President Biden’s support for autoworkers helped them make big wage gains, and labor organizers are looking to bring about similar gains elsewhere as carmakers transition to electric vehicles.The United Automobile Workers’ big wins with Detroit’s Big Three automakers could also prove to be a significant political victory for President Biden, who openly sided with striking workers to pressure the companies, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, to produce generous concessions.But the U.A.W.’s turn now toward nonunionized automakers like Tesla, Hyundai, BMW and Mercedes will test whether Mr. Biden’s support, as well as measures that he signed into law, will produce the expansion of organized labor that he has long promised.For unionized autoworkers, many of them in the swing state of Michigan, the tentative contracts, which are awaiting rank-and-file ratification, would bring substantial wage gains, “another piece of good economic news,” Mr. Biden said on Monday. The tentative contracts would lift the top U.A.W. wage to more than $40 per hour over four and a half years, from $32 an hour. Stellantis, maker of Chryslers, Jeeps and Ram trucks, agreed to reopen its assembly plant in Belvidere, Ill., near the border of Wisconsin, another crucial swing state.“The impact of Biden’s public support can’t be overstated,” said Steve Smith, a spokesman for the umbrella A.F.L.-C.I.O., which includes the autoworkers’ union. “There’s a lot of upside here for Biden. The contracts set a new standard for the industry that clearly show the benefit of collective bargaining.”Beyond that, G.M. agreed to bring its electric vehicle battery joint venture, Ultium, under the national contract, a boon for Ultium workers but also a pressure point for unions as they seek to organize battery plants sprouting up around the country. Such plants are using generous subsidies from Mr. Biden’s signature legislative achievements — especially the climate change provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act — as the administration pushes to speed the country’s transition to electric vehicles.“This historic contract is a testament to the power of unions and collective bargaining to build strong middle-class jobs while helping our most iconic American companies thrive,” Mr. Biden said Monday evening.Jason Walsh, the executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which has brought together labor and environmental groups to marshal support for the clean energy transition, said the contracts, if ratified by U.A.W. workers, would be a watershed moment for the economy — and possibly the planet.“The legislative intent behind the industrial policy in the Inflation Reduction Act was an implicit deal: We as a nation are going to invest in the sectors of the economy that are important to the country and the planet in the long run, but in return we want the companies that receive those benefits to maximize returns to workers, communities and the environment,” Mr. Walsh said. To that end, the contract settlement is “huge,” he added. “It highlights the lie peddled by Donald Trump and at times the Big Three that the E.V. transition means lower-quality jobs in a nonunion work force.”The U.A.W. actions took on strikingly political meaning. In May, the autoworkers’ union opted to withhold an endorsement of Mr. Biden’s re-election, openly expressing “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition” that the president was pushing through legislation and regulation.Last month, Mr. Biden became the first sitting U.S. president to join a picket line. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, castigated striking workers, saying “they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.”Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, visited a nonunion parts plant in Michigan to rail against electric vehicles and to demand that Shawn Fain, the new and aggressive U.A.W. president, endorse him for another term in the White House.Mr. Fain said he would never do that, and supporters of the president pointed to provisions in federal laws championed by Mr. Biden that may have helped secure the deals. Subsidies for electric vehicle production will go only to domestic manufacturing plants, meaning Detroit management could not credibly threaten to move new auto plants overseas in search of cheaper labor.But union officials did not say on Monday what their intentions were for a presidential endorsement. Mr. Fain did make clear over the weekend that he was not resting on his laurels with the gains achieved with its escalating wave of strikes against the Big Three. The union plans to target Tesla, the nonunion automaker that dominates the domestic electric vehicle market, as well as foreign automakers with factories in the Southeast, where unions have struggled to gain a foothold. Some of the biggest new plants are under construction in Georgia, a critical swing state for 2024, including a Hyundai electric vehicle plant that will be the state’s biggest economic development project ever.Organizers will be able to lean on provisions of the three big laws that Mr. Biden signed — a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, a $280 billion measure to rekindle a domestic semiconductor industry and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $370 billion for clean energy to combat climate change — to push their case.Tucked into all of those laws were measures to give unions the power to effectively tell employers that accept rich federal tax incentives this: You must pay union-scale wages and use union apprenticeship and training programs, so you might as well hire union workers.How electric vehicle and battery makers respond to the U.A.W.’s next push will go a long way toward determining whether Mr. Biden can make good on his promise that his effort to curtail climate change and wean the nation off fossil fuels will indeed produce “good union jobs.” More

Senate Republicans moved on Thursday to grant themselves vast new powers for a sprawling election-year effort to discredit the Trump-Russia investigation, with one committee authorizing subpoenas for dozens of high-level Obama administration officials, and another lining up a similar vote for next week. The actions by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and […] More

The ruling answered a question that an appeals court had never addressed: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected former President Donald J. Trump’s claim that he was immune to charges of plotting to subvert the results of the 2020 election, ruling that he must go to trial on a criminal indictment accusing him of seeking to overturn his loss to President Biden.The 3-0 ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed Mr. Trump a significant defeat, but was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Mr. Trump is expected to continue his appeal to the Supreme Court — possibly with an intermediate request to the full appeals court.Still, the panel’s 57-page ruling signaled an important moment in American jurisprudence, answering a question that had never been addressed by an appeals court: Can former presidents escape being held accountable by the criminal justice system for things they did while in office?The question is novel because no former president until Mr. Trump had been indicted, so there was never an opportunity for a defendant to make — and courts to consider — the sweeping claim of executive immunity that he has put forward.The panel, composed of two judges appointed by Democrats and one Republican appointee, said in its decision that, despite the privileges of the office he once held, Mr. Trump was subject to federal criminal law like any other American.“For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,” the panel wrote. “But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects him against this prosecution.”The panel’s ruling came nearly a month after it heard arguments on the immunity issue from Mr. Trump’s legal team and from prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith. While the decision was quick by the standards of a normal appeal, what happens next will be arguably more important in determining when or whether a trial on the election subversion charges — now set to start in early March — will take place.. More

Overall Rankings Jamelle Bouie Gail Collins Daniel McCarthy Michelle Cottle Nicole Hemmer Melanye Price Peter Wehner Mimi Swartz Héctor Tobar Will Wilkinson Overall Rankings Jamelle Bouie Peter Wehner Mimi Swartz Daniel McCarthy Gail Collins Michelle Cottle Nicole Hemmer Melanye Price Héctor Tobar Will Wilkinson Night was a failure Overall Rankings Night was a success Gail […] More

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storylettersHow to Give Senators CourageA reader suggests that term limits might help. Also: Online incivility.Jan. 31, 2021, 12:00 p.m. ETTwo of the few Republican senators willing to defy President Trump: Mitt Romney, left, and John McCain.Credit…Brooks Kraft/Corbis, via Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Peter Beinart argues that older senators are more likely to show political courage (“The Few Courageous Senators,” Op-Ed, Jan. 16), so “Americans should elect more who are near the end of their political careers.”He may be right that older senators are more concerned with their place in history, rather than short-term political advantage. But Mr. Beinart does not mention the obvious solution to our dysfunctional Senate: Term limits might give all senators more courage.If all senators know that they are “near the end of their political careers,” they might be willing to vote their conscience, instead of cowering to avoid a tough re-election challenge. They would be compelled to think about their place in history now, rather than wait until they are septuagenarians or octogenarians.Chris RasmussenHighland Park, N.J.Cruelty in the Chat Box  Credit…Hokyoung KimTo the Editor:Re “When the Online Troll Is a Co-Worker” (Business, Jan. 25):Another work-from-home platform that invites misuse is the videoconference, and its irresistible chat function, which typically allows for private as well as full-group messaging.Although the chat can be helpful for quick clarifications or information posting, it’s also a superconductor for everything from sidebar social exchanges to critical and sometimes cruel commentary on the participants or presenter, any of which can be inadvertently sent to everyone by mistake.It’s the virtual version of passing notes or whispered conversations: distracting, dangerous and rude. The only effective antidote is to have the host of the meeting disable the chat function.What’s next? Virtual spitballs?Raleigh MayerNew YorkThe writer is a management consultant.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More