More than a decade before the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, Charlotta Bass joined the Progressive Party ticket in 1952 on an antiracist platform that called for fair housing and equal access to healthcare. Bass ran alongside presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan in a long-shot bid, and they lost to Dwight Eisenhower. But she campaigned with the slogan, “Win or lose, we win by raising the issues.” For more on Charlotta Bass and the Black women who cleared a path for Harris to be VP pick, as Harris pointed out, we’re joined by Keisha Blain, associate professor of history at University of Pittsburgh and author of Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom, also president of the African American Intellectual History Society. Professor Blain joined a panel Wednesday at the DNC on “Progress and the Path Forward” that looked at the unsung heroes of suffrage and Black women’s political power. Her forthcoming book, Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Vision of America. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor. It’s great to have you with us. Can you talk about the significance of Kamala Harris being nominated and accepting the nomination for vice president of the Democratic Party, and the people on whose shoulders she stands? KEISHA BLAIN: Well, first, thank you so much for having me. I think it’s important to emphasize the fact that Kamala Harris is certainly standing on the shoulders of all the women she mentioned last night, but also standing on the shoulders of Charlotta Bass, as you pointed out. And it’s somewhat unfortunate that she didn’t mention Bass, because, as you pointed out, Bass was in fact the first Black woman to run for vice president. And this took place in 1952 in the state of California on the Progressive Party ticket. In so many ways, her exclusion last night from Harris’s speech, I think, signals the way we often do sideline Black radical politics, and really, just to echo something that Derecka mentioned earlier, how leftists in the movement tend to be sidelined. And I’m not suggesting that the exclusion of Bass was intentional, but I do think it is unfortunate, and would love to hear more people acknowledging the history and the fundamental work that Bass did long before Kamala Harris. AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you tell us that history? KEISHA BLAIN: Well, one of the things that we know about Charlotta Bass is that she truly engaged in what can best be described as pragmatic activism. And I say that because this is someone who shifted, who moved between organizations. This is someone who was literally — at the same time that she was a leader in the NAACP, she was a leader in the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Anyone who studies history understands just the complexity of being able to function in two organizations that were radically different, even as they were equally committed to Black progress. And then, on top of that, Bass moved from — supported the Republican Party, then supporting the Democratic Party, and then abandoning both of them when she came to the conclusion that they were simply not doing enough — not doing enough for Black people, not doing enough for women, not doing enough for marginalized groups. And she put up her hands, and she tried a new party, the Progressive Party. And I think just really thinking about the ways that Charlotta Bass moved in between organizations, shifted parties throughout her lifetime, speaks to her unwavering commitment to advancing Black politics. She never allowed herself to be tied in to one particular group or even one particular perspective. She truly engaged in pragmatic activism, believing that she would do anything, anything possible, to improve the conditions of Black people. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Keisha Blain, could you also explain some of the issues with which she was most preoccupied, from police brutality to media stereotyping of African Americans? KEISHA BLAIN: Absolutely. She was deeply — excuse me — deeply committed to challenging racism and discrimination and, as you mentioned, even the media. One of the things that she did in 1915, so this is very early in her career in California, was to speak out against the film Birth of a Nation. And she tried to get people — well, certainly she tried to pull the film from being shown publicly. She was not successful in doing that. But what she did do was point out the problems with the film. She was able to rally the community. She openly denounced the film. And I think her efforts really captured the way that she was concerned with not only, you know, certainly, various aspects of Black politics, but she was concerned with how Black people were being represented on screen. And as a journalist, she understood the power of words, she understood the power of imagery. And I think that’s just one example of how she was truly, I think, a fierce advocate for Black people. And she was really bold. She confronted the KKK. She addressed police violence and brutality. And her boldness got her in trouble. And it’s not surprising that she was surveilled by the FBI, because she was someone who simply did not sit on the sidelines. She confronted every challenge that she saw, and she tried to come up with solutions to fix the problems. NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Professor Blain, why was she branded a communist? KEISHA BLAIN: Well, she was branded a communist for the same reason that people like W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and even Marcus Garvey, earlier, had been branded as a problem for the United States. She is someone who certainly embraced leftist politics and ideas, and ultimately she posed a challenge. The truth of the matter is, she didn’t even need to embrace any kind of radical platform to be branded a communist at the time, because, in the end, to use the term “communist” within that context was simply to try to smear someone, to be able to say, “Listen, this person is not American.” And what we know from history is that the people who were branded communists, whether they embraced communist views or not, were ultimately individuals who stood up, who stood up in the face of injustice, who confronted racism and discrimination. And every time they were vocal, every time they decided they were simply not going to accept Black people being mistreated in this country, all of a sudden they were, quote-unquote, a “communist.” AMY GOODMAN: In these last few seconds that we have, your next book is on Fannie Lou Hamer. Can you talk about her level of activism, and the struggle you see now in the Democratic Party of the progressives and the establishment, even as history is being made with Kamala Harris being the first woman of color to be nominated as a vice-presidential candidate? KEISHA BLAIN: Yeah, it was truly wonderful to hear Harris evoke Fannie Lou Hamer. I’ve been deeply invested, certainly, in Hamer’s ideas, and finishing a book on this topic. And one of the things that I think is important to emphasize is that Hamer ran for office. She ran for office three times. I think that’s important, because we don’t talk about it. Generally, we don’t talk about it. And the reason we don’t talk about it is because she was unsuccessful. But I’m of the mindset that even those stories we have to know. And those stories are powerful, because Fannie Lou Hamer was unsuccessful, Charlotta Bass was unsuccessful, but it doesn’t mean that their stories don’t matter. And it certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about their efforts, because what is key here, it’s not really about winning or losing. AMY GOODMAN: Three seconds. KEISHA BLAIN: It’s about how these women ultimately rose to the occasion. AMY GOODMAN: Professor Keisha Blain, we thank you so much for joining us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Stay safe. The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

As presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s search for a running mate drags on, press coverage hasn’t failed to disappoint. Useful coverage would lay out each potential pick’s background and qualifications. While you certainly can find that if you look hard enough, many journalists seem quite content to avoid content. The Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake (7/24/20) offered a nice helping of unedifying rankings in his “12 Most Logical Picks for Joe Biden’s Vice President, Ranked.” At number one, Blake put Kamala Harris: Another list, another list with Harris at No. 1. While others have been jockeying to climb up, nobody makes more sense than the senator from California right now, which has been the case for a while. About the best argument against her is that her 2020 presidential campaign wasn’t exactly a resounding success. But for a campaign showing a wide lead, she’s clearly the safest pick. And safe might be what the doctor orders. Why does “nobody make more sense” than Harris? Why is she the “safest pick”? Perhaps Blake assumes you remember his three-line explanation from June, when he similarly offered rankings—or perhaps he doesn’t care. (For the record, she’s been the “favorite from the start” because of her “high-ranking résumé,” her “experience on the national stage” and the fact that “she has shown she is a capable messenger.”) Over at CNN (7/30/20), Chris Cillizza has really been milking the drawn-out process, putting out new rankings so often (he’s currently at 16) you’d think he was running a gambling ring. Much of the problem is that since the top contenders have already been fairly well-established for the last few weeks, most outlets don’t have much new ground to break. So what’s left? Mainly, politicians and operatives on all sides trying to create positive coverage of their team and negative coverage of their opponents—and journalists that seem happy to go along. California representative and new short-list candidate Karen Bass took multiple trips to Cuba 40 years ago, and in 2016 called Fidel Castro’s death “a great loss to the people of Cuba.” Her opponents gleefully pushed out this “Cuba baggage” (AP, 8/6/20) to drum up a story about how this makes her dead in the water (because Florida!), and journalists happily complied. No matter that Cuban Americans make up only 6.5% of the population of Florida, and Cuba is for vanishingly few of them their primary motivating issue when voting. As the response to Bernie Sanders’ positive comments about Cuba’s literacy program demonstrated (FAIR.org, 3/6/20), US political orthodoxy does not permit even hints at acknowledgment that longtime Official Enemies like Cuba might not be evil. Bass’s supposed Communist sympathies were the subject of widespread coverage—and not only in outlets like Fox News—under headlines like “I’m Not a Communist” (NBCNews.com, 8/3/20) and “Karen Bass Eulogized Communist Party USA Leader” (Politico, 8/4/20); the Atlantic (7/31/20) saw fit to devote nearly 3,000 words to an investigation of Bass’s relationship with Cuba. Sometimes it happens even as journalists appear to be at least somewhat aware of what’s going on. In a Washington Post piece headlined, “Biden’s Delay in Choosing a Running Mate Intensifies Jockeying Between Potential Picks,” Annie Linskey (8/2/20) describes how “Biden allies” worry that the process is “pitting women, especially Black women, against one another.” The piece refers to “nastiness,” “backbiting” and “currents…many of them sexist, that have been swirling for weeks,” seeming to attribute these largely to “allies of the women”—but it’s not always entirely clear who is being blamed. It’s certainly not the media, though, which appears merely as the vehicle for the nastiness. (Such as: “One donor implied to CNBC that Harris has too much ‘ambition.’ And former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a longtime Biden friend, told CNN that Harris can ‘rub people the wrong way.’”) At the same time, Linskey offered her own piece as a vehicle for some sexism. Quoting Rendell on the “buzz” around Susan Rice, Linskey ate up without comment a tired trope used repeatedly in the past on women: Her demeanor on television fueled the speculation, he said. “She was smiling on TV, something that she doesn’t do all that readily,” Rendell said. “She was actually somewhat charming on TV, something that she has not seemed to care about in the past.” The “Year of the Woman” has come and gone, and come and gone again (Extra!, 9/92, 4/13), and yet we keep talking—in 2020—about how female politicians need to smile more (FAIR.org, 6/14/99; Intercept, 9/26/16). Biden may be breaking the mold by only considering female running mates, but the media sure aren’t straying from tradition.

It looks like Biden will beat Trump badly and the Republicans will suffer disastrous losses across the country in November. Although the polls have just been inching toward the Democrats, suddenly articles about what Trump might do if he loses are multiplying, here, here, and here. Trump might declare the elections fake, go on FOX News to say he had really won, call out the National Guard, barricade himself in the Oval Office, order the Secret Service to shoot Biden on sight. But what he will do is the wrong question. What matters is what his supporters will do when they lose. Three groups of supporters are crucial to observe. The media will focus at first on Republican politicians. Will Senate losers in Montana, Arizona, Colorado, and other states jump on the fake news bandwagon? Would Mitch McConnell go quietly if Amy McGrath beats him in a very close race? Maybe Susan Collins will accept defeat in Maine, but what about QAnon promoter Jo Rae Perkins in Oregon? How about Lauren Boebert, QAnon enthusiast and House candidate in Colorado, and the other 7 Republican congressional candidates on the ballot who have expressed support for QAnon? The whole Republican Senate delegation has already cast doubt on the results by allowing their leader to proclaim unchallenged that the election will be fraudulent. On June 22, Trump said the 2020 election “will be the most RIGGED Election in our nations history”. In 2018, the National Republican Senatorial Committee followed up a Trump tweet about “electoral corruption” in the Arizona Senate race by charging that the election they lost there was rigged. Stripped of power, perhaps for years, it’s not hard to imagine Senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham, among others, casting doubt on the results. Thus far the bravest Republicans in Washington, aside from Mitt Romney, are Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who called Trump’s pardon of Roger Stone a “mistake”, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who said she won’t campaign against Joe Biden. The majority of Senate Republicans cowers in silence. Will Trump’s toadies now running our intelligence services and justice system speak up and what will they say? Across the country, Republican state legislators who lose their gerrymandered majorities could join the chorus. A second set of Trump supporters use their control of media to send waves of influence into every corner of America. Will FOX News report the official results or attack them? How about the other people to whom Republicans listen, even more partisan and less connected to reality, like Limbaugh, Breitbart, InfoWars, Drudge? Will powerful evangelical pastors Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress proclaim that their God-given leader was cheated? The third group is the most important and hardest to gauge – the MAGA-hat-wearing, Confederate-flag-waving white supremacists and conspiracy partisans who make up his legendary “base”. Will they see the end times coming as their messiah is defeated? Will the dozens of armed militia groups adopt 2nd Amendment remedies to the impending takeover of America by radical socialist pedophiles? What will Ammon Bundy, the boogaloo boys, the Oath Keepers, and the more than 500 other anti-government groups loosely allied in the so-called “patriot movement” identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center do? Will the NRA call out its members to fight the commies? Trump could scream himself hoarse with no effect unless his supporters sing along. As full election results trickle in the days after November 3 and as the implications sink in with the approach of Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021, a coalition of supporters in Washington, state governments, media, and on the ground might throw our country into an existential, not merely Constitutional crisis. It’s certain that Trump will do nothing brave himself, will commit himself to no action that he can’t back out of. But the radicals who drive their cars into Black Lives Matter protesters, who bring their assault rifles to the pizza palace, and who believe anything “Q” says are much more volatile, unhinged, and violent. Whatever answers such questions might elicit now will change over the next few months, as Trump stokes more fear among his supporters, pushes them further away from the American center, and forces his Republican allies to come along. Watch Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio), Matt Gaetz (Florida) and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (California), Gov. Ron DeSantis (Florida), and Mark Meadows, White House Chief of Staff. Watch wily Mitch McConnell, who shares with Trump a powerful belief in the importance of his own survival. And watch out for America. Steve Hochstadt is a writer and an emeritus professor of history at Illinois College. This article was originally published at History News Network

“The current presidential term ends at noon on January 20. Full stop,” Joshua Geltzer, a Georgetown Law professor, told me. If Biden wins, that’s the precise moment when his term would start. It’s democracy’s most dangerous instant: the interval when power changes hands, testing whether the nation stays moored to self-governance. That tradition’s endurance depends on Trump’s cooperation—or the resiliency of the country’s democratic institutions should he withhold it. There’s no assurance that Trump will accept the validity of the election results. He’s already described mail-in voting as a plot to steal the election. And he’s trolled critics with the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that, by popular demand, he might stay in office beyond the Constitution’s eight-year limit. .....news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT), both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 16, 2019 Trump could win, of course. But if Biden sweeps enough battleground states in convincing fashion, any claim that Trump was robbed of victory would be ludicrous on its face. At noon on January 20 he’d no longer be president, and if he boycotted the rituals surrounding the presidential handoff and holed up inside the White House, he’d be squatting. “He can sit in the Oval Office and put his hands together and say, ‘I’m not going to leave,’ but … the transfer of power will occur with him or without him,” Jonathan Wackrow, a former Secret Service agent who was a member of the presidential protection detail and was at work the day Barack Obama took over from George W. Bush, told me. In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Trump said that he would accept defeat, that if he lost, he’d leave. “Certainly, if I don’t win, I don’t win,” he said, adding that he would “go on, do other things.” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and Trump confidant, told me that he does not believe Trump would defy the electoral verdict: “I’m not buying into that nutty stuff. I’m not worried about that.” Read: Why Americans might not trust the election results Trump’s opponent isn’t so sure. Speaking with Trevor Noah on Wednesday, Biden predicted that the military might be called on to evict Trump if it came to that—and that it would willingly comply. “I am absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch,” Biden said. Making the moment more harrowing might be an election that is both close and contested—a more plausible scenario than a Trump wipeout. In Michigan, the outcome could hinge on mail-in balloting, which Trump has sought to discredit. He’s already previewed his objections to postelection recounts that don’t go in Republicans’ favor. The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 12, 2018 If Biden were to notch a narrow victory, Trump could look to contest the results and claim he’d actually won. He could put the military and other tools of presidential power in an awkward spot, pressuring them to pick sides and untangle competing claims about who won. A supine Justice Department led by Attorney General William Barr might bolster Trump’s claims by putting out statements that the vote was tainted.

(CNN) Joe Biden said Wednesday night that he believes if President Donald Trump loses the election and refuses to leave the White House, many of the former generals who used to work for him "will escort him from the White House with great dispatch." The comments, which Biden made in an interview with Trevor Noah on "The Daily Show," are not the first time that the former vice president -- and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee -- has suggested that he believes the incumbent may well seek to fiddle with the election results. "Mark my words I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can't be held," Biden said in April. But the real danger here is not that Trump changes the date of the general election, which is virtually impossible, or that he seeks to claims squatter's rights in the White House. The thing that could threaten Biden's potential presidency -- and the ability of the country to move on from what will be one of the nastiest elections in modern history -- is if Trump simply refuses to admit he lost, never conceding that Biden is the fair-and-square president.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Alan Blotcky, Ph.D. spoke to Raw Story Tuesday to walk through what he thinks voters will see from President Donald Trump in the upcoming week ahead of the election. While Dr. Blotcky isn't part of the "Duty To Warn" movement, he does support it and he explained how mental health experts have been able to diagnose the president without ever having him sit in their offices. "The most important information that a mental health professional can get is observable behavior," he explained. "It's not just his observable behavior we have access to. We have thousands of examples of his tweets, of his statements, of his interviews, his audios, his videos. So, we have many years of his accumulated information directly from him both verbally and behaviorally. Yes, we don't get to meet with him in our office in a one-on-one session. And that's important because that would give us even more information into his thinking and feeling. But having access to vast amounts of verbal statements and behaviors is crucial." Dr. Blotcky explained that Trump is "so obviously impaired and so obviously disordered" that it would even be difficult to find a mental health professional who wouldn't agree with that assessment after four years in office. For anyone who thinks Trump is merely playing the role of an angry politician, he explained that throughout Trump's life, he's been consistent in his narcissism. "If you look at the whole of his life it's very consistent," he said. "It's outlandish to think this is just an act. This is him." As Trump goes into the final week of his campaign, Dr. Blotcky anticipates seeing more desperation from Trump. He thinks that Trump will bring more "wild accusations, conspiracy theories and threats." It has become clear that the president is reverting to what worked for him in 2016, "his old bag of tricks," as Dr. Blotcky described it. The only difference is that this time around, it not only isn't working to move the needle, but his multi-rally strategy is also serving as superspreader events. "I think he's going to throw out any outlandish things he can think of, hoping that something will stick," said the psychologist. In a normal campaign, the candidate would be pivoting to something that actually works to expand their base of support. Trump is sticking with his existing supporters, even if that means he won't have enough of them next Tuesday. "That's why he always doubles down, triples-down, quadruples-down," said. Dr. Blotcky. "He can't [change] because to change would be a sign of weakness or failure. And he always thinks he's right. He thinks he's the smartest person on the planet. He thinks he knows more than the experts. He thinks he knows more than the scientists. And so, what he thinks automatically becomes the prevailing strategy on his part and he can't pivot. He's incapable of pivoting. I think it comes from his psychiatric disorder. I think he is so grandiose and so self-absorbed that he can't see outside himself. And I don't even think he understands that he needs to pivot because I think he thinks he's right. And if he's right, there's nothing to talk about." For the every-day self-aware person who is capable of being insightful and psychologically minded, that level of delusion isn't an option. "I think until recently he has thought of himself as unstoppable," said Dr. Blotcky. "And I think he still thinks he's unstoppable. I think he thinks he's going to pull it out in the end just like he did in 2016 and if he can get it to the courts his new Supreme Court Justice will help tip the scales." If Trump loses, Dr. Blotcky thinks he will play the victim card, allege the election was rigged, there is a conspiracy against him and that mail-in votes shouldn't even be counted. "I think he's going to turn to his attorney general to try and get him to begin some actions," he continued. "I think he's going to try and take it to the courts and I think he's going to try to give the message to his supporters all around the country that he is the victim, that he is aggrieved, and that they need to support him in his victimhood." For Trump's supporters, even those who held their noses and voted for him four years ago, Trump has been able to tap in them a kind of grievance that they have been ignored by politicians. "They believe in him because they feel aggrieved," said Dr. Blotcky. "They feel like the political system has left them behind. They feel like victims. So, I think they identify with him and I think they like chaos. They like the rebelliousness of this president. They want to turn the political system upside down because they feel like the system has hurt them. So, he is kind of their supreme leader as far as wreaking havoc in the political system. When he says ridiculous things, they cheer him on because he's expressing their own pent-up frustrations and feelings our system has left them behind and have hurt them." One of Trump's greatest accomplishments has been in fearmongering and painting former Vice President Joe Biden as a socialist to people who don't know what that even means has been a successful tactic. It's one that the GOP has employed for years, but such an accusation isn't as effective as people understand American socialist programs like Medicare, the interstate system and public schools. "What he's been successful at is selling the idea that Joe Biden and the Democrats are socialists and they're going to change your neighborhood and that your way of life is going to be vastly different," said Dr. Blocky. "I think there's a group of Republicans that buy that. I know some people that buy that." Trump's claim that somehow neighborhoods are going to become chaos-driven riot-zones is a "fabrication," he said, but "fearmongering works." It is possible to bring those people back from that, but Dr. Blotcky says it will come with Biden including them as part of his new administration. "If you cut off the head, which is Trump, I think there is going to be residual stuff, but I think if Joe Biden keeps talking about being the president for all Americans, and not just Democrats, that's the strategy. That's the attitude you have to have — that our new president has to be the president for all of us, and they have to listen to him," Dr. Blotcky went on. "A lot of his supporters, I see them in the crowds, are people who really have been left behind by this economy and they feel like they are not listened to or valued. And I think one of the major functions of the president is to listen to everybody and have everybody feel like we're a part of what we're trying to do in this democracy." In the immediate aftermath, Dr. Blotcky agrees that the Trump supporters will still take to the streets and that there will be violence, but that Biden will have the capacity to calm the nation much more so than Trump. "If [Trump] gets agitated and riled up, you're going to see a lot of his supporters get agitated and riled up," he explained. In an interview Monday, Cindy, a self-described Republican evangelical explained that her children were kind and thoughtful in how they spoke to her about the election and helped her walk through options because she didn't like Trump, but still had conservative issues she was dedicated to. Dr. Blotcky agreed that the soft and kind way of speaking to Trump supporters is the best way to help move them. For some, he acknowledged that it's never going to work, but for those who are looking for other options in the final week of the election, it's the best way to persuade. No one moves voters by screaming "you're wrong!" at them. As the U.S. goes into the holiday season, he explained that's the best way to get through with your families. Yelling and screaming over politics never persuades anyone. Dr. Blotcky closed by reinforcing that what Trump has done to diminish the dangers of the coronavirus has been reckless and criminal. "Donald Trump has made the decision that losing American lives is fine. Our very lives have become unimportant, ignorable, even forgettable to him," he wrote for AL.com in May.

As the vote counting in the United States' 2020 presidential race continued in Pennsylvania, Georgia and other key battleground states this week, the news was looking better and better for former Vice President Joe Biden. And according to the Washington Post, the U.S. Secret Service planned to ramp up its protection of Biden as a victory appeared likely. The Washington Post's Carol D. Leonnig reports, "The Secret Service is sending reinforcements to Wilmington, Delaware starting Friday (November 6) to help protect former Vice President Joe Biden as his campaign prepares for the possibility he may soon claim victory in his bid for the White House, according to two people familiar with the plans. The Secret Service summoned a squad of agents to add to the protective bubble around Biden after his campaign told the agency that the Democratic nominee would continue utilizing a Wilmington convention center at least another day and could make a major speech as early as Friday." Both Secret Service spokeswoman Catherine Milhoan and a Biden campaign aide declined to be interviewed for Leonnig's article. The Post reporter notes that the Secret Service "typically ramps up protection for a president-elect immediately after that person has been declared the winner by assigning a new raft of agents to the incoming president." "Historically, that increase in protection has happened late into Election Night after one candidate has conceded and the other has given a victory speech," Leonnig explains. "But this year's race has been marked by a drawn-out vote count and a flurry of unsubstantiated attacks by President Trump on the integrity of the election." As of Friday morning, November 6 at 10:30 a.m., Biden was ahead in the vote count in Pennsylvania — which has 20 electoral votes and would easily give him the 270 he needs to be elected president. Biden had also moved ahead in Georgia's vote count and was maintaining his leads in Arizona and Nevada. "If Biden is considered the clear winner and Trump does not concede," Leonnig notes, "the Secret Service could wait under agency protocol until the Electoral College meets in mid-December to certify the vote results before officially treating Biden as the president-elect. But Secret Service would probably feel duty-bound to ramp up protection before then, a former agent said."

Imagine for a moment that Hillary Clinton had won the presidential election in 2016. Imagine, in other words, that the "blue wall" of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had held firm four years ago. Claiming election fraud, Donald Trump would have insisted on a recount and Election Day would then, too, have stretched into election week and election month. Eventually, Trump would have given up, though not without insisting that the "deep state" had stolen his victory. Once in office, Clinton would have set to work building on the Obama legacy. The United States would have remained in the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear agreement would still be in force, and perhaps a more robust health-care plan might even be in place. Competent civil servants would have taken charge of federal agencies, a tax cut for the wealthy wouldn't have gone into effect, and the Democrats would have been well positioned in 2020 to reelect the first woman president and build a stronger congressional majority. America wouldn't have gone down the rabbit hole of Trumpism. Civic discourse wouldn't have been coarsened. The country wouldn't now be in such complete and utter... Hey, wake up! If Hillary had somehow managed to eke out a victory in 2016, she would soon enough have faced a Republican Party as hostile to compromise as the one that hamstrung Barack Obama. Opposition from Congress and Republican-controlled states, combined with her own centrist instincts, would have kept the country mired in a failing status quo: an increasingly unequal economy, crumbling infrastructure, a growing carbon footprint, a morbidly obese Pentagon, and other signs of a declining superpower that we've come to know so well. Now, imagine what would have happened when the pandemic struck in 2020. Clinton would have responded more competently than The Donald because virtually anyone over the age of 12 would have been better suited to handle the emergency than he was. Indeed, if the United States had managed Covid-19 with anything faintly approaching the competency of, say, Germany under Angela Merkel, the country would have had, by my calculations, 2.6 million infections and about 45,000 deaths on the eve of the 2020 elections. That obviously would be better than the 10 million infections and more than 245,000 deaths the United States is currently experiencing. Keep in mind, however, that Americans wouldn't have known just how bad the situation could have been. Quite the opposite: having set up a bully pulpit in an alt-right Fox News-style media conglomerate after his loss in 2016, Donald Trump would have led the charge on Clinton's "mismanagement" of the pandemic and her direct responsibility for all those deaths. He would have assured us that the resulting economic downturn, with striking numbers of Americans left unemployed, could have been avoided, and that he as president would have prevented both those deaths and business cutbacks by immediately closing all borders and deporting any suspicious foreigners. He would have labeled the president "Killer Clinton" and, given the misogyny of significant parts of the American electorate, the name would have stuck. In 2020, Donald Trump would have run on a platform of making America great again and won in a landslide. Don't, however, think of this as just some passing exercise in alternative history. Substitute "Joe Biden" for "Hillary Clinton" in the passages you've just read and you'll have a grim but plausible prediction of what could happen over the next four years. On the Road to 2024 Hillary Clinton would have faced challenges of every sort if she'd won the presidency in 2016. They nonetheless pale in comparison to what now awaits Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The Republicans are already gunning for the new president. They're blocking the transition process to handicap the incoming administration. President Trump has forbidden federal agencies from even cooperating with the Biden-Harris team. The 2020 presidential election forms part of the Republican Party's denialism trifecta: the pandemic, climate change, and now Biden's victory are all simply liberal "myths." The Republican Party will either control the Senate -- pending the outcome of two run-off races in Georgia -- or, at least, be able to disrupt any major pieces of legislation. The Biden administration will be hard-pressed to roll back the tax cuts the Republicans handed out to the wealthy in 2017, pass a major green infrastructure bill, or expand affordable health care. When Biden tries to implement a nationally cohesive program to combat Covid-19 through more testing, tracing, and investment in medical equipment, he's guaranteed to face resistance from a number of Republican governors who have refused even to mandate the wearing of masks. And then there are all those Republican-appointed judges just itching to rule on any legal challenges to Biden's executive orders, not to speak of a Supreme Court now located in the bleachers beyond right field that will serve as an even greater constraint on an activist agenda. And those are just the political obstacles. The pandemic is clearly spiraling out of control. The economy has yet to crawl out of its hole. And Donald Trump has a couple of more months to scorch the earth before his army of incompetents are driven out of Washington, D.C. Then there are the 71 million Americans who just voted for him despite his criminal conduct, gross mismanagement, and near-psychotic view of the world. Short of a nationwide deprogramming campaign, the adherents of the Trump cult will continue to cling to their religion (and their guns). In the Biden years, they're sure to form an industrial-strength Tea Party opposed to any move the federal government makes. And let's be clear: their resistance will not be exactly Gandhian in nature. At the same time, it's essential to separate their illegitimate complaints laced with racism and misogyny from their all-too-legitimate grievances concerning the American economy. Much of Trump's base sees that economy, quite correctly, as unfair and the elite as not sharing the wealth. Unless the Democrats succeed in proving themselves to be the party of the 99% and successfully show how the Republicans are the 1% club -- by, for instance, publicizing the true impact of Trump's tax cuts for the rich -- the Biden administration will fall victim to charges of elitism, which is a political death sentence these days. Everything that Hillary Clinton faced during her hypothetical first term in office will apply to Joe Biden in his very real first term. Trump will never give up on the fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He'll continue to rally his followers through social media as well as Breitbart and the One America News Network. Even if he doesn't have the fire in his 78-year-old belly to run in 2024, other true believers will eagerly pick up his torch, whether from his own family or a pool of loyalists that includes Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton. No matter how well President Biden does in dealing with Covid-19 and how quickly a vaccine comes on line, he'll be saddled with the responsibility for everyone who dies in the pandemic from January 20th on. Ditto with future economic problems, no matter that they were quite literally dropped in his lap as he entered the Oval Office. All the faults that Trump's followers refused to see in their own candidate will suddenly be magnified in their vision of Biden. Trump, in their eyes, was a man who could do no wrong. Biden will be the man who can do no right. A significant percentage of those 71 million Americans will want to make sure that Biden, too, is a one-term president. Unfortunately, several international examples can serve as models. The Liberal Interregnum Beware the right-wing revolutionary movement thwarted. Donald Trump promised to turn the world upside down: to throw out the Washington elite, radically shrink government, close off borders, bolster white privilege, and restore American unilateralism. As a platform, it wasn't much more than the photo negative of Barack Obama's agenda, but it was a clarion call to shake things up that thrilled his followers. Thanks to a mixture of bureaucratic inertia, liberal resistance, and his own managerial ineptitude, Trump failed to carry out his revolution -- and now the elite has struck back. The newspapers are full of columnists, Democrats and former Republicans alike, delirious with anti-Trump triumphalism: "Loser!," "You're Fired!," "Our Long National Nightmare Is Over." The Dow Jones is celebrating and Hollywood has popped the bubbly, while the foreign-policy mandarins are looking forward to the return of predictability and their version of stability. Even the Pentagon, particularly after the shocking post-election dismissal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, will be relieved to see the end of the Disrupter-in-Chief. But the celebrations may prove premature. Just consider recent examples of right-wing populist revolutions elsewhere that were stopped in their tracks by elections. The Trumpian Viktor Orban was the prime minister of Hungary from 1998 to 2002. His time in office was marked by corruption scandals, tax cuts, and efforts to concentrate power in the hands of the executive. In the 2002 elections, a coalition of the Socialist and Liberal parties ousted him and, governing for eight years, seemed to have put Orban's brand of authoritarian politics in an early grave. In the 2010 elections, however, he returned from the political dead and has since transformed his country from a bastion of liberalism into an autocratic, intolerant, uber-Christian friend of Vladimir Putin. In the process, the Socialists became synonymous with a corrupt, economically unjust status quo and the Liberals simply disappeared as a party. Nor is the Hungarian experience unique. In Poland, the Law and Justice Party has moved the country's politics steadily rightward since achieving a parliamentary majority in 2015. But it, too, had an earlier experience (from 2005 to 2007) as part of a governing coalition. In between, the more liberal Civic Platform Party took charge, but did little to improve the livelihoods of the bulk of working Poles, ultimately driving ever more voters into the arms of the right-wing Law and Justice Party. In its second crack at power, those right-wing nationalists did indeed push through a number of economic reforms that began to redistribute wealth in a way that fulfilled their populist promise. In Japan, right-wing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had a brief opportunity to govern in 2006-2007, only to return in 2012 after a failed effort by the opposition Democratic Party to reform Japanese politics. As the country's longest-serving prime minister -- Abe stepped down for health reasons in August -- he succeeded in making Japan "great" again as an inward-looking, jingoistic power. Right-wing nationalists certainly learned something about wielding power from their first experiences of leadership, while their liberal successors, by failing to offer fully transformational politics, prepared the ground for the return of the right. After a period of tumultuous rule, most people don't want to jump from a bucking bronco onto another wild horse. So the prospect of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appointing a competent cabinet and returning to the status quo ante by, among other things, rejoining the World Health Organization, signing onto the Paris climate accords, and welcoming back the Dreamers seems reassuring to many Americans. It won't, however, be faintly enough to drive a stake through the heart of Trumpism. Apocalypse Later? In "The View from 2016," an essay I wrote for TomDispatch in 2007, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the 2008 election and serve two terms, but also that his administration would make only half-hearted gestures at reform -- abiding by the Kyoto protocol on climate change, but not committing to deeper cuts in carbon emissions; canceling a few weapons systems, but not transforming the military-industrial complex; tweaking the global war on terror, but not ending it; and so on. Apocalypse, I concluded, comes in many different forms. There are the dramatic effects of sword and fire and famine. And then there's the apocalypse of muddling through. That's what happens when you just carry on with the same old, same old and before you know it, poof, end of the world. It's an apocalypse that's neither too cold nor too hot, neither too hard nor too soft. It's the apocalypse of the middle, the Goldilocks apocalypse. In 2016, a hungry bear named Donald Trump emerged from the woods and took out Goldilocks. (Don't say I didn't warn you.) After four years of bracing for a more conventional apocalypse precipitated perhaps by Trump's itchy nuclear trigger finger, we're back in Goldilocks territory. More than half the country craves a return to normalcy by dumping Donald Trump and then defeating Covid-19. Under the circumstances, it's easy enough to forget that the pre-Trump normal wasn't actually very good. The world was already in the midst of a climate crisis. The global economy was providing anything but a fair shake to everyone and so generating a politics of resentment that propelled Trump and his cohort to power. Countries continued to spend almost $2 trillion a year collectively on war and preparations for it, leaving societies ill-equipped to handle an onrushing pandemic's war on the health of humanity. Joe Biden should learn this key takeaway from the Obama years: muddling through not only speeds us toward a Goldilocks apocalypse but makes it so much more likely that another bear will come out of the woods to "reclaim" its house. Let's face it: Biden and Harris are card-carrying members of an elite that's enamored of the Goldilocks middle ground. The only way they could pivot from that position would be by implementing a full-blown green economic renewal that benefitted America's blue-collar workers while satisfying environmentalists as well. The blue bloods of the Republican Party will inevitably call such a jobs approach "socialism." The next administration has to push forward nevertheless, appealing over the heads of the Republican leadership to a base that desperately wants prosperity for all. Remember: other bears are lurking out there and they seem to have acquired a certain taste for cautious politicians. Sure, a few disgruntled ursine types will go into hibernation after the 2020 election. But when the hoopla dies down, others will venture out, angry, resentful, and looking for their next big meal. John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and volume two of his Splinterlands series. He is the author of the just-published book The Pandemic Pivot (Seven Stories Press). Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Snce World War II. Copyright 2020 John Feffer

As soon as Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election was clear, the question of what lies ahead immediately came to the fore: What do Democrats need to do, not just to help America recover from the profound damage of the Trump presidency, but to address the long-term underlying problems that made it possible in the first place? To help answer that question, I turned to the man who took the measure of those problems in the first place, sociologist and historian Jack Goldstone, whose 1991 book, " Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World ," revolutionized our understanding of revolutions as products of organizational failure in coping with demographic pressures. Goldstone's book appeared just as America was celebrating "The End of History," as announced in a then-famous book by Francis Fukuyama. With the end of the Cold War, everything had supposedly been settled. There would be no more revolutions or ideological struggles. Almost 30 years later, no one thinks that anymore, and the demographic factors Goldstone identified — such as the "youth bulges" associated with the Arab Spring — have become commonplace terms in discussing potential revolutions. Goldstone's model combined measures of demographically-driven social stress from the mass population, the elites and the state to produce a single number, the "political stress indicator," or psi. State breakdown — and thus revolution — has only occurred when psi rises to dramatically high levels. Unlike earlier theories, Goldstone's approach explained when revolutions didn't happen, as well as when they did. I discovered Goldstone's work by way of cultural anthropologist Peter Turchin, who refined and expanded his model and applied it to a broader range of societies, including modern industrial states. Four years ago, the month before Donald Trump was elected, I reviewed Turchin's book, " Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History ," which predicted an approaching period of social and political disintegration, regardless of whether Trump won or lost. But even in 1991, Goldstone had seen worrying signs in America of the same sorts of problems his book described in England and France in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively, as well as in China and the Ottoman Empire. Most notable was the problem of "selfish elites" who "preferred to protect their private wealth, even at the expense of a deterioration of state finances, public services, and long-term international strength." That's why Goldstone's perspective on the problems facing us today seem particularly worth our attention. He and Turchin combined to write an article for Noema magazine in September, " Welcome to the Turbulent Twenties ," and BuzzFeed highlighted their perspective — and specifically, the role of psi — in a late October story on the possibility of rising political violence in the U.S. But their perspective deserves much more than an occasional mention — it should inform the entire framework in which our discussions take place. I reached out to Goldstone even before this election had been decided, seeking the broadest perspective I could possibly get. Some of what he and Turchin wrote about is admittedly now difficult to imagine, given that Democrats may not win a Senate majority and have lost at least nine seats in the House. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Your book "Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World" came out just after the end of the Cold War, at the same time as Francis Fukuyama's celebrated book "The End of History and The Last Man," which claimed that we had reached "the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Fukuyama was hardly alone at the time, but you offered a strikingly different view, one much more consistent with how history has unfolded in subsequent decades. What was the key insight that gave you such a different view? Most people had viewed revolutions as a result of great ideological struggles. And if there weren't going to be any more such great struggles, people thought there wouldn't be any more revolutions either. It's certainly true that the leaders of revolutions need an ideological platform, but in my view the causes of revolutions were organizational failures, and the ideological shifts come about when people feel the organizational failure of their society and look for new ideas on how to fix it. In my view, organizational failure is not something that goes away with some march of history. It's always possible, even likely, that societies will get themselves into trouble. Governments tend to overspend, elites tend to fight taxation and accumulate resources. As elites grow in number, they tend to fight more and more among themselves for position and wealth, and if elites do not make sure that the wealth of society is distributed in the way that gives ordinary people hope and a stake in society, then they can be recruited to opposition, even radical movements. So I feel the risk of revolutions is always there. The ideologies may change. We went from an ideology of liberalism to an ideology of communism and then, when communism faded, the Middle East and much of Asia started turning to an ideology of radical Islam. So I had no reason to believe that revolutions would disappear. When they reappeared with vigor I was not surprised, and my work started getting a lot more attention — especially after the Arab Spring, which was a whole bunch of old-fashioned violent, civil war-inducing revolutions. They obviously had a lot to do with the failure of states to provide jobs for the young, the problem of over-educating a large cohort of youth, the failure to distribute economic progress equally. So, my vision turned out — not happily but, as it turned out, correctly — to foresee that many more revolutions were possible. In fact, I'll go one step further. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, many people said, "Well, those aren't revolutions, those are something new. Those are refolutions" — with an F — "They're more like reforms, they're negotiated, they are peaceful or they are democratic movements." I was a little bit alone in saying, "Now, wait a minute, to me they look like revolutions." You had a failure of states that were organized on the basis of state communism, and they unwound differently because the populations tended to be older and thus were less drawn to radicalism and violence. So you had the color revolutions as the response, but when you talk about why these things occurred and how they played out and whether we'll see more of them in the future, the answer was, "They're organizational failures. Yes, we will see more of these." And indeed, after 1998 is when so we started seeing more color revolutions across Asia, and we will continue to see those. In fact, I think the real difference between color revolutions and violent revolutions is not just a matter of tactics or ideology. It's got a great deal to do with the age structure of the population, the educational job profile. When you have a younger population that's more educated, that's suffering higher unemployment, you're likely to get a more ideologically extreme revolution. When you have an older population that is in a stagnant economy, you're more likely to get the color revolutions, seeking just to open up and democratize politics. Another big argument I had with people at the time was that they felt that once capitalism had triumphed, there would not be any more need for revolutions. But I said this is not about capitalism. The revolutions of the 19th century were still about the same kind of organizational state failures that we'd seen in earlier centuries, and once we get to the 20th and 21st centuries, we could still have organizational failures, even in modern, fully industrialized states. Your model actually had three contributing factors to political instability: the mass population, the elites and the state. You've already talked about that dynamic, but could you break it down into those three parts and say a little more specifically about each of them? Let's start with what it takes for society to continue to work and successfully reproduce itself across time. We tend to think about society as how it looks at a particular moment in time: Are people getting along or are they not getting along? Is it because they disagree or whatever? That to me is a very incomplete, shortsighted way to approach the dynamic nature of society. Instead I tend to think in terms of flows of resources, flows of people. To reproduce itself over time, the government needs to continue to have enough revenue to carry out its responsibility for national defense and domestic administration. The government, the economy and other institutions like the church need to recruit a fresh flow of leadership every generation. So they need to have some system for training and selecting the next generation of elites or leaders. If the government doesn't have a system to keep revenues in pace with expenses, it will start to go into debt, it will start to go broke, it will start having to scrounge around to find other ways to raise money. If society doesn't get the flow of elites correct, either there are not enough competent, well-trained people to move into leadership positions or what's much more common is that you have an overflow, where society ends with more people training and aspiring to elite positions, and believing that they deserve them, than there are positions for such people. For societies to grow stably, there has to be a system of recruitment and filtering that is seen as fair and legitimate to govern that distribution of elite positions. Otherwise, it becomes a dangerous free-for-all. For much of human history that was simply inheritance. The older son inherits his father's position and the younger sons have to go work things out on their own. When we get to a meritocracy, you have people acquiring the training or degrees to provide the right certifications for elite positions, and that's fine as long as things grow at the same pace — if you have expansion of the universities, if you have societies expanding their bureaucracies, expanding the professional business positions and so on. But if you start training many more people for elite positions than the society can provide, you get the frustration of large numbers of overeducated youth, and that's politically dangerous. Lastly, you understand that a government that's losing money and resources gets into trouble and it starts picking on other groups to say, "We need to tax your wealth, or we need to increase your taxes." But, if the elites can organize and be unified and simply say, "No, we're going to change the system," then you either get reforms or an elite coup-d'état. There's no need for a revolution if the elites are united and can agree what needs to be done. But if the elites themselves are very divided and unsure — do we need to change government policy, or do we actually need to change the government and displace some of the conservative elites that are preventing the changes we need? — then members of the elite who believe change is necessary will try to recruit popular support. They want the demonstration that large numbers of the population are with them to demand the overthrow of conservative elites or an incompetent ruler. So this ties into mass well-being, then? Trying to stir up popular support for change is only feasible if large numbers of the people are unhappy with the situation. It's very hard for dissident elites to get people to take the risk and take the time to engage in opposition to government if most of them think everything's OK, as long as they're getting what they expect. It doesn't have to be great, but at least it's what they expect. But if large numbers of people find there are shortages of land, that wages are going down or stagnant, that they don't have enough land to provide for their family or kids or enough income to provide a proper wedding for their daughters; if they can't find work, they lose their land to a greedy landowner and are thrown into the workforce and have trouble finding jobs, or become vagrants or bandits. Then, when things are bad enough for a large portion of the population, they are much more easily recruited to movements that say, "We gotta get rid of everything. These are bad people in charge. Things are never going to get better until we get them out of the way." That's how you recruit a mass movement for rebellion or revolution. In your book, published almost 30 years ago, you warned that we were getting ourselves in trouble. You focused particular attention on the role of "selfish elites," which you've called a "key difficulty faced by regimes in decline." You warned that the U.S. was, "in respect of its state finances and its elites' attitudes, following the path that led early modern states to crises." What did you see then as the central problem that wasn't being addressed? I had just spent 10 years studying how states gradually get themselves into a situation of breakdown, and one of the questions that motivated me was: Why should governments that have the ability to tax and to recruit the smartest people ever get into trouble? You would think that they're holding all the cards. But what I'd seen in my studies of state breakdown was that government got into trouble when it could no longer count on the support of elites, and that usually occurred because elites lost sight of what we used to call the public service ethic. I was just reading about John F. Kennedy and what his parents drilled into his entire family: "Yes, you're rich and you're privileged, but you have responsibilities to serve the public." That's the same ethic that had been drilled into Roman centurions and senators, and had been drilled into the aristocracy of Europe — the whole code of chivalry was that if you're a knight or a lord, you have certain responsibilities to watch out for society and take care of those that are not as powerful and fortunate as you. Throughout history, societies start down the road into collapse when elites start saying, "No, I've got to take care of myself first, because other people are after my position and I can't count on it being secure for my children. So I have to keep as much of what I have as possible." So elites start fighting with each other, they resist taxation, they become much less civic-minded. They give less in the sense of philanthropy and leadership for public efforts. I was seeing that in the United States. We put a movie out that said, "Greed is good," and people started revering the work of Ayn Rand, who basically preached that whoever is successful owes that success only to themselves, and it's wrong for government or anyone else to ask that they share it. Well, that line of thinking makes elites feel very good and feel, "Yes, I've earned all of my success. It's all due to me and I have a right to enjoy it." But that leads to bigger yachts and private islands on the one hand, and deteriorating schools and ballooning budget deficits on the other. That was very clearly the way the United States was going in the '80s and '90s, and it really didn't change. And now? So here we are with this election. There was no mass rejection of Trump. It wasn't about Trump. People didn't understand that four years ago, and apparently they still don't understand it now. The breakdown, the polarization, the divisions of American society are not about Trump,. They are about people rejecting the actions of an elite — both conservatives and liberals, it really didn't matter; it was both New York elites and Texas elites — rejecting a notion of a society in which winners take all and government should be starved, with no provide benefits or support for communities that are in trouble, and basically leaving people on their own. So, we have hundreds of millions of people whose lives, they feel, are slipping away from them. They feel their opportunities for their families and their children are getting fewer, rather than greater, they see the government getting further and further into debt. They don't see why. What's all that money being wasted on, if their lives aren't getting better? And so they are voting to reject everything in the traditional elites and establishment politics. They reject everything they've seen for the last 30 or 40 years, because it has neglected and demeaned their lives. So, they're voting for the outsider, the renegade, the person who'll upset the apple cart and who at least says, "I'm doing this for you," regardless of the reality and regardless of the delivery. Someone who says, "The people that you're angry at are the people I'm angry at, and I'm going to do something about it for you." That's enough to earn their deep, steadfast loyalty, and that's why they came out in such large numbers to vote for someone, even if the other half of America says, "Well, you know, this guy Trump seems to be divisive and incompetent and nasty and so we're not going to vote for him." You know, half of America thinks he still gets it: "He understands our situation. We don't want to be taxed and have money wasted. We don't want to live in a situation where we're constantly worried that other people are taking our opportunities, our jobs. We want to feel defended, supported." That's their America, and they want it back. I saw all this coming when you have an elite that lives inside guarded communities and makes it harder to get into school, and instead of investing to deal with declining productivity puts its money into fancy real estate and showy acquisitions. In the article with Peter Turchin you published in September, you argue that American exceptionalism had been founded on cooperation. It unraveled during the 19th century but was "reforged during the New Deal," only to fall apart again beginning in the 1970s. You describe that cooperation as "an unwritten but very real social contract between government, business and workers," and what replaced it was the neoliberal contract, only between business and government. Now Trump comes in saying, "I'll stick up for you," but he didn't actually do anything for workers. How should we understand that gaping disconnect? In my 1991 book, I said that there are two different playbooks you can get as leaders respond to this kind of crisis. Donald Trump has followed the typical dictator's playbook. That is, he finds a country where a lot of people are unhappy because they see they're losing out to greater inequality. The elites don't care about them. The elites are starving the government, so the government is basically incompetent, or becoming a tool of the elite. So they want to vote for a strongman to repair the damage. But the dictator is smart enough to know that he also needs elite support. You can't just come in and stage a revolution. He doesn't even want a revolution, he just wants to be in power. He needs to somehow get elite support while harnessing the anger of the population, so what does he typically do? He directs that anger at others. He may direct it at the professional elite, at the left-wing intellectuals. "I don't need them. I just need the business elite." And the other thing he says is, "Look at the other people who are trying to take things away from you. Look at immigrants, look at foreigners, people of different religions." He finds scapegoats. So that's what Trump did, and that's why we're in the situation we're in now. It's a divisive, not a healing approach. It leads deeper into crisis. But that's not the only alternative. What we really need is the kind of leadership that can inspire elites to make sacrifices to strengthen all of society. This is what the Japanese did after World War II. It's what America did in World War II, and in leading the world in the Cold War. That kind of inspiration benefits from having a major external enemy. I remember Sputnik, and how afraid America got all the sudden. We won the Second World War, but then Russia had missiles and had nuclear weapons that could destroy us. So we needed to invest in ourselves, we needed to invest in science and education for the young, we needed to build our internal infrastructure to a high level, we needed to invest in research and development and put a man on the Moon. We were going to build modern communication, build the greatest scientific establishment in the world, and recruit — wherever it's useful — immigrants to come and strengthen us. So a lot of the top engineers and scientists in our big Cold War movement were immigrants, and we continued that into the '70s and '80s. A lot of the people who built our computer industry were immigrants and children of immigrants. So, we had a bit of that new social contract — government investment and taxation rates were higher. People think Ronald Reagan got rid of taxation rates, but elite taxes were still 50% higher in the Reagan era than they are now. We had a series of presidents — all the way, I would say, from Eisenhower through Reagan — who said, "America has an ideal, we're all going to contribute to that. We're going to pitch in, live up to that ideal, we're going to lead the world together." That pursuit of American exceptionalism worked pretty well to keep America together. Now, it started to break down even under Reagan, because Reaganism started to join with the free-market competitive inequality that got worse and worse over the next 30 years. But at least after the Depression and World War II, Americans were being trained to pull together. It was minorities who legitimately felt that they were being left out of the conversation, so you had the civil rights movement and the women's movement saying, "We want to be part of this." What they wanted to be part of was an America that in general was moving forward and taking leadership in the world. That kind of notion, that everybody should move forward together and that the whole society needs to work together — that has been lost. So it began to break down under Reagan. Then what happened? It really collapsed after the Cold War, when it seemed that Americans just kind of took for granted: "We have the system that works. All we have to do is keep doing what we're doing and if the meritocracy gets more and more privileged and exclusive, well, that doesn't really matter. The rich get richer and richer, but they earned it. They're building new industries and doing what the railroad and steel magnates did in an earlier century to build a new America, so they're fine. We're not for the sales tax on Internet products and we're just going to let the intellectual, professional and business elites feather their nests, and everybody else can either catch up or fall behind. That's fair play in America." That's been completely corrosive, and obviously it's also given opportunities for the dark side of American history: the hatred of foreigners, the hatred of minorities, the regional competition, the distrust between the city and the countryside. All those have been kind of long-standing elements of human nature. America didn't discover them, but we didn't get rid of them either. Those dark elements come out more strongly when you're in a society that simply says, "We have open competition and the better you do the more proud you should be of yourself. You don't really owe anything to anyone else, and you certainly don't owe anything to the government to provide for the basic structure and investment in society. Government doesn't deserve it. They don't know what to do with it. So let's starve the government." Well, you do that and you lose social cohesion. You lose the confidence and effectiveness of government and the government will not be able to respond when you have a crisis, whether it's a pandemic or a crisis of racial injustice or a crisis of income inequality. So those problems simply fester and lead to worse divisions and eventually to some kind of conflict. In the article with Turchin, you describe a formula for past progress, referencing what happened in England in the 1830s and here in America in the 1930s. First, a leader trying to preserve the past social order is replaced by a new leader willing to undertake much-needed reforms. Biden replacing Trump may fit that mold, but he's not going to have much support in the Senate, or an FDR-style popular mandate. The second thing you describe is the new leader leveraging support to force opponents to give in to necessary changes. It looks like that's not an option, at least in the near term. So where do we stand right now? I can tell you very simply: The most important person for the future of America has been and will be Mitch McConnell. The reason I say that is because we're going to have a president who wants to be a nonpartisan problem-solver. He definitely realizes that America needs to fix its infrastructure, and join the world in moving toward control of the terrible threat of climate change. Our West Coast is burning, our Midwest farmers are being flooded, and our East and Gulf coasts are being pounded by hurricanes. So we need to do something about climate change before it destroys us, we have to take care of the pandemic, we have to make the economy work better for those people who are not on the cutting edge of the digital economy, we have to somehow restore dignity and opportunity for people from all walks of life. So there are big problems that need to be solved. Biden does want to address those in a bipartisan way, and he says it: "I want to bring America together again. I want to include everybody. I want to be the president of all Americans." He's saying all the right things to put us back on the right track. You can think of the instability index that Peter and I talk about as measuring your distance from a cliff: How close are you getting to the edge of the cliff? We can't tell exactly where the edge of the cliff is, because you could say it's shrouded in fog. It depends on lots of particular circumstances. But we know there's a cliff out there, when government no longer commands the respect of the people and the elites can no longer work together. Our measurements say we're getting very close to that cliff. So Biden wants to turn around and change directions, and start backing away from that cliff edge. That's good. If Republicans win the Senate and Democrats have the House, the issue is whether Republicans in the Senate will support that change in direction, to pull us back from the cliff. Or are they going to say, "No, if you're not going to put us in charge, if you're not going to do it our way, we're going to push you over that cliff, so that people can see how bad you are"? That's what they did with Obama, to a large degree: Just say no to everything and if there are failures, it's on you. If Mitch McConnell works with moderate Democrats to move away from the cliff, that will strengthen the moderate Democrats and reduce the power of the more radical or progressive wing, because the moderates will be getting more done. This is a very common situation in politics. You usually have an extreme left and extreme right, a middle left and a middle right. And if the middle left and the middle right can work together, they keep the extremists marginalized. They keep them weak. But if the moderates cannot work together and cannot get anything done, that strengthens the extremists on both sides who say, "See, there's nothing to be gained by moving to the middle. There's nothing to be accomplished by compromise with our opponents. So let's just go all the way to get what we want." So if Mitch McConnell is willing to say, "Hey, I want the moderate center of American politics to flourish and be rebuilt," if he is willing to work with the Democrats to pull us back from the edge of a cliff, we can start to move away from the dangerous spot that we're in. But if he says, "I'm going to be the party of no. I'm going to just wait until we get a Republican president again, and I will let things go as close to the cliff, or even over the cliff, if that's what it takes," that is going to increase the strength of the far-left progressives and the far-right radical Trump anti-government anti-globalist extremists — and we're going to end up having an election in 2024 that makes 2020 look relatively united. The polarization will be worse, the anger will be worse, the recrimination on both sides will be vicious and nothing will have been accomplished in four years. That's what I really see if it continues in that direction. We're close enough to people taking up arms against each other in the streets now. That becomes almost unavoidable if Biden is pushed to the extremes by McConnell's unwillingness to work with him in the right direction. I wanted to ask about innovative democratic reforms that can cross ideological lines. Ranked-choice voting is one example that can incentivize a less acrimonious, more substantive way of campaigning. Or citizens' assemblies, which have been widely used in other countries recently. Obviously the Senate is not going to start doing that, but these ideas are bubbling up in more local contexts. Could they be promoted to help change the conversation, or at least expand the possibilities for avoiding the cliff? Absolutely. We don't want partisan solutions, even if they're good ones, rammed through on a partisan basis, because that does more damage by increasing the polarization and political division, even with good policy. I think citizens' assemblies are great. I like the idea of going back to an old device, the "blue ribbon commission," where you have a policy issue, you know it is important, you know it's contentious and you have some idea where you want to go. You appoint a bipartisan commission with some leading politicians, some leading experts, you try to work out a plan. And once that plan is developed to the point where you can make a good argument for it, you can show it has bipartisan support on the commission that developed it, then you offer it to the legislature. We actually had that with the prison reform bill that President Trump signed. That wasn't something that came because he was so wildly enthusiastic about it when he ran for office, but it was a problem that both sides saw needed to be addressed and they came up with a plan that could be the basis of bipartisan legislation. I think we can do that again on climate and environmental policy. We can do it on infrastructure. We can do it on jobs and social mobility. We can do it on income inequality and opportunities. There are a lot of ideas floating around, whether it's cash handouts or more progressive taxation or taxing capital and labor equally or providing preschool education to give everybody a better chance early on. But these ideas need to be discussed at length by people from different perspectives, in a room with technical experts who can answer questions, and with legislative aides who can hammer out concrete legislation to be a framework for bipartisan agreement. I'm a big believer in universal citizen service, to bring people from all over the country from all different walks of life to work shoulder to shoulder on a common goal and get to know each other. That breaks down a lot of the polarization and enmity that grows up if people are educationally and residentially segregated, as we have become. I think there are a lot of things that can be done without changing the Constitution, and without radical overhaul of the income structure. There are things we can do to make progress on concrete issues that will help us pull together as a country and point us away from the edge of the cliff.

Far-right militia groups have felt emboldened by Donald Trump's presidency. And in Hood County, Texas, according to Politico's Ciara O'Rourke, members of the Oath Keepers are infiltrating the local government. Hood County is a Republican-leaning county near Fort Worth. Although Dallas leans Democratic — not unlike Houston, Austin and El Paso — Hood County is more Republican and predominantly White. And O'Rourke, in a Politico article published on December 9, describes some of the inroads that the Oath Keepers have been making there. O'Rourke notes that John D. Shirley, the Hood County constable, is a "sworn member of the Oath Keepers" — which, she reports, has "in recent months…. been warning of a civil war." On August 31, Shirley called for the execution of Democratic Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler, who he blamed for the shooting death of a member of the far-right militia group Patriot Prayer by an Antifa activist. Shirley, on Facebook, posted, "Ted Wheeler needs to be tried, convicted and executed posthaste. He has blood on his hands, and it's time for justice." O'Rourke explains, "By the time he was posting about Wheeler, Shirley had been an Oath Keeper for more than a decade, serving on the organization's board of directors as its national peace officer liaison and as the Texas chapter president. But he isn't the only elected official in Hood County affiliated with the group. One member, a newly elected justice of the peace, said in February that Oath Keepers was having a 'surgence' there. Shirley has described an incoming county commissioner as an Oath Keeper." According to O'Rourke, "What's happening in Hood County may represent a shift for a group that was once seen as a governmental antagonist but is now establishing itself inside the halls of the elected officialdom. And it is setting up potentially dangerous conflicts between officials with different ideas of what constitutes legitimate government authority." O'Rourke points out that the Oath Keepers, founded in 2009, have been joining President Donald Trump in claiming, without evidence, that the election was stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud. The Oath Keepers posted in an e-mail blast, "Our POTUS will not go down without a fight. He WILL NOT concede. This election was stolen from We The People. We will prevail but we need your help!" On November 7, Shirley — typing in all caps — posted on Facebook, "NO WHINING, NO CRYING, NO PEARL CLUTCHING! DONALD TRUMP WON THE ELECTION. YOU CAN FEEL IT IN YOUR BONES. THIS WAS TAKEN FROM US ILLEGALLY. THE ONLY WAY WE LOSE IS IF WE DON'T FIGHT. LEAVE IT ALL ON THE FIELD. ITS TIME TO SEPARATE THE WINTER SOLDIERS FROM THE SUNSHINE PATRIOTS."

According to a report at the Daily Beast, some Republicans, as well as advisors to Donald Trump, are questioning Sen. Lindsey Graham's decision to relitigate the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into the Trump administration's connections to Russia so close to the election saying it could come back to haunt both the president and Graham himself. Last week Graham, who heads up the Senate Judiciary Committee, stated that he was willing to call Mueller back to testify again about his investigation and that has some conservatives nervous. In an interview with the Beast this week, Graham admitted, "I was reluctant to call him because it was hard to watch [him testify] in the House. I just think, if he decided to comment on the Stone case... OK, let’s hear what you’ve got to say.” While the White House has been silent about Graham's plans, some Trump allies --including one of the president's former attorneys --are wondering if it is not all a big mistake. "Republicans and even prominent figures in pro-Trump media are split, not just as to whether Mueller should be called back to the Hill but whether it’s a good idea at all to re-litigate his probe at a time when the president is struggling both to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and with his re-election bid against former Vice President Joe Biden," the report states, adding that Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, a confidant of the president thinks Grahams needs to back off of his plans. "In a recent episode, Carlson decried how many GOP bigwigs, including some on-air at his own network, were so intensely focused on Russiagate at the expense of policies that could affect millions of Americans," the Beast reports, quoting Carlson saying, "Who cares how many Benghazi hearings we have? We are supposed to care, but why should we? How did Peter Strzok’s text messages become more important than saving American jobs from foreign nationals who are taking them? It is lunacy! We fall for it every time.” Add former Trump attorney John Dowd to the list of critics of the recalling of Mueller, saying he's not sure Graham is up to the job of pressing the former special counsel. “I don’t quite understand Sen. Graham… I’m never quite sure what he’s up to,” he told the Beast. "When he called [Rod] Rosenstein, he didn’t even ask him… ‘What was the factual basis to appoint a special counsel?’ So, I’m not sure how reliable any [hearing of his] would be…I’m not sure what he’s about. But I thought his examination of Rosenstein was poor.” "I read in the paper that the Democrats want to hear from Mueller [again, too]. I thought Graham was a Republican! I don’t understand what the guy’s doing! So what if the Democrats want [Mueller]. He’s the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee," he continued. "[Why do it just] because the Democrats want it?” The report also notes that Graham that some Republicans feel Graham needs to focus on his own re-election where he faces a stiff challenge from Democrat Jaime Harrison, who has amassed a $29 million campaign chest. You can read more here.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) just faced his greatest fight for re-election by a top Democratic challenger. He won that battle and kept his seat on Election Day, but the Chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee is now facing a controversy so dangerous he could lose it. "The allegation that the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee pressured the Georgia Secretary of State to throw out lawfully cast votes describes conduct that threatens the foundation of our republic by one of the government's most senior officials," says Walter Shaub, the former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics. "It must be investigated." On Monday Georgia's Secretary of State accused Chairman Graham of pressuring him to throw out all ballots from certain counties. Graham denies he pressured Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger but the Republican elections official told The Washington Post he was "stunned" when it happened. Shaub adds that Graham's actions were "inherently coercive." And he calls Graham's response "a damning admission": Other legal or ethics expert are denouncing Graham's actions and calling for action. "There is more than sufficient predication here to open a federal investigation," says former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance, now an MSNBC legal analyst and a law professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. "Georgians & all Americans deserve to know what happened, not just be left to speculate over a matter so serious." Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner is calling for a grand jury investigation: "For the chairman of the Senate committee charged with oversight of our legal system to have reportedly suggested that an election official toss out large numbers of legal ballots from American voters is appalling," says Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Executive Director Noah Bookbinder. "Not only is it wrong for Senator Graham to apparently contemplate illegal behavior, but his suggestion undermines the integrity of our elections and the faith of the American people in our democracy," Bookbinder adds. "Under the guise of rooting out election fraud, it looks like Graham is suggesting committing it. That is unacceptable, and Senator Graham should step down from his chairmanship immediately." Voting rights expert Ari Berman says "Lindsey Graham should be expelled from the Senate for trying to subvert free & fair elections." Senator Graham, who has a moderately active Twitter feed, hasn't tweeted since last week.

(Full disclosure, although I don't think it's relevant to this story: Both my mother and stepfather were American Communists, and my stepfather, Mel Fiske, knew Abel and Anne Meeropol, who adopted the Rosenbergs' children, including Ivy Meeropol's father, after their parents were electrocuted. So, yeah, if you want an entirely neutral account of these events, go elsewhere.) Meeropol's new film uses her grandparents' execution as an inciting event, so to speak, but it's only indirectly about them and about the combustible collision of Communism and anti-Communism in mid-century America. "Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn," which premieres on HBO this week, is instead about one of the most notorious Americans of the last century — the man who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, who served as Sen. Joe McCarthy's right-hand man, and who groomed and nurtured a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump, seeing in the callow womanizer and tabloid celebrity the seeds of greater things. Few people shape history as much as Cohn did, and none of it was for the better. Given that, I told Meeropol in our phone interview this week, it's remarkable that "Bully. Coward. Victim." offers such a full, complicated and human portrait of Cohn — who may be best known in our age for his vivid satirical portrayal in Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America" (as variously played by Ron Leibman, F. Murray Abraham, Al Pacino and Nathan Lane, among others). Not many people would have gone out of their way to be fair to the man who almost literally killed her grandparents. My recording software glitched out for the first few minutes of our conversation, but I can reconstruct Meeropol's answer fairly enough. She said that both as a storyteller and a human being, she thought it was important to pierce the mythology surrounding Cohn and depict him as a highly intelligent and almost uniquely conflicted person. Cohn was both Jewish and gay — and only partly in the closet, for the latter portion of his life — and at least initially identified as a liberal Democrat, yet made common cause with the anti-Communist crusade led by a right-wing Republican, which specifically targeted Jews and gay men as agents of the Red menace. (In the film, Tony Kushner observes that Joe McCarthy was too dumb to appreciate that Cohn was dragging him into a self-destructive conflict with the U.S. Army, which ended up destroying the Wisconsin senator's career.) The film's title comes from a square in the AIDS Memorial Quilt that Meeropol and her father Michael (the Rosenbergs' eldest son) stumbled upon when the quilt was on display in the National Mall in Washington in 1987. Cohn had died of AIDS at age 59 less than a year earlier. Their father-daughter discussion in the film about that discovery offers one of the most powerful moments in what is both a piercing personal memoir and a work of scrupulous and even generous social history. Then I asked Meeropol about the fact that nearly everyone involved in her grandparents' trial for treason — from the defendants and their attorneys to the key witnesses, the trial judge and of course Cohn, the lead prosecutor — had been Jewish. You know, It finally dawned on me that in one sense the prosecution of the Rosenbergs was like something out of Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," a show trial by which Jewish Americans could display their loyalty. Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, back when I was making "Heir to an Execution," a Jewish film producer, I'm not going to say who, kind of told Sheila Nevins at HBO, who'd greenlit the film, "You shouldn't be doing this film. You should leave this story alone." Wow. Because, essentially, it "wasn't good for the Jews"? Yeah, even then. That was like in 2001 or 2002, when I was in the midst of making that film. "That's a black hole. That's a dark moment in Jewish history and you would do well not to revisit it." That kind of thing. So yeah, in terms of [the Rosenberg trial] it was absolutely calculated. Cohn embraced that and he spent his career making sure that he was clearly – because he was proud to be Jewish, but he really wanted to be certain that he was always identified as an anti-Communist. You may not want to touch this question, but I was really struck by the presence of Alan Dershowitz in your film. I've met him and interviewed him myself, and he's such a peculiar individual. I'm well aware that in his youth he stood up for the rights of Communists at Brooklyn College, and has for much of his career been a civil liberties lawyer. But given his apparent slide to the right in recent years, and of course his strange relationship with Donald Trump, it was troubling to watch him on screen talking about Roy Cohn. I'm wondering how much any of that was in your mind. Oh yeah, I mean, I wasn't necessarily excited by the idea of interviewing Alan Dershowitz because he'd already been publicly for Trump. I find him very confusing. I don't quite understand where he's coming from or if he's just a pure opportunist or what. But I felt that it was a really important interview to get. I went into that interview just really wanting him just to tell me his stories of Cohn, how he knew Cohn and what he knew of him. I knew that Cohn had admitted quite a few things to him about my grandparents' trial and what had gone down. I never expected Dershowitz to go as far as he did, in saying, ultimately, that it was the greatest miscarriage of justice in his lifetime. It's an amazing moment. Exactly, and to hear it from Dershowitz is important. It's not the usual suspects telling us this, which is easy for people to dismiss sometimes. "Oh it's just someone on the left, of course they're going to say that," right? And then to have him be involved in the impeachment process was just like, oh God, there he is again. Making bizarre circular arguments that I could not follow about how the president can't be impeached unless he's been charged with an actual crime, and he can't be charged with an actual crime because he can't commit an actual crime. And then he was never to be heard from again after that day, right? He's one of the only people from the film who — I have no idea whether he saw the film, or if he did, whether he likes it or not. I did ask him if he had had a chance to see it and he never responded. Was there anything that really surprised you either about Cohn or about the story in doing the research — stuff that you learned about him or about his life that you hadn't known about before? I mean, probably the two biggest things that were most surprising were, one, that he fought so publicly against gay rights. I didn't know that. By the time the gay rights bill was moving through the New York City Council [in 1986], he was pretty well known in a lot of circles as being gay. Yet there he is, aligning himself with the Archdiocese of New York at the same time. I didn't know anything about that. So that was very surprising. Then, I've come to learn how integral he was to Donald Trump envisioning himself on a national and even international stage. I knew, of course, about his connection to Trump. That was what made me want to make this film and actually decide to finally pursue it. But what we learned is just how important he was, in terms of where Trump got to, and even how we got to where we are now. I think just to see the machinations, the actual process of Cohn having these relationships with so many journalists. He had a close relationship with Lois Romano [of the Washington Post]. He says "You need to interview my guy Donald Trump, you're going to be seeing a lot more of him." Then he's on this campaign: You see footage of him talking about how Donald Trump is a genius and this, that and the other thing. He's promoting him and helping him and he's introducing him to everyone he needs to know in Washington, who turn out to be people like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. All those characters who end up helping him get to the White House. Rupert Murdoch, all these connections that originated with Cohn. I did not know the extent of his influence. Yeah, that is obviously the big news hook in the film. There is also this sense, and I think you fill in the blanks on this really well, that maybe Donald Trump is nowhere near as bright as Roy Cohn, but he learned a number of tricks from him. Rhetorical tricks, public relations tricks, ways to position himself — maybe more than anything else the attitude of always attacking and never retreating. All those aspects that we see in the White House right now sound like things he picked up from Roy Cohn. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, even when Trump was being pressured about his relationship with Putin, he threw out my grandparents' names. He said, "Traitors? That's what Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are. That's what they did." That's exactly the kind of thing Roy Cohn would say to divert attention from himself. You know, we were thinking as a family, at the time, like, "Trump doesn't even know what the hell he's talking about." He probably only heard of them because of Roy. That kind of stuck with him and then he's able to say "That's a traitor. A traitor is a Rosenberg." Then his followers say, "Oh yeah, right, that's those Commie Jew atomic spies. That's what a traitor is, not Donald Trump." That's just one small example of that kind of language. He certainly learned how to deflect and blame and gaslight and do all sorts of Roy Cohn things. Whenever I hear about the entire Republican Party being too afraid to challenge him, that's just like Roy, who would threaten to expose people to try to get a settlement. There's Trump threatening to tweet you into oblivion. Just this week, when we have the extraordinary spectacle of people like white Southern evangelical pastors standing up and saying, "Well, maybe it is time to take these monuments down." And Donald Trump, who isn't from the South and doesn't have any investment in this stuff, is like, "No way, this is about winning and greatness and history." Because you never admit you're wrong. Yeah, or his decision to speak in Tulsa on Juneteenth. That to me is classic Roy Cohn. Obviously you have already made a film about your grandparents and what happened to them. That story is certainly an important part of this narrative, but you made a decision here to bracket that a little bit. It's the thing that launched Roy Cohn's career, but maybe in some ways not the most important part. I'm glad to hear you say that, because I took great pains to not make this film so much about my family and to be "Heir to an Execution Part II" or whatever. I kept reminding my whole team, and myself, that this was the beginning of his career and we want to cover a lot of it. Of course we could use more of the story because of how Roy trailed my father and my uncle as they were trying to reopen the [Rosenberg] case. He became the face of the government defending the execution. But I never wanted this film to really just be about that. Our family's story was just so dramatic and tragic and emotionally raw that it could easily dominate. This is the story of Roy Cohn. I mean, my family's story is important, to understand how he got his start. It also is important to understand how he would break the rules to get whatever he wanted, with reckless disregard and contempt for people's lives. He did that time and time again in so many different venues, so many different periods of his life. I didn't want it to dominate so much. I was cautious and careful about not seeming like this is our family revenge story. That's not as important in my mind. I wanted to make sure that it never came across that way. Let me ask you a different version of my opening question. You had every reason to hate this man, and you've gone out of your way to create a fair and full portrait of one the most widely vilified Americans of the last 100 years. What do you hope audiences can get from that portrait? I think my effort to empathize with Cohn is about trying to humanize him as someone who was not purely evil but was also tortured by his own inability to live openly as a gay man. You can clearly see that he was happier when he could, in those periods of his life where he could escape to Provincetown and other places. I think it's important to not just leave it that he was evil. It limits how we can overcome systemic homophobia, racism and the like. Because if we just dismiss him as this self-loathing, evil person, we don't actually get to understand the sense that he's a human being who wished, I'm sure somewhere inside, that he could live a life where he was happier, where he could be free too. I think it's a powerful thing for us to try to understand that. It's not about forgiveness. It's about trying to understand what he went through, so we can look at what is systemic and not just kind of a one-off. It's not just one person being evil. It is many people suffering because we're not protecting them, we're not embracing them, we're not celebrating diversity. We are crushing people's spirits when we don't protect them. So Roy Cohn is an example that we can learn from. We can only do that by humanizing him. I really believe that if you just call someone evil it dehumanizes them, and then we're doing exactly what he did. We're doing what Trump does when he calls people "thugs" who are fighting for Black Lives Matter or any other social justice or progressive movement where people are dismissed, like my grandparents were, as evil Commie spies. It dehumanizes them. I don't think we should be doing the same thing to someone like Roy Cohn. One last question, and given our personal backgrounds I'm sure we could talk about this one for hours. How do you think now about the legacy of American Communism and anti-Communism, as it continues to resonate below the surface of our public life? Wow. Yeah, we could talk for a long time on that one. I mean, it's so interesting to me that someone like Trump and his followers so easily fall into this old language of like "Oh, my god, that's socialism, that's communism, so bad, so bad." Meanwhile, there's this surge of young people who recognize that the core values and beliefs and political aspirations of those movements, so much of it is exactly what people are still fighting for today. It's equality and social justice and equal access to public education. It's not accepting that it's OK that we're continuing to lynch Black Americans, with police officers doing just that. I hope the history of the American Communist Party will lead to young people looking to understand where people like my grandparents were actually coming from. It's what I tried to do in "Heir to an Execution." I wanted so much to redeem the core values and take it out of the simplistic ways that the Trump administration will use the language to divide us. I see a real opportunity now for people to revisit those same ideals. In "Heir to an Execution" I have Miriam Moskowitz, one of my characters, saying of that time period, "You have to be dead from the neck up not to feel radical, not to feel like a change is necessary." Right? That's where we are right now. And what's even more exciting is that all these young people are feeling it. "Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn" is currently streaming on HBO Max.

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