But you already did. You signed a weaker than water bill that will not prevent any of this. Get the guns out of murderers' hands. Thoughts & prayers don't help when 315 shootings have occurred since Jan 1.

— Benny🌹 (@Benny06) July 5, 2022

Happy 4th of July! Let us recommit today to building a future that works for all of us, not just the few. pic.twitter.com/RrnhJOpx46

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 4, 2022

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/05/politics/democrats-frustrated-biden-lack-of-urgency-supreme-court-setbacks/index.html

Debra Messing was fed up. The former “Will & Grace” star was among dozens of celebrity Democratic supporters and activists who joined a call with White House aides last Monday to discuss the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

The mood was fatalistic, according to three people on the call, which was also co-organized by the advocacy group Build Back Better Together.

Messing said she’d gotten Joe Biden elected and wanted to know why she was being asked to do anything at all, yelling that there didn’t even seem a point to voting. Others wondered why the call was happening.

That afternoon, participants received a follow-up email with a list of basic talking points and suggestions of Biden speech clips to share on TikTok.

The call, three days after the decision eliminating federal abortion rights, encapsulates the overwhelming sense of frustration among Democrats with Biden. It offers a new window into what many in the President’s party describe as a mismanagement permeating the White House.
Top Democrats complain the President isn’t acting with — or perhaps is even capable of — the urgency the moment demands.

“Rudderless, aimless and hopeless” is how one member of Congress described the White House.
Two dozen leading Democratic politicians and operatives, as well as several within the West Wing, tell CNN they feel this goes deeper than questions of ideology and posture. Instead, they say, it gets to questions of basic management.

More than a week after the abortion decision, top Biden aides are still wrangling over releasing new actions in response, despite the draft decision leaking six weeks earlier.

White House counsel Dana Remus had assured senior aides the Supreme Court wouldn’t rule on abortion that day. A White House press aide assigned to the issue was walking to get coffee when the alert hit. Several Democratic leaders privately mocked how the President stood in the foyer of the White House, squinting through his remarks from a teleprompter as demonstrators poured into the streets, making only vague promises of action because he and aides hadn’t decided on more.

Then, Biden’s July 1 meeting with governors to talk about their efforts to protect abortion rights was planned so last minute that none of those who attended came in person, and several of those invited declined to rearrange their schedules to appear virtually.

Multiple Democratic politicians who have reached out to work with Biden — whether it’s on specific bills, brainstorming or outreach — often don’t hear anything back at all. Potential appointees have languished for months waiting to hear if they’ll get jobs, or when they’ll be done with vetting. Invitations to events are scarce, thank you calls barely happen. Even some aides within the White House wonder why Biden didn’t fire anyone, from the West Wing or at the Food and Drug Administration, to demonstrate some accountability or at least anger over the baby formula debacle.

Inside the White House, aides are exhausted from feeling forever on red alert, batting at a swarm of crises that keeps growing — enough for White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to make an offhand joke about the constant “eleventh hour” decision-making in the building when under fire at a recent daily briefing.

Several officials say Biden’s tendency to berate advisers when he’s displeased with how a situation is being handled or when events go off poorly has trickled down the ranks in the West Wing, leaving several mid-level aides feeling blamed for failings despite lacking any real ability to influence the building’s decision-making. That’s contributed to some of the recent staff departures, according to people familiar.

Democrats worry the lack of decisions and authority are deepening their own midterm problems and feeding a sense that the President couldn’t truly handle the extra complications of a run for reelection in 2024 — and along the way, reinforcing narratives that he’s an old man not fit for the moment.
The President who campaigned on putting America back together again after four years of deep divisions appears to have stopped trying, supporters say.

“There’s no fight,” another Democratic member told CNN. “People understand that a lot of this is out of his hands — but what you want to see is the President out there swinging.”

‘Throwing spaghetti at the wall’

A year and a half in, the Biden administration is struggling to untangle supply chains and tackle soaring inflation— which is by far the biggest problem facing Democrats up and down the ballot in November.

“It’s got to look like you’re taking actions,” said California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna. “Any economist who says the President shouldn’t do anything on the economy should be fired. They can be at a think tank, they can be a professor. But they shouldn’t be at the White House.”

“There’s not a frontline office out there that isn’t frustrated with the lack of action coming from the White House on inflation,” one aide told a member fighting to hang onto an endangered seat. “At the very least, the President should get caught trying to bring prices down just about every day.”

White House aides say that is exactly what they are doing. In the past few months, the administration has announced a historic release of oil from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve, invoked the Defense Production Act to address baby formula shortages, and even floated a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax.

But none of these moves have solved the problems: The baby formula shortage persists, inflation remains high and gas prices, though slightly down from their high, are still hovering close to $5 a gallon.

Biden’s support of a gas tax holiday was the subject of months of deliberations among officials — many of whom were against it and privately suggested it was a purely political step to show initiative on gas prices, and only recently put the question in front of Biden directly.
“It had the appearance of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks,” one official said privately.

Bottlenecks and indecision

Sources also say that decisions in the White House are getting bottlenecked, as veteran advisers urge Biden to take the long view, rather than focus on fast responses. Few are trying, and even fewer succeeding, in pushing back against Biden’s infamous inability to settle on decisions, on everything from whether to lift tariffs on Chinese imports or cancel student loan debt.

Biden has been mulling what to do on student loans for more than a year. White House staff drafted a memo on the topic weeks ago, and a final decision is now being targeted ahead of when the current repayment pause expires on August 31 — further aggravating progressives who say Biden’s indecision is hurting people with debt who are trying to make plans, and losing much of the political benefit he could get from it.

“We picked that date for a reason: we’d like to see where the inflation problem is, and we’d like to see where our legislative agenda is. There’s nothing uncertain or hesitating about it: it’s a deadline, and we will deliver on it,” White House spokesperson Chris Meagher told CNN about the timeline.

Taking time on major decisions isn’t a bad thing, White House aides argue, and neither is taking seriously, for example, that independent agencies like the FDA and US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention are supposed to function without the President’s direct interference — something Biden allies say is a key differentiation from the last President.

“This is what separates him from Donald Trump, and it’s an important separation. He says, ‘I am not a dictator. I am not an autocrat,'” said Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor who’s coordinating the implementation of the $1 trillion infrastructure law passed last year.

White House officials also lament not getting more help from their colleagues in Congress, most recently on trying to lower gas prices. If congressional Democrats thought Biden took too long to offer his gas tax holiday proposal, the thinking in the White House goes, they could have easily come up with another idea of their own, and sooner. Aides also eagerly point out how much support multiple polls show for Biden’s proposal.

Landrieu ticked off a number of initiatives the White House has gotten behind and hoped for congressional action by Democrats only to have bills languish.

“The President has called on Congress to pass a reconciliation bill. The President has called on Congress to pass the COMPETES Act. The President has called on Congress to reduce prescription drugs, to reduce costs to health care, to fill in the gap on the challenges with the Affordable Care Act and to continue to basically do everything they can, and Congress has gone, ‘Oh, well, we can’t do anything.’ So it’s just the nature of politics sometimes you just say, ‘I wish somebody else would help,’ when we’re really this is all hands on deck,” said Landrieu.

‘Scapegoating the President’

Throughout, the President’s defenders argue, Biden is the one who’s taking action, even if much of that action is out of view. They hold up the gun legislation passed by Congress as a perfect example of how his approach works even if not always in the spotlight: Biden deliberately left the negotiations to the rank-and-file members to avoid aggravating a delicate situation.

White House aides checked in daily, and Biden spoke several times with Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who led the efforts. “The President’s early attention to this issue was a big part of setting the table for the process that led to the bill’s passage,” Murphy told CNN.
Inside the White House, criticism and proposals from fellow Democrats are often seen as the latest version of, essentially, presidential fan fiction — the kind of visceral, political statement that sounds great from the sidelines but doesn’t actually make sense.

For example, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s abortion reversal, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul have called for the White House to open up federal lands to abortion clinics, a move that lawyers inside and some outside the government believe would backfire by leaving abortion providers and women open to potential prosecution as soon as they stepped off the federal lands.

Fundamentally, Biden and his aides are operating from a very different sense of the presidency. He’s being realistic, they believe, and responsible — not just because his options are truly limited, but specifically because he’s trying to restore the structural integrity of the government and of democracy after four years of Trump. They also see him as taking a more integrated view — moving on canceling student loan debt, for example, they believe, could imperil whatever is left of the legislative agenda that is starting to emerge from Senate negotiations.

Biden has been batting away complaints that he’s out of sync with his party since before he launched his presidential campaign.

“The country didn’t elect Joe Biden because they wanted a Democratic Donald Trump to go out there every day and divide the country more,” said Cedric Richmond, who left his own seat in Congress to serve in the West Wing for Biden’s first year. Democrats attacking Biden are “scapegoating the President, or distracted and not focusing on what they should be focused on. He saved democracy once by beating a tyrant. He’s doing it again, but he doesn’t do it by beating his chest.”

The attacks Biden is facing now are “the same foolishness that got us Donald Trump — ‘Hillary wasn’t good enough,’ ‘She’s not fighting hard enough,'” Richmond said. “That’s what got us Donald Trump. And that got us Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Case closed.”

So after 5 weeks of the Dobbs leaks, the response to Roe being overturned was:

– Singing on the steps of Congress
– Rep. Nancy Pelosi reads a poem
– Congress goes on vacation (one they’re still on)
– Call Debra Messing and other celebs

Am I missing something?

— Nina Turner (@ninaturner) July 5, 2022

.@POTUS has ordered U.S flags to fly at half staff in honor of the victims we lost in the Highland Park, Illinois shooting. pic.twitter.com/reKQOWUbXD

— Matt Hill (@MattHill46) July 5, 2022

More thoughts and prayers.

Pete Buttigieg says he “hasn’t seen all the math come back” on @SenSanders’ proposal to fine airlines for cancelling & delaying flights they knew couldn’t be staffed.

15,542 flights were delayed & 1,564 were cancelled July 4 weekend.

Sanders wants fines up to $55,000/passenger. pic.twitter.com/GZwT2Ao7eB

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) July 5, 2022

So much for Build Back Better…

Is it time for a national public health system?

Since the early months of the covid-19 pandemic, it’s been clear that the U.S. public health system needs major improvements. Now, a blue-ribbon commission assembled by the Commonwealth Fund has issued a report with a rather provocative conclusion: The United States needs a national public health system.

To better understand the rationale, I spoke with three commission members. Former New York state health commissioner Nirav R. Shah explained to me that there is a fundamental problem with public health in America that long predated the pandemic: “It’s disorganized, under-resourced, poorly coordinated and disconnected from the health-care delivery system.”

He’s right. There are nearly 3,000 local health departments with vastly different capabilities. Depending on where someone lives, they could be served by a well-funded city or county health agency that provides many safety-net services, or one with a handful of staff and a shoestring budget. The result is evident in the disparities seen during the pandemic: Some areas were quick to set up big vaccine clinics and free testing sites; others struggled with the basics of contact tracing.

The Commonwealth Fund commission wants to set a national standard for health department capabilities and help them achieve it through new funding. The latter part, to me, is the most important part of their proposal: a federal government commitment to sustained and reliable funding for local public health.

When I served as Baltimore’s health commissioner, my biggest challenge was lack of staff. The same people who worked on the opioid epidemic and maternal and child health were called on to respond to weather emergencies and disease outbreaks. Every crisis was like robbing Peter to pay Paul, with each new problem diverting attention away from existing priorities.

Over the past decade, state and local health departments have lost 15 percent of their essential staff due primarily to budget cuts. A one-time grant, such as Congress’s American Rescue Plan, is not a long-term solution. “Millions of dollars of pandemic funds are unspent because they come with a fiscal cliff,” Shah explained. “If you hire people this year, what happens to them next year?”

That’s why the commission is seeking approximately $8 billion from Congress every year, with the bulk of it addressing local workforce shortages. The rest will pay for a revamped data system that connects public health agencies and hospitals. Julie Gerberding, another commission member, told me that this could have made a big difference during the early days of covid-19.

“If we had real-time information exchange, we might have detected hotspots much earlier,” she said. “We might have noticed outbreaks at meatpacking plants, and that the average age of intensive care admissions was going up; we might have focused efforts sooner at workplaces and nursing homes.”

Commission members are quick to point out what a national public health system is not. Gerberding, who served as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the George W. Bush administration,, is clear that the proposal isn’t to federalize public health, but to set standards. “Our goal is to make sure that there are basic public health protections for everyone regardless of where they live.” She is careful to say even as there needs to be better national coordination, local and state control is paramount.

I think this distinction is really important. Local health departments should be better funded so that they can respond to emerging crises without having to pull their staff from other day-to-day duties. Federal agencies can also be better coordinated among themselves (another issue that the report addresses).

But public health in United States won’t work with top-down control. City and county health officials know their communities best and must be empowered to make local decisions. There is also a real danger to giving the federal government too much power. Just think about what could happen if a president who, for example, promotes anti-vaccine conspiracy theories has greater control over public health policies.

Is the Commonwealth Fund proposal realistic? If Congress can’t get its act together to allocate $10 billion for boosters and antiviral pills, what are the chances that it will agree to a new annual line item? The chair of the commission, Margaret Hamburg, who served as the health commissioner of New York City and then head of the Food and Drug Administration, is undeterred. “Trillions of dollars have been lost because of the pandemic,” she told me. “The amount we’re asking for is such a small amount compared to what the absence of a coordinated public health response has cost us.”

Put another way, the United States can’t afford not to reform its underfunded and outdated public health system. I hope policymakers will read this report and use it as a blueprint for taking concrete, practical actions to safeguard our nation’s health.

Plenty of activist organizations endorse political candidates, but @nycDSA is trying to do something more — building a permanent bloc of socialist state legislators in Albany who are proud members of DSA and work in concert with the group. https://t.co/SX3s8ZdOHX

— Peter Sterne (@petersterne) July 5, 2022

SCOTUS spent a lot of time this term making it harder for you to sue govt. officials when they violate your constitutional rights: https://t.co/c21QLHTUfw

— Matt Ford (@fordm) July 5, 2022