Nesters,
With our number of commenters (and less to open the Nest) dwindling down to almost a trickle, I decided to make it an open thread for the week.

If someone would care to start another thread another day this week (and put on the headline for how long) I can change the date to reflect the end of this thread.

Summer is here, Bernie is not running, so unless anyone has any objection to have a weekly open thread on Mondays and last through Friday (this week is longer due to the holiday weekend), I think we can still connect with it that way.

The downside is if the comments get over 100, folks find it laborious to go through all of the comments, but otherwise, it’s pretty manageable.

CAMPAIGN STATEMENT:

My friends and family know that my wife @leeladaou and I have been caring for our ailing parents. It's been tough to do that and focus full time on a presidential campaign.

Here is the official @marwilliamson campaign statement for why I decided to leave. pic.twitter.com/AjnlLD763N

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) May 22, 2023

Daou is not the only one to leave the campaign; deputy manager also resigned.

RFK leads popular polling after Biden, who still isn’t reaching in the upper 40’s. If the debt ceiling passes with major cave-ins, or defaults, Biden is likely to land in the Carter lane politically.

Bernie is about to be Rachel Maddow’s first guest tonight. Probably will be an extension of this tweet from yesterday:

Speaker McCarthy wants to take away nutrition assistance from 1.2 million women, infants and children while giving a $1.8 trillion tax break to people who inherit over $1 billion. That socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the rest ideology is beyond unacceptable.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 21, 2023

I’ll post the video tomorrow.

7 News Outlets Reimagining Political Journalism in Smart Ways

Political journalism is in crisis. Over the past few months, BuzzFeed News, FiveThirtyEight, Vice and a number of other outlets that specialize in political news have substantially cut staffing and coverage. Even CNN and The Post have laid off journalists. And the political media is struggling to cover an increasingly radical Republican Party without seeming to be on the side of the Democrats.

But there is good news, too. Several new or expanding outlets are addressing some of political journalism’s long-standing shortcomings: insufficient coverage of state and local government and of people who aren’t White and upper-income; an over-prioritization of elections over policy; a failure to recognize that the courts are a central front in today’s political conflicts.

And this matters. I don’t care about the state of political journalism just because it’s my field. The coverage decisions and priorities of news outlets affect the behavior of elected officials and the lives of everyday citizens. Good political journalism is vital.

Here are seven outlets that are reimagining political journalism in smart ways:

1
The American Prospect

If you want to understand what’s happening inside the Biden administration and the broader Democratic Party, the Prospect is a must-read. The magazine focuses on policy, not elections. But it’s not boring or overly wonky. The Prospect smartly explains how major industries, electoral considerations, and particular politicians and strategists drive policy decisions.

The Prospect generally shares President Biden’s ideology, but the magazine isn’t just reflexively praising Democrats and bashing Republicans like MSNBC. It often delves into Republican strategy and fissures among Democrats.

“A lot of what we do is uncovering the structures of power that are just outside the spotlight. We’ll tell you how power works and what powerful people are wielding it, from Washington to the corporate boardroom,” said David Dayen, the Prospect’s executive editor.

2
Balls and Strikes
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Until recently, many news outlets treated the judiciary, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, as a high-minded institution not caught up in the partisan battles dividing the rest of the country. But there has been a push to tell a different, more accurate story: The judiciary is partisan and political, too. And the Republican Party in particular has stacked the courts with appointees who carry out its policy goals.

Balls and Strikes, which is an arm of the progressive group Demand Justice, most embodies this style. One of the site’s stories last year criticized NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg’s close ties with then-Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, arguing that a journalist is supposed to scrutinize those in power, not befriend them. Articles on the site have also shown the crucial role largely unknown conservative lawyers and activists play in pushing cases that result in right-wing rulings.

“Our coverage is premised on the reality that interpreting the law is an inherently political act with real-world consequences, and that a given outcome is not just or desirable or legitimate simply because a person wearing a robe managed to string together a few sentences about, ‘why the law compels it,’” said Jay Willis, the site’s editor in chief.

3
Bolts

When there is a high-profile incident involving race or the police, the news media tends to descend on a given city for weeks, write a lot of stories and then move on. Not Bolts. The magazine recognizes that voting rights, gerrymandering, policing and other issues that often play out at the state and local level are increasingly at the center of American politics. A recent Bolts story not only explained how Atlanta police have arrested protesters who object to a massive police training facility being built there, but described similar actions being taken against activists across the country.

“There’s a large audience looking to delve into the local weeds of power and policy beyond where they live,” said Bolts founder and editor in chief Daniel Nichanian.

4
The Guardian US

The U.S. edition of the London-based Guardian is one of the few outlets that does these three things at once: covers up-to-minute news like the New York Times or The Post; openly acknowledges its left of center ideology; writes about politics without the “insider” approach (unnamed sources, an obsession with consultants and strategy) that makes so much political coverage hard to parse if you aren’t already an expert.

The results are great. A recent five-part series on Ron DeSantis described his policies as Florida’s Republican governor in detail, used blunt, non-equivocating language (stating that one of DeSantis’s goals is to “dilute Black political power”) and didn’t spend much time speculating about his poll numbers.

“We often describe our perspective as an outsider perspective or a global perspective. We’re not doing the latest inside scoop from the corridors of Congress. We’re looking at American politics with an eye to what matters to the rest of the world and the rest of the country,” said Guardian US editor Betsy Reed.

5
Hammer & Hope

This magazine was created by some of the activists and intellectuals who have been at the center of the Black Lives Matter movement. So Hammer & Hope takes it as a given that anti-Black discrimination still exists in America and concentrates on what should be done to address it.

For example, the magazine had tenant organizers in Kansas City, Mo., write a piece explaining their strategies to reduce evictions. In another article, leading BLM figures debated why the movement was not as successful as it hoped in getting policies on policing and other issues changed in the wake of the massive 2020 protests.

“We want to make a firmly practical difference by creating a space for discussing and circulating tactics and strategies around actual struggles,” said editor and co-founder Jen Parker.

6
Popular Information

Neither the grocer Kroger nor the restaurant chain Olive Garden was offering all of its employees paid sick leave during the early stages of the covid-19 pandemic. Many companies have broken their promises not to donate to Republican members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election results. Cameron Sexton, the GOP speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, purchased a house in Nashville through a trust, perhaps trying to obscure that he and his family may functionally live in Music City, not Sexton’s home district about two hours away.

Those are all stories that were extensively covered by other media outlets but were first broken by Popular Information. The site’s founder and editor, Judd Legum, was the research director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, in charge of digging up negative information about both Clinton and her opponents. Legum’s background has helped him carve out a unique role. He focuses on finding scandals, unlike most political writers. But he publishes regularly, unlike the investigative reporters at most large news organizations, who might only write a few times a year.

“If I identify a story that involves a lot of monotonous work to pursue effectively, that’s a good story for Popular Information,” said Legum.

7
States Newsroom

Local newspapers are shrinking, and most national media outlets mostly cover Congress and the president. That has left a huge and important void as both parties increasingly enact their policy agendas at the state level.

Enter States Newsroom. Over the past six years, the company has founded news outlets focused on state government in 34 states. They are usually quite small, only four to five staffers and a handful of contributing writers. But because so much is happening at the state level and there are so few reporters in most capitals, these operations are extremely valuable. I subscribe to the newsletter for the Kentucky Lantern and read it every day.

“In many states, we have more reporters in the capital year-round than any other news organization,” said Chris Fitzsimon, the director and publisher of States Newsroom.

I should emphasize that the Associated Press, CNN, the New York Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal and The Post remain the preeminent news organizations in America. Those six have huge numbers of journalists, consistently accurate coverage and try to reach people across geographic and ideological lines.

But political journalism is much less rigorous and well-staffed at the state and local levels, and those six big outlets also have their weaknesses. We need more political journalism, but we also need better political journalism. And amid all the bad news about the news, that better political journalism is emerging.

This is Perry Bacon Jr’s opinion in WaPo. I’ve posted it here as I’m happy to see The American Prospect at the top of the list, but he listed 4 digital ones I’m unfamiliar with: Balls & Strikes, Bolts, Hammer & Hope, and States Newsroom. States Newsroom is worth a look as twitter will continue to chase out organizations who post negative things about corporations pulling the political levers. I’m looking to see where else to find current political news that may offer some free articles or good summaries on a microblog, such as Post.news or Mastodon. I’ve been on Bluesky’s waiting list for a month, and I anticipate it will be later this summer before they open the floodgates.

The state of publishing has been disrupted in general, and I know with business information, one pays a lot more for a lot less content, all modules, which is what the Substack is beginning to look to me. I’ve mentioned to Ryan Grim at The Intercept (which I donate to each month) that I still don’t see the value proposition for consumers to see “notes” which is Substack’s alleged answer to twitter, but if you already subscribe to a few things on substack, trotting out a note once every week or so to highlight the one article you’ve penned, is not as current as The American Prospect.

The Guardian is hit or miss, but Bernie and David Sirota’s The Lever , occasionally post op-eds there.

For my own lenses for political journalism, I also think The Lever does solid reporting, as does The Intercept, The Nation, and Propublica.

Last year, Republicans & too many Democrats voted for an $80 billion increase in the Pentagon. We now spend $877 billion on the military while we have the highest child poverty rate of almost any major country. Any deficit reduction plan must include major cuts to the Pentagon.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 23, 2023

Amen, brother Sanders.

an argument that congress has no power to "regulate the internal affairs and operations of the Supreme Court" runs very quickly into the little problem that the supreme court cannot operate without congressional appropriations and that it owes its structure to statute https://t.co/yhGA4GBjwX

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) May 23, 2023

Ryan Grim

Biden is at his moment of maximum risk. Look out.

From the moment Joe Biden announced his candidacy, the biggest risk the country faced from a potential Biden presidency was that he would wind up in high-stakes negotiations with Republican congressional leaders, and those Republicans would fleece him blind.

For the past several months, Biden insisted that he wouldn’t ever be in that room, because he simply wasn’t going to negotiate with Republicans over lifting the debt ceiling. But he also poured cold water on invoking the 14th Amendment or minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin, which handed Republicans all the leverage. Biden has claimed to believe he has the authority to use the 14th Amendment, but today entered a suit saying the opposite. Biden also had the chance to lift the debt ceiling at any point from January 2021 until last December when Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., recently told Politico not doing so is one of his biggest regrets.

Instead, Biden went into negotiations with congressional Republicans — without a serious offer of his own. He made a few half-hearted suggestions that a better way to cut the deficit is to target hedge fund managers and the super rich. But when Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy objected, he dropped it. Talks continued at the White House between McCarthy and Biden Monday evening. But with Biden now negotiating the size of the cut, Democrats’ only hope is that Republicans can’t agree on what they’ll accept and they fail to seize the moment.

All of this is reminiscent of the last time Biden, as vice president, intervened in high stakes Capitol Hill negotiations. Afterwards, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ordered the White House to never send him down again. He did such a bad job that he got a worse deal out of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell than McConnell had already agreed to give Reid. I covered this moment in my last book, “We’ve Got People”, which was excerpted in The Intercept.

It all came at the end of 2012, and the circumstances were similar. President Barack Obama had just stomped Republican Mitt Romney at the polls in a post-Occupy campaign that centered on economic inequality. Democrats picked up two seats in the Senate, expanding their majority to 53 and adding Elizabeth Warren to their ranks. Though Democrats won more House votes nationwide and picked up a net of eight seats, Republicans held onto the House narrowly.

The major tax cuts pushed through by President George W. Bush were set to expire at the end of 2012, creating what was called a fiscal cliff. If Congress did nothing, taxes would go up on everybody. Harry Reid told me in an interview for “We’ve Got People” that going over the cliff was precisely his plan. Reid said: “I thought that would have been the best thing to do because the conversation would not have been about raising taxes, which it became, it would have been about lowering taxes.”

In other words, let all the rates go up, and then bargain with Republicans to reduce taxes just for the middle class and the poor. McConnell similarly knew the difficult position going over the cliff would put him in, and in talks with Reid, he agreed to let rates on people making more than $250,000 per year go back up.

Reid felt like he had successfully pushed McConnell to the brink; McConnell had a strong sense that Reid intended to go over the cliff and put Republicans up against a wall. It was now Sunday, December 30, 2012, and Democrats only had to hold out until Tuesday to find themselves in a dramatically improved political position, as the dawning of the new year would mean the tax cuts expired and automatically reverted to pre-Bush levels. At that point, it would be Republicans who would be left pleading for rate cuts.

In desperation, McConnell reached out directly to Vice President Joe Biden, calling him on the phone and explaining that Reid was refusing to be reasonable. Over the course of the day, McConnell and Biden struck a deal. A senior Republican aide told me: “Biden gave Republicans everything they wanted in exchange for fixing the fiscal cliff problem.”

Just like today, the fiscal cliff problem was only a problem because Biden allowed it to be. Reid would have been happy to drive the car off the cliff, and then fight it out amid the wreckage.

In the same way, Biden could have just ignored the debt ceiling, invoked the 14th amendment, declaring the debt ceiling unconstitutional, and dared Chief Justice John Roberts to blow up the global economy. McCarthy himself would publicly complain but be privately relieved that he had gotten through this moment with his speakership intact. Future presidents would thank Biden. If future Congresses wanted to rein in spending, they could rein in spending. But they could not threaten the global economy to do it.

On the morning of New Year’s Eve back in 2012, Reid was still feeling good about his position, still ignorant of what Biden had given away. Then McConnell took to the Senate floor and announced that he’d been in talks with the vice president, they were progressing well, and he was hopeful that they’d have legislation to move by the end of the day.

As details of the deal began leaking out, progressive Democratic senators were floored. A large group of them — including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Al Franken of Minnesota, and Tom Harkin of Iowa — stormed over to Reid’s office.

The deal was awful, they told Reid, and it had to be stopped. Reid told them what had happened, that it was out of his hands and that McConnell had gone around him to Biden. He said he was working on improving it and would be in touch throughout the day.

None of the senators had any business scheduled — it was New Year’s Eve, after all — so Sanders invited them back to his office in the Dirksen building. The Hart building has a popcorn machine, so Harkin asked his staff to bring some by. The crew ended up spending several hours together in Sanders’s office, thinking through potential strategies of opposition and waiting to hear from Reid.

Instead, one senator’s phone rang, and it was Joe Biden, calling to sell the deal he had cut. In classic Biden fashion, he offered a 10- to 15-minute soliloquy, a meandering argument that largely boiled down to: You can trust me; I’m your friend; this is a good deal. The senator could barely get a word in before the conversation ended.

Moments after he hung up, another cellphone rang, and it was Biden again. Unaware that the group was all together, Biden proceeded to call each of them, one after the other, delivering the same spiel.

Ultimately, it fell to Reid to drag the progressive senators into line. Once it was clear that the White House was on board with Biden’s deal, and McConnell was all in, that meant that there would be at least 70 or 80 votes for it. The progressive bloc could vote no, but it would only send a message of discord and have no effect on the outcome, Reid told them, coaxing them to support the deal he himself loathed. In the end, all the progressive senators except Harkin voted for the deal. It passed 89-8.

Years later, Reid still regretted how it went down. He told me: “If we’d have gone over the cliff, we’d have had resources to do a lot of good things in the country — infrastructure development — but it didn’t work out that way.” Letting all the tax rates go back to pre-Bush levels would have yielded the Treasury around $3 trillion over 10 years. Without the deal, taxes on dividend payments to the rich would have been set at 39.6 percent. Under the terms of the deal, they would be set at 20 percent, meaning that the super-wealthy would be paying lower tax rates on their passive dividend income than many working people would pay on their wages. It helped fuel the inequality that keeps getting worse, and added trillions to the debt at the same time.

Now Biden has another chance to be in the room, and so far, he’s getting outmaneuvered by Kevin McCarthy.