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5/23 News Roundup & Open Thread – Bernie Inches Toward Backing Impeaching Trump, Sanders/Lee Introduce New Financial Transaction Tax & More

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Bernie Sanders inches toward backing impeaching Trump

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday inched closer to supporting impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, saying “it may be time” for the House Judiciary Committee to determine whether to start the process.

“I do understand where House members are coming from. And you’ve got this guy who is refusing to respect the Constitution, equal powers, and is rejecting requests for members of the administration to come forward,” the 2020 Democratic White House hopeful said on CNN.

“So, you know, I think it may be time at least to begin the process through the Judiciary Committee to determine whether or not there are impeachment proceedings.”

Calls by Democratic lawmakers to launch an impeachment inquiry have ramped up since Monday, when the administration directed former White House counsel Don McGahn to defy a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee to testify publicly and produce documents related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

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Sanders said Wednesday that if Trump “continues to not understand the Constitution of the United States, the separation of powers, the fact that the Congress has every right to subpoena,” it might be time to start the impeachment process.

Sanders, a Vermont Independent, also said House Democrats must remain focused on progressive legislative priorities.

“The House has got to continue going forward, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, making sure that all of our people have health care, dealing with climate change, dealing with voter suppression,” Sanders said. “If all we talk about is Trump, Trump, Trump, I think he benefits.”

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5/22 News Roundup & Open Thread – Sanders Response To Iran Intelligence Briefing l,Hear the Bern Episode 7 & More

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No War With Iran, Say 62 Groups in Letter to Congress

The White House is continuing its march to war with Iran, but resistance is growing—most recently by a group of 62 organizations that issued an open letter to Congress on Tuesday calling for the representative body to exercise its power and stop U.S. aggression.

In the letter, the 62 groups call on Congress to “fulfill its constitutional duty and enact further constraints to unequivocally prevent the administration from launching an unauthorized war.”

The push to war has been led mainly by President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump himself has been noncommittal, expressing support and hesitance in nearly equal measure depending on the day.

Nevertheless, a number of the letter’s signatories said in a statement, the administration’s actions require pushback from Congress.

“Trump and his National Security Advisor John Bolton are taking this country to the brink of a completely avoidable military confrontation,” said Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian-American Council. “It’s time for Congress to turn its words into action by passing legislation to stop Trump and Bolton from starting an illegal war.”

Under the Constitution, only Congress has the ability to declare war. But that right has been eroded over the last seven decades as presidents have used language like “police actions” and other euphemisms to go around Congress and start wars at will. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has been used (pdf) over 37 times by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Trump in over 14 countries.

In response to congressional cooling on war, the administration on Tuesday used a briefing from Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan to continue to raise the specter of a vicious, calculating foe while telling members of Congress that the threat, for now, has abated.

“I’d say we’re in a period where the threat remains high,” Shanahan told reporters Tuesday. “And our job is to make sure that there is no miscalculation by the Iranians.”

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Gwen DuBois, the president of the Chesapeake Bay chapter of PSR, made clear that the horror that could be seen in Iran was previewed in Iraq. In a war with Iran, DuBois said, “likely hundreds of thousands if not a million or more people would die, as in Iraq, from the indirect consequences of war—such as infections and the collapse of the healthcare system.

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5/21 News Roundup & Open Thread – Bernie Sanders’ Plan To Desegregate Schools Is A Long Overdue Democratic Priority & More

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Bernie Sanders is bringing back the most underrated education policy

Over the past two decades, education reform has been a major topic of debate and policymaking, from President Bush’s No Child Left Behind bill to President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative. Reforms have generally followed the pattern of adapting mechanisms from the for-profit business world to “fix” supposedly broken aspects of the public education system: weakening teacher unions, replacing public schools with privately-run charters, tying teacher pay to test score results, and so on.

Yet there is one idea that was once a major focus of reform efforts, but has been set aside for years: racial desegregation.

That is, until now. Last week, Bernie Sanders released a plan to revitalize school integration efforts. It’s both an excellent plan and brings attention to a vitally important racial justice issue.

Historical context is important here. For a couple decades after the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the federal government put real effort into forcing school districts to integrate their populations. The main objective was to equalize educational opportunity, particularly in the South. Stuffing black populations into crummy, under-resourced institutions was one of the major mechanisms of the Jim Crow apartheid system — but if white and black children went to the same schools, then they should receive education of a similar quality (or at least a lot closer than before).

Because cities across the nation were (and remain) extremely segregated, and whites violently resisted any attempt to integrate actual neighborhoods, the only realistic option was using transportation to achieve a decent demographic mix. But this led to an enormous white backlash across the country.

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So what would Sanders do? He would end the prohibition on funding desegregation transport (a relic from that 1970’s backlash), provide several pots of money to encourage schools to desegregate, triple funding support for the poorest schools, expand funding for minority teacher education, ramp up desegregation orders, and provide more money for school construction and maintenance, (as well as several other policies not directly related to desegregation). It’s an excellent start, to say the least.

School integration has been outside the main political discussion for a long time, and it’s long since time we started talking about it again.

Bernie Sanders deserves enormous credit for bringing it back on the national radar and offering a meaningful plan to address it.

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5/18 News Roundup & Open Thread – Bernie Sanders Unveils His K-12 Education Plan & More

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Bernie Sanders will call for ban on for-profit charter schools

In a major education policy speech set to be delivered Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders will call for a ban on all for-profit charter schools, a position that puts him directly at odds with the Trump administration and becoming the first of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates to insist on such a move.

The Vermont independent also will call for a moratorium on the funding of all public charter school expansion until a national audit on the schools has been completed. Additionally, Sanders will promise to halt the use of public funds to underwrite all new charter schools if he is elected president.

A senior Sanders campaign official shared the details of policy proposal with CNN ahead of the Sanders speech in South Carolina — the crucial early primary state where the African-American vote is a key voting base. The moratorium on the funding of public charter schools was initially called for by the NAACP; Sanders will say in his speech that he supports the group’s efforts.
Sanders will also make the case that the growth of charter schools has done disproportionate harm to the black community because it has pulled public dollars away from community public schools.

He will give his speech in Orangeburg on the anniversary weekend of the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.

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According to the campaign, Sanders will outline a series of reforms he deems necessary to charter school policy. Among them:

*Mandating that charter schools comply with the same oversight requirements as public schools
*Mandating that at least half of all charter school boards are teachers and parents
*Disclosing student attrition rates, non-public funding sources, financial interests and other relevant data
*Matching employment practices at charters with neighboring district schools, including standards set by collective bargaining agreements and restrictions on exorbitant CEO pay
*Supporting the efforts of charter school teachers to unionize and bringing charter schools to the negotiating table

Sanders will concede that the initial goal of charter schools — to help kids with unique learning needs — was admirable. But he will argue the system has been corrupted by wealthy activists who spent millions to privatize these schools, leaving them unaccountable and draining funds from the public school system.

Update: Bernie is holding a TH in Denmark, SC.

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5/15 Open Thread & News Roundup – Sanders Speaks Out Against War With Iran, Hear The Bern Episode 6 & More

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Hear the Bern is a new podcast from Bernie 2020 that explores the people, stories and ideas that are driving this political revolution.

On Episode 6, hear about how the campaign is about bringing people into the political process who would otherwise never get involved in order to defeat Trump.

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5/14 News Roundup & Open Thread – Road to a Green New Deal Tour feat. AOC & Bernie Sanders!

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Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders is going to be joining the final stop on the Road to a Green New Deal Tour.

We’ve got an amazing lineup of speakers and I’m positively thrilled to be joining them to launch the next phase of our campaign: putting together an unprecedented youth intervention to make sure the Green New Deal is at the center of the debate as the Presidential primary heats up.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Sen. Bernie Sanders

Sen. Ed Markey

Judith Howell, SEIU 32BJ

Payton Wilkins, Historically Black College and Universities Climate Consortium

Naomi Klein, author and activist

Alexandra Rojas, Executive Director of Justice Democrats

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, policy lead for the GND, New Consensus

Jeremiah Lowery, DC environmental justice organizer and former city council candidate

5/10 News Roundup & Open Thread – Bernie: “I Can Defeat Trump By Speaking To His Base”, AOC and Sanders Plan Would Cap Outrageous Credit Card Rates & More

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Sanders: I Can Defeat Trump By Speaking To His Base, “Exposing Him For The Fraud He Is”

Sen. Bernie Sanders told MSNBC on Thursday that his strategy for defeating Donald Trump in 2020 will be to speak to his working-class base and “expose him as the fraud that he is.”

“Trump essentially lied to the American people,” Sanders said. “Who were hurting, and for too many years the Democratic leadership ignored that pain and ignored the midwest and the flyover states.”

STEPHANIE RUHLE, MSNBC: Can your ambitious, progressive plans pull in all Democrats? Nancy Pelosi has said the number one priority for the Democratic Party should be to defeat Donald Trump. Do you believe your plans can pull the party together? Since Joe Biden officially entered the race we’ve seen you drop in the polls.

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. Look, what I believe is the way you beat Trump, who is the most dangerous president I expect in modern history if not the history of our country, is bringing more people into the political process. That means speaking to working people who out of frustration in some cases voted for Trump. It means getting young people involved in the political process and voting. What we saw in 2018 was a good step forward, and as more young people voted than in previous years but we have to do a lot better than that.

So you expand the base, talking to working people and young people, and we expose Trump for the fraud that he is when he said that he — when he campaigned on being a friend of the working people. You do that, I think I can win. I can defeat Trump and every poll that I have seen suggests we are ahead of Trump, and I think that is the correct way to go forward.

STEPHANIE RUHLE: Can you swipe his base? President trump believes — and many do — that his base is bulletproof. But you and he had a similar message in the last election that it was economic populism. He hasn’t delivered for those voters. Can you take them from him?

BERNIE SANDERS: Absolutely. Look, Trump essentially lied to the American people who were hurting, and for too many years the Democratic leadership ignored that pain and ignored the midwest and the flyover states. So when Trump tells the American people during his campaign that he is going to provide health care to everybody — remember that? Everybody. Well, then he fights to throw 32 million people off of the health insurance they have.

He said, hey, I’m a different type of Republican. I will not cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. Look at his budget. Massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare, billions in cuts to Social Security. So I think that we can expose him for the fraud that he is and provide an alternative progressive agenda, which really does speak to the needs of working families.

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5/9 News Roundup & Open Thread – Bernie Sander’s Speech @ The DC IAM Union Legislative Conference, Warren Unveils CARE Act & More

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2020 Democrats show off labor cred at union event

Democratic presidential hopefuls clambered to showcase their labor credentials this week in a bid to wow members of an influential union whose endorsement could offer a critical boost in their party’s 2020 nominating contest.

Over the course of two days at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) legislative conference, seven contenders recalled personal ties to organized labor, railed against international trade agreements and decried right-to-work laws that they said had gutted organized labor protections across the country.

The appearances underscore just how eager Democrats are to court members of major trade unions at a time when many labor groups are reluctant to wade in early to the 2020 presidential race.

So far, only the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) has backed a candidate in the Democratic primary, announcing late last month that it would endorse former Vice President Joe Biden.

Among the candidates who spoke at the IAM conference were Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Klobuchar and Booker, as well as Reps. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and former Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.).

The IAM announced earlier this week that it had reformed its presidential endorsement process to include a vote by its full membership, a change spurred by lingering frustration among many members with the group’s early endorsement of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary contest. The union has nearly 600,000 active and retired members.

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“It might be easier to do it the old way. We could sit down with the candidates and negotiate in a private meeting, asking them to make promises they may or may not keep,” Bob Martinez, the machinist union’s international president, wrote in a letter to members this week.

“Or we could really make them work for our endorsement.”

Each candidate that took the stage on Tuesday and Wednesday appeared intent on doing just that.

Sanders touted that he had “walked on more picket lines all over this country than I can remember,” all the while vowing to put an “immediate moratorium” on cuts to pension benefits overseen by the federal government if elected next year, a pledge that drew lingering applause from conferencegoers.

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5/8 News Roundup & Open Thread – Sanders Discusses Healthcare, Student Debt, Trade with China on PBS & More

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Bernie Sanders on trade with China, health care and student debt

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., slammed the Trump administration’s approach to trade policy in a PBS NewsHour interview Tuesday, arguing that the U.S. needs to do more to protect workers but “not the way Trump is dealing with it.”

The remarks come in a week when President Donald Trump threatened the harshest tariffs on China yet, causing stocks to plummet Tuesday.

“I think we do need new trade policies that are fair to the working people of this country not just to the CEOs, but as usual, I think Trump gets it wrong in terms of implementation,” Sanders told the NewsHour’s anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff.

Sanders, who has opposed many of the same trade deals Trump has, including the Trans Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement, said his policies are aimed at stopping companies from sending jobs overseas.

On “Medicare for All”: The 2020 presidential candidate pushed back on a recent Congressional Budget Office report that said moving to a single-payer health care system “could be complicated, challenging, and potentially disruptive” and could deter people from entering the medical field.

Sanders called the nation’s current health care system “dysfunctional,” and said most of the pushback for his Medicare for All plan is coming from insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

When asked whether Americans would be able to choose their doctors under his plan, Sanders argued that Americans do not have true “freedom of choice” right now because insurance companies decide which doctors are included in their networks.

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Sanders also dismissed concerns among some Democrats that former Vice President Joe Biden could win more support among moderate, middle-class voters. Biden, who entered the presidential race last month, is already polling above Sanders, who was the front-runner before Biden entered the race. Sanders has slipped to second place in most polls in recent weeks.

“At the end of the day, we are going to be fine because I think our message is going to appeal to working people,” Sanders said.

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5/7 News Roundup & Open Thread – Sanders: Medicare for All Will Save Americans From Health Care Crisis, “The Pact for a Green New Deal” & More

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Bernie Sanders: Medicare for All will save Americans from health care crisis

Today in America, we have more than 27 million people without any health insurance. Millions more who have employer-based insurance are being fleeced by skyrocketing premiums and prescription drug prices, and they are often thrown off those private plans when they change or lose jobs.

This is great for the 64 health care CEOs who were paid $1.7 billion in 2017. But this is an economic and medical emergency for millions of Americans. The good news is that we have a very straightforward solution that draws from our own country’s past success: We can guarantee health care as a right to all by expanding Medicare, the most popular and successful program in American history.

Medicare is the country’s most popular and cost-effective health care program. Americans who are covered by Medicare report significantly higher satisfaction rates than those with private insurance. That is not surprising: Unlike private insurance, Medicare does not threaten to bankrupt people in order to enrich greedy CEOs. Instead, it guarantees coverage.

Now here’s more good news: By expanding that coverage to everyone, we will save Americans money. Under a Medicare for All system, we will no longer be paying those exorbitant CEO compensation packages, or the absurdly high administrative costs in the private insurance system. We will also be able to negotiate lower drug prices.

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Just as America did in the lead up to the passage of Medicare, we are building a national movement for Medicare for All. Polls now show that a majority of Americans support the idea. That is because of our grassroots organizing work, but also because of the crushing reality more and more Americans face.

No 30-second television ad from a dark money group will convince a person that the huge health care bill they are looking at from their insurance company is acceptable. No radio ad from a corporate lobbying group will convince a person that their inability to pay exorbitant prices for medicines is acceptable.

To be sure, as we gain momentum, the health care industry will shift tactics and try to persuade us to accept incremental changes. But the health care crisis is so intense, we must not accept any substitute. Medicare is a successful model for American health care; we can, we must and we will expand it to cover everyone.

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