Tanden on the Ropes as OMB Director

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has released a statement saying that he cannot vote to confirm Biden’s nominee for OMB director, Neera Tanden, because of her personally insulting tweets directed at key Republicans while she was serving as head of the Center for American Progress.

Manchin said this will make it hard for her to work with Republicans, and he’s not wrong. “I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” Manchin said.

For now, White House press secretary Jen Psaki says Biden is sticking with Tanden: “Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent Budget Director and we look forward to the committee votes next week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties.”

But Manchin’s opposition could well sink Tanden. Normally, you might expect Biden to enlist a Republican or two to offset Manchin’s negative vote. But with the $1.9 trillion relief package hanging in the balance, Manchin is the last senator Biden wants to cross.

In addition, don’t expect Republicans to bail out this nomination. In her confirmation hearing, Tanden’s apology mollified few. The handful of moderate Republicans would be happy to sacrifice Tanden to throw a bone to their more ferociously partisan colleagues.

There’s also not a lot of love lost between Tanden and the Democratic senator to whom she would report, Budget Committee chair Bernie Sanders. “Your attacks were not just made against Republicans,” Sanders said when Tanden testified before the Senate Budget Committee. “There were vicious attacks against progressives, people who I have worked with—me personally.” The centrist Manchin may prove to be Tanden’s undoing. But there are several other progressive Democratic senators who would not mourn her sacrifice.

It’s looking like Tanden could well gracefully withdraw, with one of those “I’ve become a distraction” statements.

If not Tanden, then who? My sources say Gene Sperling, one of the more progressive veterans of the Clinton/Obama era. He’s already served as head of the National Economic Council.

Sperling was the author of several of the more imaginative policy proposals written for the Biden campaign. When the game of musical chairs ended, he was one of the few senior campaign aides who did not land a top job, but was advised to keep his powder dry just in case.

Sperling has become more of a progressive since leaving office. His 2020 book, Economic Dignity, helps offset some youthful indiscretions of the Clinton years such as his work on the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. Most progressives would applaud, but he is just orthodox enough to win easy confirmation. He’d round out a progressive senior economic team.

Dean Baker, the founding director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told me: “Gene’s views have genuinely evolved from when he was in the Clinton administration. While I would not have wanted the Gene Sperling of 25 years ago to hold a top position in the Biden administration, I think the Gene Sperling of today would be an outstanding pick as head of OMB.”

If Dave Dayden wrote this article, I would be more comforted by this choice. But it’s not. It’s Robert Kuttner who sorta leans left, but by the by, he’s still a neo-liberal. That’s why I highlighted a particular point. He doesn’t embrace MMT, as far as I know.

I am wondering why Baker nor Bernstein wasn’t in the mix for this position.

Indigenous Standing Rock Activist Imprisoned for Resisting Grand Jury

A full four years since the powerful Oceti Sakowin prayer camp at Standing Rock fought the pipeline’s construction, Indigenous water protector Steve Martinez was jailed this month in relation to his presence there — although he has not been convicted or even accused of a criminal offense. In no uncertain terms, Martinez’s current detention by federal authorities makes clear that state violence against Indigenous climate struggle is far from a thing of the past.

A photograph of Steve Martinez as provided by his legal team. Photo: Courtesy of the Water Protector Legal Collective
Martinez is being held for his refusal to give testimony before a federal grand jury, a notoriously secretive judicial process that has historically been weaponized against activist communities. Grand jury resisters like Martinez are detained under a torturous peculiarity in U.S. law that permits a judge to hold a person in contempt of court if they refuse to cooperate with a grand jury subpoena. The grand jury resister can then be imprisoned with the express purpose of coercing testimony. If it can be shown that the coercion will not work, and the imprisonment is thus punitive, rather than coercive, such incarceration becomes illegal. It was for grand jury resistance that the incoercible Chelsea Manning was also recently imprisoned for over a year.

In Martinez’s case, the grand jury appears to fit within a pattern of the state using such processes to browbeat activists engaged in struggle. The grand jury ostensibly revolves around a 2016 incident in which another water protector at Standing Rock, Sophia Wilansky, was seriously injured; Wilansky has claimed that the police were responsible. Though grand juries are opaque, the authorities seem to have convened this latest assembly in an effort to prove a fanciful theory that the injury was caused by water protectors themselves — perhaps even the injured young woman. This is the context of Martinez’s resistance.

“The state should not be intimidating people and trying to blame us for harm they caused,” Martinez said in a statement released by supporters. “I didn’t want to lose my freedom, but they are not going to break me.”

THE U.S. IS near unique among nations for its continued use of grand juries. The U.N. Special Rapporteur for Torture last year suggested that coercive confinement to force people to testify against their conscience meets the definitional criteria of torture and violates international human rights law. For over a century in the U.S., federal grand juries have been used to investigate and intimidate social movements — from the late-19th-century labor movements, to the Puerto Rican independence fighters and black liberationists of the last century, to environmentalists, anarchists, and Indigenous activists more recently. The grand jury before which Martinez has been called to testify appears particularly suspect.

While the black-box nature of such proceedings permits the government dangerous secrecy over its prosecutorial intents, this grand jury ostensibly relates to the investigation of events leading to the maiming of Wilansky in November 2016. Wilanksy almost lost her arm when she was struck by a high-impact munition during a standoff with police during the Standing Rock protests. Martinez, who had access to a car and was near the scene, drove a bleeding Wilansky, bone and tissue protruding from her mutilated arm, to meet an ambulance at a nearby casino.

Wilansky and those present with her that night insist that her grave injury was caused by a concussion grenade lobbed by a sheriff’s deputy of the Morton County, North Dakota, sheriff’s office, whose officers were attacking water protectors that night. Morton County has continuously denied accusations of excessive force, blaming the water protectors, and even Wilansky herself, for her injury. The county claims that it was a protester’s propane canister that exploded and ripped through Wilansky’s arm, despite the fact that medical reports deemed that the injuries are not consistent with a propane tank explosion.

For Martinez, the latest grand jury constitutes a demand to assist the government’s effort to blame water protectors for Wilansky’s injury. Martinez had already resisted a grand jury subpoena in 2017, which the government withdrew before he could be jailed for contempt. It beggars belief that the government is in earnest calling a new grand jury for a criminal investigation around Wilansky’s injury, four years after the fact.

Prosecutors say that the delay is due to their previous inability to locate Martinez — a preposterous claim, given that the water protector has since 2017 primarily been living in the small city of Bismarck, North Dakota, a town of just 70,000, where the federal court is small enough to share a building with the post office.

It is “inherently suspect that they” — the federal government — “expect us to buy … that they are suddenly interested in pursuing a criminal investigation.”
This grand jury’s timing is all the more suspect: It was assembled hurriedly just four days after a significant ruling in the civil case brought by Wilansky against Morton County. A judge ordered that the parties involved in the civil case could subpoena federal law enforcement to hand over shrapnel taken from Wilansky’s arm during her eight-hour surgery. FBI agents visited Wilansky in the hospital and seized both shrapnel and items of the young woman’s clothing. Ever since, Wilansky has been fighting to have the items returned; the shrapnel is expected to serve as dispositive evidence that she was struck by a law enforcement grenade.

Since 2018, attorneys for Wilansky have expressed concerns that the FBI may have damaged or even lost the evidence. The government, meanwhile, justified their refusal to return the property with reference to an ongoing criminal investigation, although no arrests were made, and indeed no available evidence suggests that anyone but law enforcement bears responsibility for her injuries. In calling a grand jury now, the government has grounds to claim that it cannot hand over the shrapnel for the civil case, as it requires the evidence for its own federal investigations.

Moira Meltzer-Cohen, one of the attorneys representing Martinez, who has defended a number of previous grand jury resisters, including Manning, told me that it is “inherently suspect that they” — the federal government — “expect us to buy that, after four years, after voluntarily withdrawing one subpoena, that they are suddenly interested in pursuing a criminal investigation, just four days after they are put on notice that they may now, finally, be compelled to hand over the critical evidence in this matter.”

“THERE IS A long history of grand juries being used to intimidate politically disfavored groups, from abolitionists to union organizers, anti-war advocates, and civil rights activists,” Meltzer-Cohen said in a separate statement. “This grand jury, which criminalizes movements for native sovereignty and environmental justice, is one more instance of such abuse.”

Given the secretive nature of federal grand jury proceedings, the government is under no obligation to prove the legitimacy of its actions. Martinez, meanwhile, is caged as collateral damage: yet another victim of this country’s unending violence against Indigenous life. He can be held for the length of the grand jury, up to 18 months. If the overseeing judge agrees with what is clearly the case — that Martinez will not be coerced to speak — he should by law be immediately released.

Martinez’s lawyers are challenging his incarceration on both procedural terms and by stressing that it is already punitive and thus illegal. The contempt statute governing grand jury witness incarceration explicitly states that coercive imprisonment must be at a “suitable place.” In the midst of a global pandemic in which prisons serve as petri dishes and incarcerated people are contracting Covid-19 and dying in vastly disproportionate numbers, the excessively punitive nature of any imprisonment is undeniable. Martinez has a number of health issues that place him at high risk for complications were he to contract Covid-19, including hypertension and diabetes. Numerous incarcerated individuals with similar health issues who have been convicted of crimes have been given compassionate release due to the coronavirus pandemic. Martinez’s continued imprisonment, without criminal charge or conviction, is, as Meltzer-Cohen put it, “definitionally punitive.”

Anyone who cares about the fight for life against environmental devastation should recognize the necessary centrality of Indigenous-led struggle. Appeals to the Biden administration for robust climate policies cannot overlook those who have been, and remain, on the very frontlines: the water protectors like Martinez who continue to face and fight repression.

“Standing Rock may have been four years ago, but it’s not over,” said Martinez’s partner, Leta Killer, an Oglala Lakota and Arikara water protector, in a video rallying supporters. Killer, who met Martinez at the Oceti Sakowin camp, added in a statement: “Feds are still grasping straws trying not to be held accountable for the terrible things law enforcement did to peaceful, prayerful Water Protectors.”

Apologies if this is a dupe.

Sanders ‘confident’ $15 minimum wage would be allowed via reconciliation

With little Republican support for President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package, Democrats have pushed to include a $15 minimum wage via reconciliation, a move that could help avoid a GOP filibuster but would have to be approved by the Senate parliamentarian.

While Biden is not optimistic a minimum wage measure would pass under reconciliation rules, Sanders, the new chair of the Senate Budget Committee, is confident the parliamentarian would greenlight it.

“Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is not incidental to the federal budget and is permissible under the rules of reconciliation,” Sanders said in a statement. “The CBO has found that the $15 minimum wage has a much greater impact on the federal budget than opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and repealing the individual mandate penalties — two provisions that the parliamentarian advised did not violate the Byrd Rule when Republicans controlled the Senate.“

“I’m confident that the parliamentarian will advise next week that we can raise the minimum wage through the reconciliation process.”

Under the Byrd rule, the Senate can’t include “extraneous matter” via the reconciliation process. The Byrd rule considers provisions that don’t change revenues or outlays to be “extraneous,” or makes changes to revenues or outlays that are “merely incidental.”

Sanders’ argument leans on a Congressional Budget Office report that found the minimum wage increase would drive up the deficit by $54 billion over a decade.

The CBO’s report found the increase would move close to a million people out of poverty but would cost the nation 1.4 million jobs.

Biden has not been as confident as the Vermont Independent about the prospects of minimum wage working via reconciliation, though he supports a $15 minimum wage.

“I really want this in there but it just doesn’t look like we can do it because of reconciliation,” Biden told a group of mayors and governors last week. “I’m not going to give up. But right now, we have to prepare for this not making it.”

Even if the parliamentarian approves the minimum wage hike, moderate Democrats may not all be in support of the move via reconciliation, which could imperil the legislation. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has said a minimum wage increase isn’t “appropriate” for reconciliation.

“It is not a budget item. And it shouldn’t be in there,” Sinema previously told POLITICO.

Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, agrees with Biden. Speaking on Fox News Saturday morning, Cardin said he supported a minimum wage increase but the Byrd rule poses challenges.

“He’s expressing the reality of where we are in the United States Senate,” Cardin said.

DoD watchdog to review Trump’s U.S. Space Command relocation

The Department of Defense’s inspector general announced Friday it will review the Trump administration’s decision to relocate U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs, Colorado, to Huntsville, Alabama.

Why it matters: The inspector general will investigate whether the decision — announced a week before Trump left office — complied with Air Force and Pentagon policy.

Between the lines: At a campaign rally in Colorado Springs in 2020, Trump signaled the command would remain at Peterson Air Force Base, AP reports.

Trump held the rally with then Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who lost his 2020 reelection bid, and Colorado, unlike Alabama, voted against Trump in November.
Multiple states, including Florida and Texas, waged lobbying campaigns with the Trump administration to host the site of the new headquarters.
The big picture: The last-minute change to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama blindsided Colorado officials, who have urged the Biden administration to reconsider, according to AP.

Space Command — established in 2019 as a unified combatant command — is designed to help protect space assets that the military relies on for all types of warfighting, Axios’ Miriam Kramer and Jonathan Swan report.

The headquarters is expected to bring with it upward of 1,500 jobs.

I wish there were a way to defund the damn unit. Having said that, it actually makes sense to move it to Huntsville, but we all know Trump played favorites on states. It’s a blow to the Springs though because it is also a college town, and the pandemic wiped out many jobs in higher education sector.

My friend @aoc came to Houston, bringing over $3 million with her for hurting Texans. It’s what you do, cause that’s who we are – Americans. #TexasRebuilds pic.twitter.com/e2qk6uOSIn

— Adrienne Bell (@AdrBell) February 20, 2021

I’m proud to support the historic efforts of @BAmazonUnion seeking to unionize with @RWDSU.

Working Americans deserve the dignity and well-being that a union can help provide, and I encourage those in Bessemer, Alabama to vote yes. #1u pic.twitter.com/A5HTRSFzzD

— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) February 21, 2021

Tweet for today:

The United States government https://t.co/SuLxHozN52

— Bryan Giardinelli 🥸📸 (@BreatheNewWinds) February 21, 2021