US Politics

This land is your landJoe BidenBiden restores beloved national monuments, reversing Trump cutsRestoration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante represents victory for advocates after protections were slashed Supported byAbout this contentHallie GoldenFri 8 Oct 2021 14.23 EDTLast modified on Fri 8 Oct 2021 15.11 EDTJoe Biden restored environmental protections on Friday to three national monuments and their vast expanse of vital ecosystems and sacred Indigenous spaces, reversing cuts made by Donald Trump.“These protections provide a bridge to our past, but they also build a bridge to a safer and more sustainable future,” said Biden. “One where we strengthen our economy and pass on a healthy planet to our children and our grandchildren.”Canada: win for anti-logging protesters as judge denies firm’s injunction bidRead moreBiden signed three proclamations that increased the boundaries of Bears Ears to 1.36m acres, while restoring the Grand Staircase-Escalante to 1.87m acres – both spanning large swaths of southern Utah. He also reinstated protections for the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine, about 130 miles off the coast of New England, and extended limits on commercial fishing.The proclamations unraveled moves made by Trump, in which he slashed 85% of Bears Ears, leaving wide swaths of the site vulnerable to mining and other commercial activities. The Grand Staircase-Escalante was cut by about half. In 2020, Trump also stripped the environmental protections for the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine, a marine monument home to more than 1,000 distinct species.After years of fighting back against cuts to the national monuments, the announcement served as a key victory for environmental and Indigenous groups. Many expressed their relief and gratitude.The interior secretary, Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet secretary, fought back tears as she applauded the administration’s actions for “bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice”.“This is a place that must be protected in perpetuity for every American and every child of the world,” she said, referring to Bears Ears.The monument, which was named for two striking buttes in south-eastern Utah, includes ancient cliff dwellings and sacred burial grounds. It is a place of worship and an important space for ceremonial activities, explained the Hopi Tribe vice-chairman, Clark Tenakhongva.“It’s on the same level as any kind of church or foundation or facility,” said Tenakhongva, who is also co-chair for the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. “It’s very important to the lifeline of all nations and all people.”Staff attorney Matthew L Campbell for the Native American Rights Fund, which represents three of the tribes that have been involved in a years-long legal battle to protect Bears Ears, including the the Hopi Tribe, said he was very excited that this day had finally come.“The tribes have fought long and hard to protect this area,” he said. “It’s a sacred place that is intricately tied to the tribes’ histories and who they are as a people and it certainly deserves the protections and we’re glad and happy to see that those protections are going to be restored.”Shaun Chapoose, chairman of the Ute Indian Tribe business committee and a member of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, said in a statement: “President Biden did the right thing restoring the Bears Ears national monument. For us the monument never went away. We will always return to these lands to manage and care for our sacred sites, waters and medicines.”Brad Sewell, senior director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s oceans program, said he was thrilled with the decision and the fact that it will help to preserve important marine wildlife and the deep-sea coral gardens within the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine national monument.“We’re very happy for the country. This action will preserve an extraordinary place – our newest blue park for generations to come,” said Sewell.But some Republican leaders have said they are disappointed with the decision and the “winner-take-all mentality” it represented.In a statement released with other state leaders, Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, said: “The president’s decision to enlarge the monuments again is a tragic missed opportunity – it fails to provide certainty as well as the funding for law enforcement, research, and other protections which the monuments need and which only congressional action can offer.”During Biden’s campaign for the presidency, he had pledged to restore these monuments’ boundaries. Just after his inauguration, he signed an executive order requiring the interior department to review the monuments, and make a decision about whether it would be appropriate to restore them.Last spring, Haaland traveled to Utah to visit two of the monuments, and then later recommended Biden return them to their previous size and protections.TopicsJoe BidenThis land is your landUS politicsConservationnewsReuse this content More

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US CongressSenate Republicans sow disinformation after $480bn US debt ceiling dealRepublicans claim cap must be lifted to pay for Biden’s economic agenda – a sign of party’s approach to once non-partisan issues Hugo Lowell in WashingtonFri 8 Oct 2021 07.49 EDTLast modified on Fri 8 Oct 2021 15.56 EDTTop Republicans in the Senate are advancing a campaign of disinformation over the debt ceiling as they seek to distort the reasons for needing to raise the nation’s borrowing cap, after they dropped their blockade on averting a US debt default in a bipartisan manner.Senate report details Trump’s attempt to use DoJ to overturn election defeatRead moreThe Senate on Thursday passed a bill to allow the debt ceiling to be raised by $480bn through early December, which the treasury department estimates will be enough to allow the government to temporarily avert an unprecedented default on $28tn of debt obligations.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, announced the morning before its passage that he had reached a deal with the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to clear the way for the vote on a short-term extension with GOP support.The movement came after McConnell made a tactical retreat to back down from weeks of refusal to allow Democrats to raise the debt ceiling by any measure other than through a complicated procedure known as reconciliation that would have required a party-line vote.The Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz said on the floor: “Unfortunately, Republicans blinked.”And some Republicans railed against what they saw as an unnecessarily triumphalist victory speech by Schumer after the deal, while the West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin put his head in his hands during the address and later called it “inappropriate”.Manchin Buries His Head in His Hands During Schumer Speech on Debt Ceiling, Says Remarks Were Not ‘Appropriate’ https://t.co/T32nLEJVkA— Carl Howard (@litlgrey) October 8, 2021
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and majority leader, Steny Hoyer, will set up a vote on Tuesday on the bill passed on Thursday evening, bringing the House back from recess a week early.But even as McConnell struck the accord to stave off the threat of a first-ever default, the resolution to punt the issue until December did nothing to address the crux of the partisan stalemate and Republicans’ mischaracterization of the issue.The argument at the heart of the GOP’s insistence – which is likely to resume in two months’ time – is that Democrats should raise the debt ceiling on a party-line basis, in part because they claim the borrowing cap needs to be lifted to pay for Biden’s economic agenda.“McConnell told them they are going to have to – if they are determined to spend at least $3.5tn more in borrowed money – lift the debt ceiling to accommodate that debt by themselves,” the Republican senator John Cornyn said of McConnell at a recent news conference, referring to Democrats’ social spending plan.The treasury department acknowledges that raising the debt ceiling would allow the US to continue borrowing in order to finance projects, such as Democrats’ social spending and infrastructure package that is expected to now cost between $1.9tn and $2.2tn.But economists at the department also say that attempts to portray the need to tackle the debt ceiling as an effort to pay for Democrats’ budget resolutions that are yet to pass Congress amount to disinformation, according to sources familiar with the mechanism.The criticism comes primarily because the overriding reason for raising the debt ceiling stems from the fact that the US needs to borrow new money to pay the principal and interest on about $8tn of debt incurred over the course of the Trump administration.In recent years, the majority of the increase in the national debt has come at the hands of Republicans, and lifting the debt ceiling merely allows the treasury department to pay existing debts by taking on new debts, the sources said.The mischaracterization by top Senate Republicans is emblematic of the party leadership’s approach to once non-partisan issues as it seeks to shield its members from being punished at the ballot box in 2022 by red state voters for lifting the debt ceiling.McConnell had insisted for weeks before caving on Wednesday that Democrats should have to tackle the debt ceiling on a party-line basis through reconciliation, repeatedly blocking measures that would have required at least 10 Republicans to vote for a debt limit hike.The Republicans’ minority leader first mounted a filibuster against a stopgap funding measure that both prevented a government shutdown and a default, as well as against a standalone bill to raise the debt ceiling as he sought to insulate Republicans from a tough vote.But Democrats ruled out using reconciliation, concerned about the scheduling difficulty and potential for abuse of the two so-called vote-a-ramas – where Republicans could offer unlimited amendments and poison pill bills – before the fiscal deadline of 18 October.The prospect of a default this October carried calamitous consequences: economists forecast an immediate recession, a meltdown in financial markets, with trillions wiped off US household wealth and sent unemployment rates surging.The weeks-long Republican intransigence to block any measure that raised the debt ceiling on a bipartisan basis also reflected the hypocrisy of the Republican position, Democrats said, noting they helped Republicans to tackle the debt without drama during the Trump era.And on Wednesday, it was only when Democrats started to call for Schumer to explore carving out an exception to the filibuster to pass a standalone debt bill that would have cut Republican power in the Senate that McConnell agreed on a bipartisan proposal.“The argument made yesterday was that this may be more pressure than two Democrat senators can stand regarding changing the filibuster rules,” the Republican senator Lindsey Graham said of McConnell’s deal to defuse moves to even partially abolish the Senate rule.Joanna Walters contributed reportingTopicsUS CongressRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

OpinionUS politicsJoe Biden’s Build Back Better bill is about freedom. Why doesn’t he say so?Jan-Werner MüllerThe Build Back Better agenda creates more options for working people. Conservatives calling such measures antithetical to freedom have things the wrong way around Fri 8 Oct 2021 06.17 EDTLast modified on Fri 8 Oct 2021 15.12 EDTPolitics is not just talk, but no major political project can do without someone crafting persuasive language. Democrats have done a singularly bad job at making the case for what is still only known as “the $3.5tn bill”. They have advanced neither symbols nor even comprehensible concepts for what this supposed monster piece of legislation is really about. As a consequence, it has become all too easy to discredit the bill as an incoherent progressive wishlist from which items can be arbitrarily subtracted. What’s worse, the right has been able to portray the bill as inherently un-American, since it supposedly erects a – God forbid – European-style “cradle-to-grave” nanny state. It might sound counterintuitive, but the Democrats should ground their plans in the very value conservatives love to claim for themselves: freedom.The fact that the bill is so large and combines what is now commonly described as strengthening the social safety net and tackling the climate emergency is not just due to Democrat’s strategic failures: it is partly dictated by the constraints of the reconciliation process. But putting together two seemingly disjointed agendas has also made it easy to portray the legislation as incoherent; it has provided self-described “centrists” (mostly self-centered, rather than offering any principled notion of a “center”) with a politically costless way of calling for cuts to what they characterize as a bloated bill. Similarly, the hefty price tag is a chance for what lazy journalists still keep describing as “moderates” to prove their fiscal rectitude and adherence to a zombie ethos of bipartisan “responsibility”.The crucial question, though, is not about numbers, but about what’s perceived as legitimate. We do not put figures to the horrendously large defense bills (and we’d probably be shocked if we did); we also stopped long ago debating the Affordable Care Act in terms of costs. True, many of the individual initiatives in Biden’s central bill are popular (even in West Virginia, as no leftwing pundit will fail to mention). But it is naive to assume that consent to particular policies will amount to legislative success overall. Absent powerful symbols and a moral language that resonates with citizens, the whole will not just seem like less than the parts – the whole might be tossed away altogether.In recent decades the right has been generally better at what is sometimes dismissed as “symbolic politics”. Plenty of people thought the financial crisis would usher in a golden age of social democracy; instead, the Tea Party ended up making the most of the crisis and paved the way for Trump. Today, there are again plenty of people – including distinguished academics – warning that things like better access to childcare and community college are somehow un-American – and, more particularly, that US citizens will end up working fewer hours and hence be poorer, just like those benighted, lazy Europeans.Plenty of empirical comparisons with Europe are cherry-picked and ignore the fact that so many Americans lead more stressful and significantly shorter lives in a society that has for decades failed to invest not just in roads and bridges, but also in a civic infrastructure of shared goods such as affordable care for dependants. So many parts of the Build Back Better agenda actually aim to create more options for working people: they would have a choice about how they rear their children and take care of elderly relatives, with obvious implications for their ability to enter the labor market; they would also have more resources to use as they see fit, if drug prices came down. To describe such measures as antithetical to freedom has things exactly the wrong way around; rather than the state dictating to citizens what they have to do, it generates more choices for them.The rejoinder by the right is predictable enough: to call tax increases freedom, they will say, is positively Orwellian; coercing citizens into handing over more of their income to the state and calling it liberty is a perfidious sleight of hand. Here a further Democratic weakness becomes obvious: had they really tried to make the owners of concentrated wealth pay their fair share, they would have forced their opponents to go out there and make a very different kind of case: namely that the essence of being American consists in buying one’s fifth vacation home with money simply not available for folks who can’t afford the services of what the social scientist Jeffrey Winters has called the wealth defense industry – pricey accountants and lawyers who can set up that tax shelter in the Cayman Islands which lesser mortals will never even understand in its complexity. Going after income instead of wealth is already a victory for the kinds of people exposed in the Pandora Papers, as is the fact that there is no serious effort to strengthen the IRS’s arsenal in its battle with the wealth defense industry’s nuclear weapons.And climate? That is about freedom, too. If we fail to act now, future freedoms of how to live – and, not least, where to live – will be drastically curtailed. But, again, the case would be easier if the owners of concentrated wealth were made to pay for a livable future world – after all, they will have to live in it, too, unless they can go to Mars or make that luxury retreat in New Zealand climate-apocalypse-proof.Even if they made the philosophical case for how their proposals would set many Americans free in their daily lives, Democrats would still lack a powerful symbol of what their plan is about. Perhaps Trump’s speechwriters only put down “Build the Wall” to remind him that he must always mention immigration (and, not to forget, add some racist dog whistles). But, as a political symbol, it was brilliant: even if no one really knew any details of Trump’s plans (of course, often there weren’t any), people understood what he was about – and that he meant business. Yet even Bernie Sanders, with all his fulminations about the “billionaire class”, has never come up with anything as effective as Trump’s image. The task remains to link the fight against inequality with a symbol for freedom.
Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton University. His book Democracy Rules was published in July by Allen Lane
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The US Senate has reached a deal to extend the debt ceiling until early December, which narrowly averted an ‘economic catastrophe’. But is this the end? Or will the crisis just re-emerge a few weeks from now? And can the Democrats finally agree on two separate major spending bills? Jonathan Freedland discusses this with Joan E Greve

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Following a tense week on Capitol Hill, the US Senate has reached an agreement to extend the debt ceiling through to December, narrowly avoiding a US economy default. But will this really change anything? And why has this traditionally bipartisan issue become a divisive one? Archive: CNN, CBS and MSNBC Send us your questions and feedback to [email protected] Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More