The Progressive Wing

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/us/biden-filibuster-senate.html

The future of the Senate filibuster is increasingly in doubt, even though Republicans have yet to use one to block a single Democratic bill in the Biden era.
While the real showdown lies ahead, President Biden’s endorsement this week of a change in the rules governing the Senate’s signature procedural weapon represented a major shift in the political dynamic. Almost overnight, the prospect of Democrats taking action to weaken the minority party’s power to stall legislation has shifted from a far-off theoretical question to a fast-moving push with presidential buy-in.
What Mr. Biden said — a tempered embrace of requiring filibustering senators to hold the floor — was far less important than the fact that he said it at all. For Mr. Biden, a protector of the Senate if there ever was one, to declare that the filibuster needed updating was a big far-reaching deal, to paraphrase the former vice president’s hot-mic comment on enactment of the health care law.
“As a student and creature of the Senate, he certainly knows how to choose his words carefully on this subject,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, who has suddenly emerged as one of the most prominent advocates of overhauling the filibuster. “I think he’s acknowledging the obvious — that the filibuster has really shackled the Senate and made it far less productive.”
Democrats still lack the votes to overturn the current rules, which effectively require proponents of a bill to muster a 60-vote supermajority to advance it. The prospect that they might try has uncovered more queasiness among Democratic senators, underscoring the reality that progressive activists and senators eager to modify the filibuster have plenty of work to do if they are to prevail.
But they already knew that. To them, the fact that Mr. Biden and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia and the party’s most outspoken backer of the filibuster, have both expressed some openness to change is more than they could have imagined at this stage.
“That’s light years ahead of where I would have hoped we’d be,” said Adam Jentleson, a former top Democratic Senate aide who is advising the antifilibuster forces. “There’s a long way to go, but we are ahead of schedule.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/18/why-republicans-want-to-keep-filibuster/?utm_source=reddit.com

But an interesting argument is bouncing around that explains why McConnell might have reacted this way — and why it’s actually a show of weakness and fear on McConnell’s part.
The idea is that McConnell doesn’t want a simple-majority Senate because many things Republicans want to do can’t get 50 GOP votes anyway, because they’re deeply unpopular. Meanwhile, important GOP priorities that can get 50 GOP votes, such as tax cuts, can be passed via the simple-majority reconciliation process: This is how the 2017 tax cut passed.
As Benjy Sarlin put it in a Twitter thread, there aren’t “many GOP priorities that could get 50 votes.” And Sarlin added a nuance: If the filibuster were done away with, and Republicans did take the majority, there would be tremendous pressure from the conservative grass roots to pass unpopular items, something McConnell might prefer to avoid.
This has created a situation in which McConnell’s threat to pass Republican legislation in a filibuster-free Senate is an empty one. And it isn’t just that those policies might be hard-pressed to command simple majorities.
The threat is empty for another reason: The things Republicans want to pass would be easier to reverse than the things Democrats want to do. In a filibuster-free Senate, if one party does things by simple majority, then power will shift eventually, and the other party can just theoretically undo via simple majority the things that the opposition did while in power. The rub is that this would be harder for Republicans to do than Democrats.

“As Benjy Sarlin put it in a Twitter thread, there aren’t “many GOP priorities that could get 50 votes.” This doesn’t seem to be backed up by recent evidence?

Shame on the dems that joined in to create the filibuster of today and the 60 vote requirement to change it.

Actually, it’s kind of true. Really the only thing the Republicans tried to pass of any consequence when they had the trifecta for the first two years of was the 2017 tax cuts for the rich. They had to use reconciliation and had zero Dem votes. They tried to get rid of the ACA and replace it with crap, but they failed because all Dems voted against along with a few Republicans (Collins, Murkowski, and McCain).

There’s actually only a 50 vote requirement to change it. The problem is getting those last few Dem votes.

i’d say the tax cuts are tremendously consequential, but i see what you’re saying about the rest of it. not sure i’d want to bank on it forever, tho. and how much would they have to change to get those last few votes? probably not a lot to end up with still very damaging legislation. imho

but i’m not wedded to my opinion. i just really really wish that if we’re going to completely do away with it, we have someone who’s going to make it worth it. and imho, we don’t.

The🐢 screwed over dems more times than we can count the past decade, If Dems dont push for thier adjenda shame on them !!!

I should add, as much as i despise Walker, He did one thing that Dems should note; he had power and enacted his policies no matter how Wi Dems objected. Nationally it sucks that Dems nationally will not unite and have the balls to enact Dem policies and screw the 60 vote BS like the turtle did

https://newrepublic.com/article/161765/republicans-losing-filibuster-fight-mcconnell

That said, the fact that political realities have brought Manchin and Biden to this point suggests that they could be pulled even further if Biden’s agenda starts getting gummed up. And that prospect has spooked moderate Republicans in the Senate enough that they’ve joined yet another probably doomed effort to prove that bipartisanship on major legislation is still possible—not a gang of six, eight, or even 14, but a grand Group of 20, which includes enough Republicans to garner 60 votes on a bill. “The so-called G-20 hopes to develop bipartisan approaches to issues like the minimum wage, immigration and infrastructure, in the process providing a compelling argument against axing the filibuster,” Politico reported Thursday. “If it can produce results.”
This is the “good cop” half of the right’s strategy. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of course, is the “bad cop.” In his latest speech warning Democrats on Tuesday, he reiterated his promise to bring the Senate to a complete halt if they go nuclear and offered a vision of what Republicans might accomplish without the filibuster should they regain Congress and the presidency. “We’d strengthen America with all kinds of conservative policies with zero input from the other side,” he said. “Nationwide right-to-work for working Americans. Defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities on day one. A whole new era of domestic energy production. Sweeping new protections for conscience and the right to life of the unborn.”
Read a certain way, McConnell’s remarks amount to a remarkable and consequential admission: Kill the filibuster, he claims, and Republicans will pass policies they regularly promise to their voters but that they evidently have no real plans to pass if the filibuster stays. To the extent the right has a federal legislative agenda, it’s largely a hallucinatory one. And McConnell’s ambivalence about making it real is sensible. The policies he’s outlined are largely redundant to the policy status quo conservatives and moderates have shaped over the last 40 years—can you imagine what it would be like if it were difficult to unionize?—and highly unpopular. This is why Republicans have narrowed their focus to courts, cuts, and culture—filling posts voters haven’t heard of with conservative justices, slashing tax rates, and spending the rest of their time babbling about how Democrats want to cancel Hop on Pop. It remains dubious as a strategy for winning over the broad electorate, but we’re confronting the filibuster in the first place because Republicans’ power in the American political system doesn’t depend on them doing so.
But their calculus might change a good bit if the filibuster really goes away. The basic strategic assumption undergirding federal politics in this country is that the Democratic Party is incapable of fully utilizing the power it wins. If it could, losing elections would be significantly more costly in policy terms for the right, and the elections themselves might be harder to win, progressives hope, if Democrats manage to pass democratic reforms.
So, naturally, conservatives are getting a little anxious about where things are headed. On Wednesday, National Review’s Jason Richwine laid the right’s cards down and stated the obvious—Democrats have no strategic reason to keep the filibuster and might really do away with it unless Republicans present a more convincing parade of horribles. “Potential legislation must seem long-lasting and transformative if it is to function as a genuine threat, but here Democrats have the advantage,” Richwine wrote. “They have policy options that fit the ‘long-lasting and transformative’ criteria, while Republicans have no comparable threats to wield. If the filibuster ends, destruction is not mutually assured.”

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/19/politics/abortion-supreme-court-conservatives-thomas-roberts/index.html

There is a danger to them of serious backlash if the S Ct does move ahead to seriously restrict abortion rights now that they have the power.

Conservative Supreme Court justices have demonstrated a desire to reverse prior decisions on abortion rights. The question, with Chief Justice John Roberts no longer the undisputed swing vote on abortion, is when and how far at least five justices will go to overturn rulings that support a constitutional right to end a pregnancy.
The aims of individual justices, based on their recent writings, range from reversing Roe v. Wade to forbidding clinics from challenging restrictions on behalf of women to relaxing the standard that states must meet to limit women’s access to the procedure.
“Our abortion jurisprudence has spiraled out of control,” Justice Clarence Thomas has written. He is the court’s most consistent critic of abortion-rights rulings dating to the 1973 Roe v. Wade, which made the procedure legal nationwide.
Justice Neil Gorsuch has separately complained that justices’ standards are muddled and said last year, in a “highly politicized and contentious arena … we have lost our way.”
Justice Samuel Alito has attacked decades-old precedent that allows physicians and other third parties to sue states over regulations that might impinge on a pregnant woman’s rights. His position would reduce challenges to state abortion laws.
New internal tensions in the age-old controversy have emerged, as the six Republican-appointed justices on the right wing diverge on curtailing precedent and more sharply clash with the court’s three remaining Democratic-appointed liberals.
The justices could move a step closer to their next chapter as they meet privately on Friday to consider whether to take up Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Then again, the newly reconfigured court may want to wait to take any dramatic action on abortion. Multiple related laws are headed its way as states continue to adopt new prohibitions, including the near-total Arkansas abortion ban passed earlier this month with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest.
While the number of abortions nationwide has declined over the decades, culturally and religiously fraught state restrictions, and subsequent litigation, have not diminished. Conflicts have deepened on the increasingly conservative Supreme Court. Former President Donald Trump, who named three new justices, had vowed to appoint judges who opposed Roe v. Wade.
If the justices were to take up a 15-week abortion ban and consider reversing decades-old precedent, it would intensify national divisions.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/biden-justice-department-voting-rights-act-redistricting-shelby-county

There’s no playbook for how President Biden’s Justice Department can protect minority voting rights in the coming round of redistricting.
When state legislatures draw their maps later this year, it will be the first time that most of them do so since the Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision in 2013.
The wave of restrictions on ballot access that followed that decision has been well documented. A similar surge is underway again, stemming in part from former President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
But as the Justice Department weighs how it will respond to the slew of new state measures that will make voting harder, it will also have to figure out how to approach the uncharted territory it’s entering on the redistricting front.
Before the 2013 ruling, any state or jurisdiction covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — which intended to give the federal government supervision over states with a history of discriminatory voting practices — had to either submit its maps for DOJ approval or get them okayed by a three-judge federal court.
That meant that more than a dozen states had to get federal approval for their maps, including the some of most populous states, as well as several in the South, where Republican dominance in statehouses incentivizes extreme gerrymanders.
Now those states will be drawing their maps, for the first time, without having to worry about the federal government giving them a hard look (a few of the states in question do now have independent or advisory commissions, but those don’t necessarily guarantee that minority communities are protected in accordance with the VRA).
“It’s hard to overstate how important that loss of direct involvement is,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
“DOJ could choose to sue about the redistricting plans. It could choose to intervene in suits by others. But that’s more affirmative effort than what was required when preclearance applied to so many remapping plans.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-politics-aoc-future-primary-schumer?utm_source=reddit.com

The in depth profile is behind a paywall but a short audio clip is available

AOC IS NOT THE LEFT’S SAVIOR: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hears the chatter about her becoming Speaker of the House. The swag touting a 2024 White House run is hard to miss. And she’s constantly bugged about whether she’ll primary Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer next year. But she has a message for everyone focused on what’s next instead of what’s unfolding now: Quit pining for the “one” and help build a legion of changemakers.
Key quote: “Right now we need millions of people in the streets. We need mass labor organizing. We need pressure on the Senate,” Ocasio-Cortez told Insider. “We have to make these windows happen.”
In her own words: Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Insider for our in-depth profile of where she stands and what fellow Democrats see in her future.
“Don’t think you can just elect people and go back to brunch,” she said, imploring more people to get involved in the political process.

This is good and unexpected

We'll see the full language Monday, but this would require roughly 140/159 counties to extend daily hours and add one additional Saturday of voting, while also allowing larger, more diverse, Democratic-leaning counties to offer a full slate of weekend early voting.
Big deal.
— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) March 18, 2021

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/18/the-nightmare-politics-of-fighting-the-recovery-bill-476830

It may be an overstated political cliché that if you’re explaining, you’re losing. But you’re almost certainly losing if you’re explaining, ahead of time, why the economic boom you’re expecting on your opponent’s watch shouldn’t be attributed to your opponent. One lesson of the volatility of the past dozen years is that fairly or not, the president’s party tends to get the credit or blame for the economy—or at least for the way people perceive the economy. Biden is visiting swing states this week to sell American Rescue Plan’s focus on giving Americans vaccines and money, but with economists across the ideological spectrum forecasting explosive growth, many veterans of the 2009 stimulus wars believe the economy will be all the sales pitch the bill needs.
“We’re going to see some fairly amazing economic numbers, and I imagine for the next few years, people will look around and say: ‘This is pretty darn good!’” says American Enterprise Institute fellow James Pethokoukis, a conservative economist who believes the Biden stimulus is somewhat excessive. “I’m sure Republicans will try to spin this, and I have long-term concerns myself, but the reality of a crazy strong expansion will be tough to spin away.”
Democrats seemed to have learned a bunch of lessons from the backlash against the Obama stimulus—that it’s important to sell your own product, that it’s even more important not to trash your own product, and that it’s supremely important to make sure your product works as well as possible. Even though the Obama White House pushed for the biggest possible stimulus it could get out of a bailout-weary Congress in 2009, most economists believe the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would have produced a stronger recovery if it had been even bigger. Biden was determined to make sure his relief act didn’t undershoot as well, even if that meant he would face criticism for ignoring the budget deficit and failing to attract Republican votes.

So far, though, political history is not repeating itself. The approval rating for Obama’s recovery plan dropped more than 20 points from his election until he signed it into law three months later, even though Obama himself remained quite popular at the time. By contrast, the Biden stimulus is polling in the 70s, while Biden himself is polling in the fifties. If the pandemic ends and the economy roars, as independent forecasters like J.P. Morgan are predicting, the rescue plan could get even more popular, and the strategy of No could get even more difficult.
“It worked in 2009, when the economy was still struggling, but I don’t see how it works if we get mammoth job creation numbers,” says Republican strategist Tony Fratto, a former assistant Treasury secretary in the Bush administration. “Maybe you could say the economy is running too hot, but I don’t think ‘the Biden bill was too effective’ would sell too well.”

https://t.co/WtiWwG4oTh pic.twitter.com/2uu0V7gfZn
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) March 19, 2021

Benny added this late last night. Ezra Klein actually brings up some good points about it

It was always a weird feature of the Obama administration that the President of the United States had admitted to past drug use that could’ve disqualified people from working for him. And that’s not a critique of Obama – these rules are dumb, and they stretch across admins.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) March 19, 2021

good cover for getting rid of lefties. at the end of the article, someone says they are targeting young people from states where it’s legal. at least in Oregon, those are often Berners.

Wonder how many were PoC?

Captain Jay Baker removed from case after racist and "bad day" comments. NOT ENOUGH!!! He single handedly proved the existence of racism in this case and also the need for gun safety. We deserve freedom from gun violence after a "bad day."https://t.co/tnKZ3A1cIh via @usatoday
— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) March 19, 2021

More racism

“The Black officer struggle was different. We fought against not just people that hated what we represented, but they hate our skin color also." https://t.co/qocI4XVTt8
— The Hill (@thehill) March 19, 2021

wow. bet George Floyd would’ve loved a cop saying that he was having a bad day for allegedly using counterfeit money.

Man, people really love taking money away the police and giving it to non-police to do the same job. If only that could be summed up in some pithy slogan. https://t.co/LcCdSAFthz
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) March 18, 2021

https://theappeal.org/the-lab/polling-memos/oregon-poll-replace-police-with-trained-first-responders/?fbclid=IwAR15A_UkJBOE72KZDmQadj0vxgfQNp2rJbTNGsFL3rz52kxf9nuwHUjZYuQ#.YFJWMzvr4Ds.facebook

actually talking about the Cahoots program that is most strong here in Eugene, i’m proud to say.

$1 billion for CAHOOTS Act included in American Rescue Plan https://t.co/xJxaNDFtnX
— Corporate Socialist Raking It In (@genofthesea) March 19, 2021

Oregon
Oregon Poll: Replace Police With Trained First Responders

Yay, Eugene, the hub for Cahoots!

CAHOOTS has been so successful, the Oregon legislature is on the verge of taking the program state-wide. The relevant bill, which will come through the House Committee on Behavioral Health, had a public hearing on February 24, 2021.
A recent poll by The Appeal and Data for Progress found that a staggering 81 percent of Oregon voters support funding any city or county in Oregon willing to adopt the CAHOOTS model. Just 16 percent of respondents opposed such initiatives—a gap of 65 points. The support is both strong and transpartisan, with 89 percent of Democrats, 84 percent of independents, and 68 percent of Republicans supporting the CAHOOTS model.
And it’s not just Oregon. CAHOOTS has inspired national momentum behind similar life-saving emergency response programs. A pilot program modeled after CAHOOTS launched recently in San Francisco, with others planned in Oakland and Portland, Oregon, and hundreds more requests for program details from communities nationwide.

National

$1 billion for CAHOOTS Act included in American Rescue Plan https://t.co/xJxaNDFtnX
— Corporate Socialist Raking It In (@genofthesea) March 19, 2021

sorry about the double. meant to delete the first one.

Solidarity can be a common word again.

New with @spencersoper: Inspired by their Alabama co-workers, Amazon employees in places like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Denver have started talking about unionizing https://t.co/oK7UCYZWua “I feel as though helping create a union at Amazon is something I could be meant for” https://t.co/zUSRrYC1DM
— Josh Eidelson (@josheidelson) March 19, 2021

he’s right.
https://twitter.com/BreatheNewWinds/status/1372941423931056131?s=20

Off to meet Johnson & Johnson! grandkids, here i come! and maybe nannying, again, eventually. eeeeee! :o)

Mr Benny prefers to get a J&J dose, but I’ve suggested he not hold his breath. Starting April 12, he can sign up for the vaccine, and I’m guessing it’s the same medicine I received.

i lucked out and looked for a pharmacy that had it. in line now.

Hope the side effects aren’t too bad. Good luck!

so far, so good. does that mean i’m not as protected?

Benny

🙂

Everybody experiences different side effects from what i read ,you should be protected. I had CV so experienced more side effects but have has 3 negative tests since the last shot

I had a sore arm and headaches for 36 hours, but used pain management medicine for it.

ouch! 3 days…😢❤️🐻 i am a little under the weather now— earache (which i often get), little nausea, sleepy. invited down in may sometime to be with fam. 💖

yayyyyy ✌️🌊🐋🌝

Dr. Anthony Fauci told the top lobbyist for the biotech drug industry that he opposes price controls on COVID-19 vaccines. "Obviously it's a profit driven industry … I've never seen a successful attempt at controls." Hopes industry works in "good faith." https://t.co/yX9ANWMgYS
— Lee Fang (@lhfang) March 19, 2021

Big Pharma in “good faith” yeah right!!!. Whyat are you smoking Fauci, i want some

LieparDestin

A real filibuster

Retro. This is not reform.

if you pair it with 41 no votes, and more than one person doing it, ity a kind of reform. Yeah, if it’s only Bernie and no one else believes in anything, then we’re all fracked anyway. lol.

LieparDestin