US Politics

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterThe House of Representatives is poised to give final approval to Joe Biden’s sweeping $1.9tn coronavirus stimulus and relief plan, a giant aid package the president has said is critical for lifting the US out of the pandemic and reviving its battered economy.If passed by the House on Wednesday, as Democratic leaders expect, the first major legislative initiative of Biden’s presidency will rush assistance to families struggling under a year-long public health crisis and provide the most generous expansion of aid to low-income Americans in a generation.It will send direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, expand aid to state, local and tribal governments, provide federal subsidies for those struggling to afford health insurance, housing and food and deliver money to boost Covid-19 vaccine distribution and testing and to safely reopen schools.Economists predict that as one of the largest emergency rescue packages in American history, the American Rescue Plan (ARP) will accelerate economic recovery, boosting growth to levels not seen in recent decades and dramatically reducing numbers living in poverty.According to one estimate, the ARP could cut child poverty by as much as half, through an expansion of a tax credit for families with children that many Democrats want to make permanent.House Democrats, who hold a slim majority, were confident the measure would pass on Wednesday morning, despite changes made in the Senate that threatened to alienate some progressives.The New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic Caucus chair, said he was “110% confident” of success. Once passed by the House, the bill will be sent to Biden for signature.The Senate passed the bill on Saturday in a 50-49 vote, Democrats overcoming unified Republican opposition and a last-minute objection by Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a member of their own party.The package before the House on Wednesday was narrower than Biden’s initial proposal, which included progressive priorities subsequently either stripped out or scaled back to appease moderates like Manchin, who echoed Republicans with concerns that the infusion of aid was too big in an economy showing signs of revival.A provision to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour was deemed inadmissible under a budget process Democrats used to bypass Republican opposition.The Senate-approved version tightens eligibility for stimulus checks and restructures a proposal for unemployment benefits that Biden hoped to raise to $400 a week. Under the new plan, unemployment benefits will remain at $300 a week but will be extended through the beginning of September, rather than August. The first $10,200 of supplements from 2020 will be made tax-free.Though disappointed with some of the amendments, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called them “relatively minor concessions” and said the overall package remained “truly progressive and bold”.Republicans say the plan is excessive and mismatched to the economic and public health outlook, as more Americans are vaccinated and states move to reopen businesses and schools. They have also revived concerns the package will grow the national debt, worries they set aside under Donald Trump.“We know for sure that it includes provisions that are not targeted, they’re not temporary, they’re not related to Covid and it didn’t have to be this way,” said the Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney, House Republican Conference chair. “We could have had a bill that was a fraction of the cost of this one, it could have gotten bipartisan approval and support.”The extraordinary price tag is just shy of the $2.2tn coronavirus relief bill signed into law by Donald Trump at the onset of the pandemic last March. It will be the sixth spending bill Congress has enacted to address the devastation wrought by the twin public health and economic crises, and is poised to be the first to pass without bipartisan support despite Biden’s campaign promise to work with Republicans.Yet the lack of consensus in Washington belies its popularity with voters across the political spectrum and local and state officials of both parties. Encouraged by polling that shows broad public support for the bill, Biden and Democrats have argued that the plan is bipartisan.Final passage of the bill will come a day before Biden is due to deliver his first primetime speech on Thursday, marking the first anniversary after the introduction of sweeping public health measures to try to control the spread of the Covid-19 virus that has killed nearly 525,000 Americans and battered the economy.Although vaccine distribution is ramping up dramatically and the economy is showing some signs of improvement, Democrats say the recovery is precarious and uneven, and that low-income Americans still need help. Millions of Americans remain unemployed with the poorest hit hardest.“This not only gets us to the other side of this crisis, it really starts healing the wounds that have been caused by this crisis,” said Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic majority leader.After Biden signs the bill into law, he and other top officials will continue to promote the plan to the American public, part of a push by the new administration to ensure Democrats receive credit for an economic recovery ahead of the 2022 congressional midterm elections.“We certainly recognize that we can’t just sign a bill,” the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters on Tuesday. “We will need to do some work and use our best voices, including the president, the vice-president and others, to communicate to the American people the benefits of this package.”In a departure from his predecessor, Biden’s signature will not appear on the memo line of the stimulus checks sent to Americans, Psaki said. “This is not about him,” she added. “This is about the American people getting relief.” More

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has hailed the massive $1.9tn Covid relief bill as “historic” and “transformative” as the House stood poised to give the legislation final approval with a vote on Wednesday morning.Joe Biden, who will mark a year since the pandemic brought shutdowns across the nation with a primetime speech on Thursday, has said he will sign the bill as soon as it lands on his desk.The House vote on the bill, which includes checks for most American households, comes after the Senate passed a modestly reworked version of the package on Saturday and will clinch Biden’s most significant early legislative achievement.“It’s a remarkable, historic, transformative piece of legislation, which goes a very long way to crushing the virus and solving our economic crisis,” Pelosi said during a press conference with senior Democrats on Tuesday afternoon, who took turns extolling what they said was the historic nature of the legislation and its impact on reducing poverty in America. “I’m so excited, I just can’t hide it,” she added.Several Democratic leaders compared it to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, saying the plan would not only “crush” the virus and the economic fallout but would look forward to tackle longstanding racial and gender inequalities in the economy.Smiling under her mask, Pelosi expressed full confidence that Democrats had the votes to pass the bill.Asked about possible defections from progressive members disappointed that the Senate had narrowed a version of the bill, initially proposed by Biden and passed by the House, Pelosi shook her head and said “no” repeatedly. The bill would head to Biden’s desk after the vote on Wednesday, she said.Besides the fresh round of stimulus checks, the bill also extends emergency jobless benefits to early September, instead of 14 March. It spends huge amounts on Covid-19 vaccines, testing and treatments, while also aiding state and local governments and schools, assisting small businesses and providing major expansions of tax breaks and programs for lower- and middle-income families.Progressives suffered setbacks, especially the Senate’s removal of a gradual minimum wage increase to $15 hourly by 2025. But the measure carries so many Democratic priorities that final passage was not in doubt, despite the party’s narrow 10-vote House majority.Meanwhile a hefty majority of Americans – 70% – say they are in favor of the coronavirus relief package. Only a third of Americans said the legislation is too costly, according to a poll from Pew research.Biden has said he will not be attaching his signature to the $1,400 relief checks that are expected to be mailed soon, a break with his predecessor who last year had “President Donald J Trump” printed on the economic impact payments approved by Congress.The next round of paper checks will bear the signature of a career official at the treasury department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said at a Tuesday briefing.Psaki said the goal was to get the payments out quickly instead of branding them as coming from Biden.“This is not about him, this is about the American people getting relief,” Psaki said. More

The election and inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris does not represent the defeat of the far right, as even the most mainstream Democrats must rhetorically acknowledge. The more critical question, however, is whether those same Democrats are willing to support the changes necessary to actually achieve this victory: not through the introduction of new domestic terror legislation and the expansion of the security state, but through passing laws that allow poor and working people to build power for themselves, in their own organizations and institutions, on their own terms.The incoming administration has already signaled its sensitivity to the urgency of the moment: within hours of taking office, Biden signed a slew of executive orders on the pandemic, immigration, and the climate that began the work of undoing some of what the Trump administration was able to accomplish without congressional involvement. But many of these orders only return federal policy to the pre-Trump status quo, which was already insufficient; those that go beyond that previous status quo do so in the most minimal or superficial of ways. If the Biden administration is serious about legislating towards a more just and equitable society, it must not only pursue reforms to the way that Congress itself works – abolishing the filibuster, for example – but it must prioritize structural reforms like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would open the door to a transformation of the US labor movement.Mostly overshadowed by the storming of the US Capitol, the second impeachment of Donald Trump, and the inauguration of Joe Biden, a slew of worker struggles in the United States are entering critical phases. On Martin Luther King Day in New York, in two very different parts of the city, the New York police department descended upon peaceful demonstrators who had taken to the streets in support of separate, but related causes: in an encore of their performance this summer, hundreds of cops beat and arrested dozens of Black Lives Matter protesters marching through downtown Manhattan, near city hall; 11 miles and an hour’s subway ride away, in the Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood, hundreds more NYPD cops swarmed a picket line of workers on strike for a $1-an-hour raise, arresting six. The co-op that runs the market has reportedly hired a private security firm to keep fruits and vegetables moving, with help from the NYPD. Six workers at the market, mostly members of the striking Teamsters Local 202, have died since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.Without a robust labor movement, the sole bulwark against far-right violence will be the stateThis month alone, in addition to the workers who keep New York supplied with fresh produce going on strike, white-collar workers at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced the formation of a union, which grew from 225 members to more than 700 within a week. Elsewhere in California, gig workers, supported by the Service Employees International Union, are suing to overturn a ballot measure stripping them of their rights as workers that platform companies like Uber and Lyft spent $200m to get passed last year. Chicago’s formidable teachers’ union is threatening to strike over school reopenings. And a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama is headed to a vote beginning next month. Nearly half a million unionized essential workers’ contracts will be up for renegotiation this year, Luis Feliz Leon reports in the New Republic, setting the stage for a potential strike wave.Victory is not only necessary to improve the conditions of the workers engaged in these particular struggles, but because an organized working class that can fight (and win) is our only hope to defeat an increasingly militant far right. Without a robust labor movement, guided by the principles of anti-fascism and anti-racism, the sole bulwark against far-right violence will be the state – specifically, the law enforcement agencies whose repressive power has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and is inevitably turned against workers, the poor, the racialized and the left.In the weeks and months since the election, Washington’s liberal establishment dissuaded anyone from counter-demonstrating against the fascists who repeatedly marched through the city to protest Donald Trump’s election loss. The momentum those fascists were able to build carried them up the steps of the US Capitol, leaving five dead; consequently, tens of thousands of national guards members and police were ordered into DC.“Their America has always done this elsewhere,” the writer and army veteran Matt Gallagher told the Guardian, speaking of the young troops occupying the city. “Now it’s happening here.” Even though leftwing organizations weren’t actively targeted, leftwing organizing efforts were disrupted as a result, with mutual-aid networks disrupted by blockades and checkpoints.The point is not to attempt to win over people who would take up arms to oppose a multiracial, socially equitable democracy; the point is to build a movement that can fight for a society where the appeal of such ideologies is obviated. The more successful any fascist or far-right populist movement is, the more working-class people will be absorbed into it, won over by its subversiveness, its superficial anti-capitalism, and its appeals to blood and soil. But at their core, these movements are not for working people and the poor; they are based in the reactionary middle classes: the heirs to suburban fortunes; the cops and prison guards and border patrol agents; the serial entrepreneurs who never have to suffer the consequences of their failures.The struggle against fascism does not begin or end with fighting fascists in the street. In fact, the most successful antifascist mobilization is not one in which the fascists get beaten up, but one that is so well-organized, publicized, and receives such popular support that the fascists never show up at all. Admittedly, this does not make for dramatic photography or videos. It deprives journalists of the spectacle of violence, but it also keeps people safe.Sustaining such mobilization over time will not be possible without a dynamic, vital labor movement, freed to experiment with new organizational forms that reach new layers of the American working class – a movement that can also lead the fight against climate change, police violence and mass incarceration, and against the capitalist order that, when in crisis, gives rise to fascism in the first place. More

Sign up for the Guardian’s Green Light newsletterWyoming’s US representative, Liz Cheney, envisions a dark future for her home state under Joe Biden.If the new administration extends its pause on new oil and gas drilling on public land, it would endanger Wyoming’s economy, kill 18,000 jobs and cause the energy state to lose out on critical education, infrastructure and healthcare funding. Biden would be “cutting off a major lifeline that Americans have relied on to survive during this time”, she has said.But there is a problem with Cheney’s forecast. The numbers she is relying on came from an analysis that is the brainchild of the oil and gas industry.The Western Energy Alliance – which represents 200 western oil and gas companies – proposed the $114,000 publicly funded analysis to state officials, tried to provide matching dollars for it and stayed involved throughout its development, according to public records obtained by Documented and shared with Floodlight and Wyoming Public Media.In February 2020, a Wyoming state senator, who is also the president of an oil company, proposed the spending. The Western Energy Alliance sought to help fund the study but was unable because the industry was in serious decline. It did, however, spend $8,000 publicizing the report, as was first reported by Politico.Records show Governor Mark Gordon’s office was aware of and never disclosed the group’s deep involvement in the study.Now, the Western Energy Alliance is spending thousands more to amplify the warnings in an ad campaign against Biden’s climate policies. The numbers have been cited dozens of times in local and national newspapers, including in the New York Times in a reference to Wyoming officials’ projections.The data has become core to Republican messaging opposing Biden’s climate plans even as critics suggest the study might exaggerate economic impacts by as much as 85%. The author even appeared at a meeting of the Congressional Western Caucus in February, alongside Cheney.While industry-funded research is not uncommon, transparency advocates say it is increasingly being used to produce conclusions favorable to oil and gas companies in order to shape public opinion.“It’s a time-honored practice,” said Bruce Freed, the president and co-founder of Center for Political Accountability. “It gives cover to the industry … they’re not going to pay for anything that will undercut them.”The Western Energy Alliance first approached the University of Wyoming economics professor who authored the report, Tim Considine, in mid-2019 to ask him to write a proposal about his research for state officials, he and the group confirmed. Internal emails show the Western Energy Alliance president, Kathleen Sgamma, pitched the analysis to the governor’s office in February 2020.“Just wanted to let you know that I’m working with the Governor’s office about who will commission and pay for the analysis, so I’m making progress,” Sgamma emailed Considine.A month earlier, Considine had shared his proposal with Sgamma and then offered to amend it based on her preferences if it would “help your fund raising [sic]”.While Considine was conducting his study with state funds, the Western Energy Alliance was part of a team working with state officials to review the report before its release. The group’s spokesperson, Aaron Johnson, got Considine to change his methodology to count more possible economic impacts in Alaska. Johnson later told Considine that the study got “very positive results from industry leaders”.In response to this story, Sgamma defended the study, saying it was by a reputable professor and it shows the sacrifice that the president is asking of westerners.“The bottom line is we didn’t fund it, and that’s usually where the disclosure comes in,” Sgamma said.Considine maintains his analysis was fair and independent. Critics, though, have questioned his closeness with industry, including allegations that when he worked in Pennsylvania he was “the energy industry’s go-to academic for highlighting the positives, and not the negatives, of fossil fuel development”. Considine called the criticisms “an old canard”.“I do not feel that getting comments on my study from the Western Energy Alliance affected my findings. In my judgment there was no conflict of interest to receive industry feedback,” he said.Considine’s past work also includes giving expert testimony on behalf of the coal company Murray Energy in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as conducting research paid for under a consulting agreement with the coal company Cloud Peak Energy.The $114,000 for the Wyoming study – funded by the public through the Wyoming Energy Authority and Wyoming State Energy Program – was proposed in early 2020 by former lawmaker Eli Bebout, who is the president of Nucor Oil and Gas and has received significant campaign contributions from the industry. Bebout, in an interview for this story, said he didn’t recall any direct involvement with the industry group.Gordon, Wyoming’s governor, declined to discuss the study for this story. “At this time, we believe the study speaks for itself,” said the spokesperson Michael Pearlman, pointing to a news release from December that did not disclose the industry involvement.Aside from the industry ties, the University of Wyoming study’s methodology has raised eyebrows among experts.Considine modeled two scenarios. In one, he considered a complete drilling ban on federal lands, which is not what Biden is proposing. In the other, he looked at a freeze on new leases, which is what Biden has done temporarily. Considine acknowledged in early emails to Sgamma that the latter would be difficult to do with existing data.Considine stands behind his conclusions. He said, if anything, his numbers were underestimates because he projected conservative productivity growth and low oil prices.But Laura Zachary, the co-director of Apogee Economics and Policy – which works with and on behalf of environmental advocacy groups – said the numbers that politicians have been quoting from Considine’s study are “very misleading”. She estimates the study exaggerates economic impacts by 70% to 85%.Another analysis of potential drilling policies, by the environmental group Resources for the Future, contradicts Considine’s conclusions of economic ruin for western states. It found the government could make oil companies pay more to drill on public lands and increase revenues going to states, while reducing climate pollution.“It’s not uncommon [in research] to take funds from industry,” Zachary said of Considine. “But it’s very important, obviously, to not have that guide what your findings are or your research methods as an academic.”The Biden administration has paused new oil and gas leasing on public lands. But companies are still drilling on previously leased lands. The climate pollution from fossil fuels developed on public lands is significant, and Biden has promised to scale it back.The state of Wyoming, meanwhile, has long fought to support fossil fuel development, given the industry’s importance for employment and revenue. The oil and gas industry alone represented nearly 30% of total state revenue in 2019. About 7% of Wyoming’s workforce is in the mining industries, which include oil and gas.The Trump administration heralded unprecedented new access to public lands for energy production, much to the chagrin of environmental advocates. If Biden’s nominee, Deb Haaland, is confirmed to run the interior department, she is expected to reverse course and prioritize the climate crisis.Wyoming’s congressional delegation voted against her nomination, arguing that she has extreme policy views and couldn’t substantively answer key questions. In one congressional meeting, Senator John Barrasso referenced a separate outlook from the American Petroleum Institute in explaining his opposition to Haaland.“I, along with other western senators, have consistently opposed nominees who hold such radical views, he said. “The people of Wyoming deserve straight answers from any potential secretary about the law, the rules and the regulations that will affect their lives and their livelihoods.”Go behind the scenes with the reporters at Floodlight. More

Sara Fearrington, a North Carolina waitress, joined the Fight for $15 campaign two years ago. A server at a Durham Waffle House, her take-home pay fluctuates between $350 and $450 a week, leaving her struggling to pay bills every month. She voted for Joe Biden, who had pledged to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. It was the first time Fearrington, who is 44, had ever voted in a presidential election.“It would mean everything. It would create stability for my household,” she said of the impact that a higher wage could have on her and her family of five, which includes her husband, who suffers from a rare lung condition, and a granddaughter who has asthma.The Democrats will need her support for their US Senate nominee next year if they are to maintain and strengthen their tenuous hold on the upper chamber. Some of 2022’s hotly contested Senate races are expected to play out in low-wage regions like Fearrington’s home state.The purple states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have rock-bottom minimum wages of just $7.25 per hour – the current federal minimum. Georgia, where the Democrat Raphael Warnock will fight to hold on to the Senate seat he wrested from the Republican senator Kelly Loeffler in November, abides by the federal minimum wage, even though the one it has on the books is $5.15. Recent polling suggests Republicans could gain a seat in New Hampshire, another low-minimum-wage state, where the Democratic senator Maggie Hassan is facing a potential challenge from the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu.The federal minimum wage has not increased from $7.25 since 2009, and for 21 states in the country the minimum wage law that governs employers is no higher than the federal minimum. Fearrington earns an hourly wage of just $3.10 an hour as a tipped worker, making her income unpredictable.Biden had hoped to include a $15-an-hour minimum wage increase in his $1.9tn economic stimulus package, which is expected to pass this week, and would also gradually phase out the sub-minimum wages for tipped workers like Fearrington. But prospects for the minimum wage provision evaporated after the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the wage hike could not remain in the budget reconciliation bill where Democrats had placed it in order to avoid a Republican-led filibuster they lacked the votes to override.Progressives inside and outside Congress pressured Senate Democrats and the Biden administration to override the parliamentarian and take the matter to a vote.“Then, at least, it’s a public conversation, where people are fighting for what they said they were going to fight for, for the poor and low-income people who turned out in record numbers in this past election,” said the Rev Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the National Poor People’s Campaign.Whether such a conversation ever takes place is a growing concern to progressives and a source of discord within the coalition that brought Biden to the White House – at a moment when the battered US economy stands at a crossroads. On Friday, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders made an 11th-hour effort to reinsert the provision into the stimulus package. Eight Democrats crossed over to vote it down, including two senators from his neighboring state, New Hampshire.Delivering a minimum wage increase before the midterm elections would give bragging rights to Democratic senatorial candidates in low-minimum-wage states. In North Carolina, 33% of workers would experience an increase in wages. Once the raise was fully implemented, the average annual benefit to a North Carolina worker who works year round would be $4,065, according to Capital & Main’s analysis of data released by the non-profit Economic Policy Institute in a recent study. Workers in other states would reap similar benefits.The ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, prompted online protests by liberal swing-state candidates in Pennsylvania, including the lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, who is seeking the US Senate seat occupied by retiring the Republican Pat Toomey.“Since the Senate parliamentarian won’t allow a $15 minimum wage to go through reconciliation, then it’s time to end the filibuster and raise the minimum wage,” Fetterman said in a statement. Biden, who generally supports the traditions of the Senate, is coming under increasing pressure to end the filibuster in order to deliver on his agenda.Delivering a minimum wage hike to voters – or at least fighting tooth and nail to get it passed – may also be key to keeping Biden’s fragile coalition together heading into the midterms. The failure to do so could also make for some fractious Democratic primaries. “Every single Dem who voted against a $15 minimum wage should be primaried,” said Krystal Ball, host of HillTV’s Rising.Polls show strong support for a $15 minimum wage, especially among Democrats and independents. And a recent poll by the non-profit National Employment Law Project found that two-thirds of voters in battleground congressional districts supported gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 84% of Biden voters and 63% of non-college-educated white people.The popularity of a minimum wage increase led to Republicans floating watered-down (and, mostly likely, doomed) proposals to hike the country’s base wage. Senator Mitt Romney and Senator Tom Cotton proposed a plan to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour over four years that is tied to stepped-up immigration enforcement. On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, proposed a $15-an- hour minimum wage plan that would apply to businesses with annual revenue in excess of $1bn. Taxpayers, not the employer, would foot the bill for Hawley’s proposed increase.Opponents of the proposed gradual increase to $15 an hour over five years – like the Business Roundtable, which represents chief executives of major US companies – have argued that wage increases should be calibrated to regional differences in the cost of living. But Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says $15 an hour makes sense as a wage floor and is even low when the cost of living is taken into account. In addition, the minimum wage would jump to $9.50 in the first year, well below its 1968 peak of just over $12 (when accounting for inflation).“In 2021, virtually anywhere in the country, a single adult will need to be working at least full time and earn at least $16 an hour in order to meet their family budget,” says Zipperer.Jim Wertz, chair of the Erie County Democratic party in Pennsylvania, argues that the Senate’s failure to pass the $15-an-hour minimum wage should push people to vote for more Democrats, not keep them from the polls.“The reason we can’t get it done is because of a couple of centrist or right-leaning Democrats,” he said, referring to the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona who have said they do not support such a large increase in the minimum wage and voted against Sanders’ failed attempt to restore the minimum wage hike to the stimulus bill.Fearrington is not paying close attention to the byzantine rules of Congress or its politics. She lost two members of her extended family to Covid-19 this year, and to protect vulnerable members of her family, she spent Christmas and her birthday in isolation after she contracted the virus.Still, she’s undeterred in her determination to vote in next year’s Senate race regardless of the outcome of this latest battle in DC. The Republican senator Richard Burr, who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, is retiring, leaving the seat open.“I’m going to go for the Senate seat that’s going to listen to the mass majority of people that are saying we need this to help our society, our community and our economy – blue or red,” she said.This article is published in partnership with the award-winning not-for-profit publication Capital and Main More

Georgia lawmakers have advanced a measure that would significantly curtail voting access after a record number of voters propelled Democratic victories in the 2020 race.The measure scraped through 29-20 in the GOP-controlled Georgia senate, which was the absolute minimum number of votes Republicans needed. Four Republicans, including some in competitive races, sat out the vote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The bill, SB 241, would end the right to vote by mail without having to provide an excuse, a policy that Georgia Republicans implemented in the state in 2005. More than 1.3 million people voted by mail in the 2020 general election in the state. Under the bill only people age 65 and older, or who have one of a handful of state-approved excuses, would be allowed to vote by mail. Just 16 other states currently require a voter to give an excuse to vote by mail.The legislation also would require voters to provide identification information, such as a driver’s license number, both when they apply to vote by mail and when they return the ballot.Republicans have frequently held up the specter of voter fraud to justify such restrictions, though there were several vote recounts in Georgia in the 2020 race, as well as audits, and officials found no such wrongdoing.Mike Dugan, the Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, said the lack of widespread fraud should not be an impediment to changing election rules.“You don’t wait until you have wholesale issues until you try to meet the need,” he said. “You do it beforehand.”He also said on the senate floor Monday that the bill was needed to reduce the burden on local election officials and to ensure that voters were not disenfranchised.State senator Elena Parent, a Democrat, said the justification for the bill was a “weaponization of Trump’s lies” about the election.“It is a willingness and embrace of damage to American democracy,” she said. “The numbers to stop this bill may not be here in this chamber today. But I assure you there are many thousands of Georgians right now whose political spirit is awakened by disgust at modern-day voter suppression.”A stream of Democrats criticized the measure as a thinly veiled effort to suppress Black and other minority voters in Georgia. Those groups contributed to record turnout in the state in 2020 and helped propel Joe Biden, as well as Democrats senatorial candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, to stunning victories in the state.“I know racism when I see it,” said Gail Davenport, a Democrat who recalledwatching the Ku Klux Klan marching on Saturdays in Jonesboro, just south of Atlanta. “This is not about the process. This is about suppressing the vote of a certain group of people, especially me, and people who look like me, and I take it personally.”The bill will now go to the Georgia House of Representatives, which last week approved its own set of voting restrictions, including new limits on early voting and dropboxes. It remains unclear which proposals will ultimately be sent to the governor’s desk once each chamber fully considers the opposite chamber’s bill.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterLawmakers have until 31 March to send the bills to Governor Brian Kemp’s desk, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.“In the last two election cycles, we saw a dramatic increase in the number of voters of color who voted by mail, the number of young people who used early voting, the number of African Americans who voted on Saturday and Sunday,” Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, told Mother Jones.“We saw unprecedented levels of turnout across the board. And so every single metric of voter access that has been a good in Georgia is now under attack.”Top Republicans in the state, including Lt Gov Geoff Duncan, have said they oppose efforts to get rid of no-excuse absentee voting and Duncan refused to preside over the senate on Monday as it considered the measure to do just that.At several points during the debate, which stretched around three hours on Monday afternoon, Democrats connected the policies under consideration to those in the Jim Crow south. They noted that some members of the legislature had lived through those policies. Harold Jones II, another Democratic state senator, urged his colleagues to pay attention to Black lawmakers who spoke out against the bill.“It’s because that most basic right was denied to us. It’s not 1800, it’s not [the] 1850s, it’s right here in this room. Many of the senators that sit here lived through that process,” he said. “Let me tell you, it is not theater. It is not a performance. It is real because we live with it every single day.” More

For the last week, Americans paying attention to politics have learned an important truth: Joe Biden may live in the White House, but the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia is effectively president. This depressing reality can certainly be fixed, but only if progressive Democrats in Congress are willing to actually change the dynamic – and they have a rare opportunity to do that right now by using their power to raise the minimum wage.But so far, they aren’t choosing to use their power – which is a huge structural problem not just now, but also for the foreseeable future.Some have argued that the way to fix this situation is by ending the filibuster, but that’s a catch-22: it is absolutely a necessary reform, but President Manchin is pledging to veto it. Even if Democrats were to eliminate the filibuster, they would still need Manchin’s stamp of approval for virtually all legislation, given the Senate’s current 50-50 split.The way to fix this dynamic is for a decisive number of House Democrats or Democratic senators to make clear, line-in-the-sand demands, and demonstrate they will vote down Democratic legislation that does not honor those demands. And they must do this specifically on must-pass legislation for which Biden can find zero Republican votes.That is the way to force Biden to stop pretending he has no agency and instead motivate him to use the overwhelming power of the executive branch to press the conservative wing of the party to back down. It is also the way to get Manchin himself to negotiate – right now, he gets to operate with impunity because there is no counterforce.The Covid relief bill provides progressives this game-changing opportunity, and in the process they can heroically deliver not on some unimportant issue or tangential agenda item – but instead on the crucial cause of delivering a desperately needed higher minimum wage to millions of Americans.The debate over the legislation also gives the public a way to see whether self-identified progressive heroes are as serious about actually using power as President Manchin is.The Covid-19 relief bill is a microcosm of the Manchin effectWe can see this opportunity in the current wrangling over a $1.9tn Covid relief package, where Manchin has successfully pressured the executive branch to support further limiting eligibility for survival checks, devising a phase-out policy so absurdly punitive that even reliably partisan Democratic pundits and centrist thinktank wonks can’t support it.The payments – which are $1,400 instead of the $2,000 people were promised – will likely now go to 17 million fewer people than the last round of checks under Donald Trump, as a result of Manchin’s handiwork.Though Biden depicted himself as a legislative master of the Senate during the 2020 presidential campaign, the result of his negotiation – or lack thereof – has been Manchin making austerity demands that position him to the right of his own state’s Republican governor.Meanwhile, the Biden’s White House is signaling that it will ignore pleas from civil rights leaders and not support Kamala Harris to use her power as the Senate presiding officer to advance a $15 minimum wage. Even though there is ample precedent for the vice-president to do this, White House officials do not support this maneuver – presumably because they fear Manchin and the conservative senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona, would oppose it.The reason Manchin has become the legislative center of gravity is obvious if unstated: the implicit threat is that if he doesn’t get exactly what he wants, he will cast a decisive vote against the final bill, killing it in one fell swoop because there will almost certainly be zero Republican votes for final passage, no matter what is in the legislation.Manchin, in other words, seems to have all the power and is more than happy to wield it.By contrast, Biden, the most powerful man on the planet, appears to be refusing to wield power. He doesn’t seem to have lifted a finger to try to change the Senate dynamic. He reportedly hasn’t even pushed Manchin on minimum wage at all, which suggests the president is either cartoonishly lazy, believes such an effort would prove fruitless, or actually doesn’t want to deliver on his promises and has found the perfect excuse in the West Virginia senator. Frankly, it is probably some combination of all of those things.The White House insists that it will still continue fighting for a $15 minimum wage in the future. But the reality is that if nothing changes right now, then the likelihood of a significant minimum wage increase in the next few years is incredibly slim.Any standalone, substantial minimum wage bill will face a filibuster requiring 60 votes to overcome it. Despite the White House fantasizing that Republicans might support a serious minimum wage increase, there probably are not 10 GOP Senate votes to break such a filibuster.Meanwhile, if Democrats try to attach a minimum wage increase to a bill that Republicans actually really want to vote for – say, the National Defense Authorization Act – Republicans could move to simply strike it out of that underlying bill, which enough conservative Democrats might agree to, and then the GOP would vote en masse for final passage of the stripped-down legislation.Everyone in Washington knows this script, so a move to attach a minimum wage to a bill like this would likely be a performative gesture, but not a legislative victory.The key: must-pass bills that the Republicans will not vote forThis situation spotlights the central point: must-pass Democratic legislation that has no chance to secure any Republican votes at all may be the foundation of the current Manchin presidency, but they can also be the foundation of a long-overdue progressive realignment in Congress.Manchin’s threat of voting down Democratic legislation is only able to disproportionately determine policy outcomes because there is not a serious ideological threat on the other side serving as a counterweight. Put another way, Manchin is this powerful because he’s willing to wield power and his purported ideological opponents are not.Amazingly, Manchin remains unchecked even though there are enough progressives in Congress to create this necessary countervailing power.In a narrowly divided House in which no Republicans will vote for a Covid relief bill, it would only take somewhere between six and 10 Democratic congresspeople to join together as a bloc and make a game-changing declaration that they will not vote for final passage of a Senate-passed Covid relief bill that does not include a minimum wage increase.Similarly, in the Senate, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren or Ed Markey could pull their own version of Manchin and make the same declaration, saying they would not vote yes on final passage unless the legislation includes Sanders’ amendment to increase the minimum wage.The relief bill is a must-pass for all Democrats. If Manchin can threaten to withhold his vote, so can Elizabeth, Bernie, and the Squad+They should wield their power. Make the bill better, for the substance and the politics.— Ady Barkan (@AdyBarkan) March 3, 2021
Such declarations would trigger a political earthquake, tectonically shifting the power structure and the assumptions built into legislative debates.Suddenly, Manchin would not be the political solar system’s sun whose gravity forces everyone to revolve around him – he would be one of two poles, forcing the Biden administration to try to find compromise between them, and pressuring Manchin to move.Suddenly, the Biden White House, the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and majority leader, Chuck Schumer, would have to carefully weigh how much to give up to Manchin for fear of losing the other bloc of lawmakers on the other side of him. And they would have to do that knowing they can’t triangulate, simply ignore the progressives and replace them with some Republican votes.Suddenly, House progressives’ demand for Harris to ignore the parliamentarian and advance the minimum wage wouldn’t just be rhetoric. With a real threat of progressives voting down a minimum-wage-less Covid bill in final passage, ignoring the parliamentarian would become crucial for Biden himself. He would need to support doing this and use his power to actually pressure Manchin, because he would need to get that minimum wage attached to the bill.With no Republican votes available, progressives would be making clear that would be the only way Biden could hope to pass the Covid relief legislation on which he’s staking his entire presidency.At the table, rather than on the menuIf this would work, then why hasn’t it happened? Almost certainly because congressional progressives are more moral than Manchin – as Representative Ro Khanna articulated in Thursday night’s Daily Poster live chat, they genuinely do not want to delay desperately necessary legislation to help millions of people and extend federal unemployment benefits expiring in 10 days, and the assumption is that Manchin would be more than OK with doing that.But whether from the film Back to the Future or from the experience of the last four years of Donald Trump, we’ve learned over and over again that the only way to defeat bullies is to stand up to them. Congressional progressives must be willing to be as strong, clear and unwavering as Manchin is villainous.They must be willing to follow through on a promise to not just cast votes against a bill Biden wants, but cast decisive votes when there are no Republicans for Biden to peel off – votes that actually take down the legislation unless progressives’ eminently reasonable demands are met.Yes, the Covid relief bill must pass. It includes desperately needed help for Americans who are struggling. And yes, progressives who actually take a stand would be falsely accused of killing the legislation and trampling their own honorable principles of harm reduction that typically leads them to support inadequate legislation because it includes some good stuff (and I have no doubt that for even writing this essay, the Guardian will be instantly – and falsely – accused of not caring about the plight of people struggling though the economic crisis, even though we’ve spent months holding Democrats accountable to their promise of immediate aid).But those arguments don’t fly here. If, as they assert, progressive lawmakers were predicating their votes for the Covid relief bill on an eminently reasonable demand like a long overdue, much-promised raise of the country’s starvation wage, then the legislation’s momentary delay would be the fault of the party and president that refuses to deliver on that promise. It is not the fault of the party’s rank-and-file progressive lawmakers who themselves were elected on the same minimum wage promise and who are simply taking legitimate, reasonable steps to make sure they deliver on the pledge right now.Additionally, precisely because the bill is so desperately needed and a must-pass initiative, there is absolutely no reason to believe it would permanently die. If a Covid relief bill with no minimum wage is voted down in the House, lawmakers can immediately go back and revise the legislation and bring it right back up. We’ve seen that happen before, most prominently during the financial crisis when the Bush administration’s initial bank rescue bill was voted down and then quickly revised and passed.For those who rightly demand a serious minimum wage increase, this is the way to have a real shot at making it happen right now. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that “the entire negotiations of this package, for a lot of people, were predicated on the $15 minimum wage”. The way to actually make that wage increase happen is to follow through and make clear no bill will pass unless it is included. Otherwise, progressives’ votes weren’t actually predicated on the $15 minimum wage at all.This isn’t rocket science. This is game theory 101. This is the ancient idea of countervailing power – and however difficult and scary it may be for progressive legislators, it is the only strategy to end the Manchin presidency before it takes over politics, eliminates the prospect of fundamental change, and delivers an electoral disaster to Democrats in 2022 and 2024.Such opportunities do not come around very often. It is incredibly rare for there to be truly must-pass legislation that no Republicans are willing to sell their vote for. Congressional progressives must be willing to use such an opportunity to make a threat and follow through, knowing that even if they momentarily delay legislation like the Covid relief bill, their party’s leaders will be instantly forced back to the negotiating table to revise it.At that point, progressives would finally be at that table, rather than on the menu – which would at last provide a chance to materially improve millions of Americans’ lives.David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter More