American Rescue Plan (2021)

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      If Biden’s Plan Is Like a ‘New Deal,’ Why Don’t Voters Care?

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      RICHMOND, Va. — As Chris Frelke surveyed the Thomas B. Smith Community Center, he conceded that the beige-and-green cinder block structure was not much to look at. But Mr. Frelke, the parks director in Virginia’s capital, spoke with excitement describing the image in his mind’s eye: One day, there would be a pristine new complex capable of providing services from child care to community college classes.That dream complex is not some remote fantasy. The city of Richmond intends to build it in the next few years using $20 million from the American Rescue Plan, President Biden’s trillion-dollar coronavirus-relief law. Richmond will receive a total of $155 million, a cash infusion that its Democratic mayor, Levar Stoney, called “a once-in-a-lifetime sort of investment.”“This is akin to our New Deal,” Mr. Stoney said.Unlike the New Deal, however, this $1.9 trillion federal investment in American communities has barely registered with voters. Rather than a trophy for Mr. Biden and his party, the program has become a case study in how easily voters can overlook even a lavishly funded government initiative delivering benefits close to home.Mr. Biden’s popularity has declined in polls over the past year, and voters are giving him less credit for the country’s economic recovery than his advisers had anticipated. In Virginia, Democrats got shellacked in the 2021 off-year elections amid the country’s halting emergence from the depths of the pandemic.Ambivalence among voters stems partly from the fact that many of the projects being funded are, for now, invisible.At Richmond’s Southside Community Center, slated to balloon in capacity with the help of rescue plan funding, Linda Scott, a 75-year-old pickleball enthusiast, said she had heard nothing of the coming upgrades.“I know that we’re getting lots of money,” said Ms. Scott, a self-described independent who voted for Mr. Biden. “But what we’re doing with it, I’m not sure.”Thirteen months after Mr. Biden signed the emergency package, that money is starting to fuel a wave of investment on city infrastructure, public services and pilot programs unlike any in decades.“You tell them about the American Rescue Plan,” Mr. Biden has said to House members, “and they say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’”Doug Mills/The New York TimesCity and county leaders are spending confidently, boasting of the generational improvements they are making with the help of Mr. Biden’s legislation.The city of Richmond plans to use $78 million to create four activity centers, overhauling two existing facilities and building two. Rescue plan money will also fund more than $30 million on affordable housing initiatives and smaller amounts on public safety and health.Mr. Stoney allowed that it was not clear how much voters had processed that barrage of spending when the projects were far from completion. In cities like his, the money must make its way through city councils and contract-bidding processes; in some states, the path to deploying funds has been even longer as governors wrangle with conservative legislatures.“I wish we could snap our fingers and say: Oh, there’s a new community center right here today!” Mr. Stoney said.A Guide to the 2022 Midterm ElectionsMidterms Begin: The Texas primaries officially opened the 2022 election season. See the full primary calendar.In the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are the four incumbents most at risk.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering, though this year’s map is poised to be surprisingly fairGovernors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Key Issues: Inflation, the pandemic, abortion and voting rights are expected to be among this election cycle’s defining topics.Other initiatives will kick in faster but affect fewer people: In Richmond, the mayor’s office has endorsed a grant of about $350,000 to Daily Planet Health Services, clinics for low-income residents, to expand capacity to care for people without homes.Richmond plans to use more than $30 million from federal rescue plan funds on affordable housing initiatives.Parker Michels-Boyce for The New York TimesDr. Patricia Cook, the organization’s chief medical officer, said the money could be applied quickly: “We’d be able to fill the rooms that day.”Getting voters excited about the American Rescue Plan is a tall order when so many are preoccupied with the price of gasoline and the cost and availability of other basic goods — concerns the emergency-spending bill was not designed to address.A Gallup poll in March found that more Americans said they worried a great deal about inflation than any other issue. Crime and homelessness, both targets of rescue spending, were not far behind.The American Rescue Plan, which also funded direct relief payments to voters and health programs like vaccine distribution, has been criticized by Republicans and some economists for pumping too much money into the economy and probably contributing to inflation.Mr. Stoney said he had encouraged the White House to work with mayors and treat them as the “tip of the spear” in promoting its aid. Many Americans were still in a gloomy mood because of the pandemic, the mayor said, and Democrats had not done a very good job of communicating about the plan.“Not just the president, but it’s difficult even for us sometimes to break through some of the noise that’s out there,” he said.Mayor Levar Stoney of Richmond says that if Democrats don’t find a way to effectively convey their role in the rescue plan to voters, then Republicans would take credit for spending the money.Parker Michels-Boyce for The New York TimesOnce in a LifetimeThe political predicament confronting Mr. Biden and his party was embedded in the structure of the American Rescue Plan. Within the $1.9 trillion law, a $350 billion fund for state and local governments was designed to meet a dire set of circumstances along the lines of the Great Recession: a potentially catastrophic short-term budget shortfall followed by a slow economic recovery.Mr. Biden declared it would help states and municipalities rehire all “those laid-off police officers, firefighters, teachers and nurses.”The $350 billion in rescue funds would be handed out by 2022 in increments, with recipients given until 2026 to spend it. That timeline was meant to gird states and cities against another economic slowdown, said Gene Sperling, the presidential adviser overseeing the rescue plan.Yet rather than limping through a recovery, the country enjoyed the fastest economic growth in nearly four decades and saw the unemployment rate plummet. Government revenues surged across much of the country, and governors of once-beleaguered states, like California and Minnesota, announced proposals to give residents tax cuts or one-time rebates.Some state and local government payrolls are smaller than they were before the pandemic; many municipalities face a backlog in services from courts to coroners’ offices, and they are not immune to inflation and fuel shocks.The rescue spending still represents something of an insurance policy against a new recession. But for state and local leaders, the money is clearly something more than that.As government revenues began returning, the Treasury Department issued guidance encouraging cities and counties to treat rescue funding as a flexible resource that could be deployed for purposes faintly related to Covid-19.Some initiatives will kick in faster but affect fewer people: In Richmond, the mayor’s office has endorsed a grant of about $350,000 to Daily Planet Health Services, a network of clinics for low-income residents.Parker Michels-Boyce for The New York TimesIf municipalities could make the case that a social problem worsened because of the pandemic, then they could probably use rescue plan funding.Under the federal legislation, Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz knows that Toledo, Ohio, is due $180 million over two years, a colossal sum for a city of about 270,000 people.His administration outlined a combination of short- and long-term improvements, including demolishing blighted buildings, creating affordable housing projects and targeted spending on public safety and child care.Mr. Kapszukiewicz is a rare Democrat who may have been helped politically by the funding. The mayor won re-election by a wide margin in November; in his victory speech, he cited the American Rescue Plan as a reason for his city to be optimistic.“None of us in public life have ever had an opportunity like this,” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said.Cities and counties cannot enact programs that would go bankrupt once the money expires. That has encouraged governments to use it on one-time investments that could be completed by the 2026 deadline — and underwrite policy experiments on a limited scale.Construction on a home that will be offered for sale through the Maggie Walker Community Land Trust in Richmond.Parker Michels-Boyce for The New York TimesMayor Michelle Wu of Boston, a progressive Democrat, has pledged to spend hundreds of millions on affordable housing initiatives. Ms. Wu, who campaigned on eliminating fares for mass transit, is using about $8 million of rescue plan money — from more than half a billion allotted to her city — to make three bus lines free for two years.She hopes demonstrating the value of free transit will create momentum to enact the policy without federal money.“Our goal is to resist the temptation to divvy up these funds into 10,000 photo ops,” Ms. Wu said, “and instead truly focus on transformational change.”Ms. Wu said she had been up front with her constituents that the federal money made her transit policy possible, but she said many were not focused on its origins.“I think if you talk to people out and about, living their lives in our neighborhoods, they don’t care where the funding comes from,” she said.The potential of these programs is unproven, and in many cases years away — a challenge for Democrats who would like to run on a record of concrete accomplishments this fall.“You tell them about the American Rescue Plan,” Mr. Biden said to House members, “and they say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’”Linda Scott said she had heard nothing of the coming upgrades to Richmond’s Southside Community Center. “I know that we’re getting lots of money, but what we’re doing with it, I’m not sure,” she said.Parker Michels-Boyce for The New York TimesChris Frelke, Richmond’s parks director, said the city would spend $78 million creating four community centers.Parker Michels-Boyce for The New York Times‘It Just Does Not Connect’A short drive from Richmond’s Thomas B. Smith Community Center is where the city of Richmond ends and Chesterfield County begins. A historically Republican suburb that is wealthier and whiter than Virginia’s capital city, Chesterfield County has already received more than $34 million through the American Rescue Plan. A second installment of that size is due later.The Republican-led county board has announced a major upgrade of parks and other construction projects, including a school and police station.The county’s finances remained sturdy throughout the pandemic and are now so robust that the board of supervisors approved a reduction in the real estate tax. The rescue plan funding allowed the county to accelerate some projects, local officials said, but they would likely have undertaken many of them without federal help.Christopher Winslow, the Republican chair of the county board, said the projects would have a “long-lasting and significant effect on citizens.” But in a fiscally robust county like his, Mr. Winslow said, the funding was less a rescue than a “bonanza.”By the time the first tranche of rescue money arrived, Mr. Winslow said, there was “a sense that the real pain was largely behind us.” That view is shared by many Republicans in Congress, who criticized the original price tag of the legislation and proposed clawing back some of the money.During a recent meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, several White House officials, including Mitch Landrieu, the former New Orleans mayor, urged city leaders to do more to promote the rescue money — or risk seeing Congress redirect some of the funding elsewhere.After shedding its conservative roots to back Mr. Biden for president in 2020, Chesterfield County shifted back to the right to support a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, for governor.Lashrecse Aird, a former Democratic state legislator who represented a slice of Chesterfield County, said the rescue plan was of “no value whatsoever” to Democrats in Virginia’s 2021 elections. Ms. Aird, who lost her seat in the House of Delegates in November, said voters were scarcely aware of the federal aid.“It just does not connect. That is just the honest to goodness truth,” Ms. Aird said. “Even when you’re talking about schools, so much of this stuff is so far down the line before it’s anything you can see.”Richmond’s Southside Community Center is slated to balloon in size and capacity.Parker Michels-Boyce for The New York Times More

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      Bracing for Losses, Democrats Look to Biden for a Reset

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      At a party retreat in Philadelphia, House Democrats hoped the president would offer a winning strategy heading into a challenging midterm election season.PHILADELPHIA — House Democrats planned a retreat here this week hoping for a reset after a difficult period during which President Biden has been buffeted by rising gas prices, soaring inflation and sagging approval ratings.Instead, they arrived in buses in the middle of the night after the president’s latest coronavirus aid package collapsed in Congress late Wednesday, a grim reminder that his legislative agenda has stalled on Capitol Hill as they head into a midterm election season in which they are bracing for big losses.One year to the day after the enactment of Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan — a law that remains broadly popular even if the president, at the moment, is not — Democrats are toiling to retool their message and refocus their agenda. They are worried that the accomplishments they helped deliver to Mr. Biden are being drowned out by concern over the rising price of gas and a focus on their legislative failures.And they are looking to the president, who addressed them at the retreat on Friday, to help them reframe the conversation.“This may be the most important off-year election in modern history,” Mr. Biden told lawmakers on Friday afternoon. If Democrats lose their majorities in the House and the Senate, he said, “the only thing I’ll have then is a veto pen.”The president outlined his administration’s achievements over the past year, noting that few pieces of legislation have had the impact of the stimulus plan he proposed during his first month in office. He criticized Republicans for wrongly blaming him for gas prices.But it was not clear from his remarks how Mr. Biden planned to help his party refashion its message before November.Gone was the talk of a transformative agenda to remake the country’s social safety net, which was once a centerpiece of Democrats’ sales pitch to voters. The words “build back better” were all but forbidden among the groggy lawmakers who arrived in Philadelphia in the wee hours of Thursday morning.Speaking to reporters, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, joked that the slogan for Mr. Biden’s defunct social policy and climate bill had become like the evil Voldemort in “Harry Potter”: that which must not be named.Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the president could use executive actions to address the issues voters care about before the midterm elections.Alex Wong/Getty ImagesInstead, after a year of supporting his agenda, House Democrats have pivoted to beseeching Mr. Biden to act on his own through executive actions to address the outstanding issues they care about before they face voters in November.Ms. Jayapal said the president could pass executive actions to cap the price of insulin, raise the overtime eligibility threshold to increase wages for tens of millions of people, and fix the so-called family glitch in the Affordable Care Act, which can make it impossible for some workers with modest incomes to afford health insurance.Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 Democrat, said he recently met with White House officials to discuss executive actions that Mr. Biden could take to protect voting rights and overhaul policing after the demise of his efforts to pass major legislation tackling both issues. And Representative Raul Ruiz, Democrat of California and the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he wanted the president to use his executive power to raise the cap on the number of refugees who can be resettled in the United States this year.Other lawmakers said they hoped a shift to the center debuted at Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address last week, along with strong support for his handling of the war in Ukraine, would be enough to persuade voters that Democrats were focused on kitchen-table issues.“We care about everyday Americans, and they don’t,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said when asked to sum up his party’s pitch to voters.The retreat was the group’s first in-person gathering in three years and a chance for Democrats — who have seen 31 colleagues opt to retire — to talk up their achievements and compare notes on how to move forward.“We have passed two major pieces of legislation that, in any other Congress, would have been historic in and of themselves,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, referring to the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure bill.He acknowledged that the landscape might look bleak, but he said the political environment this summer would matter more.“The polls don’t look particularly good now,” Mr. Hoyer said, “but that’s happened in the past.”Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said on Thursday that keeping the majority depended on speaking to voters in a way that was not too preachy or condescending.“We spent a bunch of time talking about attributes in addition to issues,” Mr. Maloney said of a closed-door presentation he delivered on Thursday. “Whether voters think we care about them, whether they think we share their values, whether we have the right priorities.”Every vulnerable Democrat, Mr. Maloney said, was “in the business of having to say, ‘You may not like everything about my political party, but I’m getting it done.’”Some of the moderate Democrats whose seats are most at risk said the tone of the president’s State of the Union address — in which he underscored funding the police, capping the cost of insulin and fighting the opioid epidemic — raised their hopes that he had moved away from simply championing progressive proposals that pleased the party’s left flank but could alienate constituents in conservative-leaning districts like theirs.“Veterans, opioids, these are things we can come together on,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, one of the 32 Democrats identified by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as running for re-election in a competitive seat. “Ukraine is part of the unity message. That is what I think our caucus is hungry for, especially those of us who believe in the value of reaching out to Democrats and Republicans, and it’s certainly what we’re hearing back at home.”That appeared to be the administration’s focus before Mr. Biden’s appearance in Philadelphia on Friday, as his team worked to highlight positive economic indicators.On Tuesday night, administration officials circulated among House Democrats a slide show about deficit reduction, noting that Mr. Biden had lowered it by $360 billion in 2021. White House officials have also been promoting record job growth, while making clear that getting prices under control remains the president’s top priority.Still, vulnerable Democrats said that was not necessarily enough to bolster their political fortunes.“The metrics are strong — employment, wages — but that doesn’t matter,” said Representative Dean Phillips, who represents a suburban Minneapolis district that was long held by Republicans. “What matters is how people feel.”Mr. Biden’s new message has also angered and concerned some progressives, who fear that their priorities were being pushed to the margins.“People say the speech was unifying — unifying because it brought white moderates and white independents back,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, who is Black, referring to Mr. Biden’s State of the Union address. “I was sitting there, like, ‘Damn, again?’”He added: “George Floyd is dead. There’s no national database for police misconduct.”“It’s lazy and unacceptable for the president of the United States to only keep the conversation at that shallow level,” Mr. Bowman said of the discussion about supporting law enforcement. “It’s deeper than that.”Feelings were still raw in Philadelphia this week about the demise of Mr. Biden’s emergency request for Covid-19 aid, which Democratic leaders had stripped from a $1.5 trillion spending bill amid disputes over how to finance it. The money will have to move separately, and Democrats will need Republican support to win its approval.“I would have preferred to just pause for another 24 hours and try to figure out” how to move forward, Ms. Jayapal said in an interview. “I’m not in control.”Jonathan Weisman More

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      This Presidency Isn’t Turning Out as Planned

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      Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president. His Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, was Obama’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve. The director of Biden’s National Economic Council, Brian Deese, was deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. His chief of staff, Ron Klain, was his chief of staff for the first two years of the Obama administration and then Obama’s top Ebola adviser. And so on.The familiar names and faces can obscure how different the new administration, in practice, has become. The problems Biden is facing are an almost perfect inversion of the problems Obama faced. The Obama administration was bedeviled by crises of demand. The Biden administration is struggling with crises of supply.For years, every conversation I had with Obama administration economists was about how to persuade employers to hire and consumers to spend. The 2009 stimulus was too small, and while we avoided a second Great Depression, we sank into an achingly slow recovery. Democrats carried those lessons into the Covid pandemic. They met the crisis with overwhelming fiscal force, joining with the Trump administration to pass the $2.2 trillion CARES Act and then adding the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill and the assorted Build Back Better proposals on top. They made clear that they preferred the risks of a hot economy, like inflation, to the threat of mass joblessness.“We want to get something economists call full employment,” Biden said in May. “Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employers to compete with each other to attract work.”That they have largely succeeded feels like the best-kept secret in Washington. A year ago, forecasters expected unemployment to be nearly 6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020. Instead, it fell to 3.9 percent in December, driven by the largest one-year drop in unemployment in American history. Wages are high, new businesses are forming at record rates, and poverty has fallen below its prepandemic levels. Since March 2020, Americans saved at least $2 trillion more than expected. And that’s not just a function of the rich getting richer: a JPMorgan Chase analysis found the median household’s checking account balance was 50 percent higher in July 2021 than in the months before the pandemic.It is easy to imagine the wan recovery we could’ve had if the mistakes of 2009 and 2010 had been repeated. Instead, we met the pandemic with tremendous, perhaps excessive, fiscal force. We fought the recession and won. The problems we do have shouldn’t obscure the problems we don’t.But we do have problems. Year-on-year inflation is running at 7 percent, its highest rate in decades, and Omicron has shown that the Biden administration wasted months of possible preparation. It is not to blame for the new variant, but it is to blame for the paucity of tests, effective masks and ventilation upgrades.The conversations I have with the Biden administration’s economists are very different from the conversations I had with the Obama administration’s economists, even when they’re the same people. Now the discussion is all about what the economy can produce and how fast it can be shipped. They need companies to make more goods and make them faster. They need more chips so there can be more cars and computers. They need ports to clear more shipments and Pfizer to make more antiviral pills and shipping companies to hire more truckers and schools to upgrade their ventilation systems.Some of these problems reflect the Biden administration’s successes. (Read my colleague Paul Krugman for more on this.) For all the talk of supply chain crises, many of the delays and shortages reflect unexpectedly strong demand, not a pandemic-induced breakdown in production. Supply chains are built to produce the goods that companies think will be consumed in the future. Expectations were off for 2021, in part because forecasters thought demand would slacken as people lost work and wages, in part because the fiscal response was massively larger than anyone anticipated and in part because when people couldn’t go out for meals and movies, they bought things instead. Overall spending is more or less on its prepandemic trend, but the composition of spending has changed: Americans purchased 18 percent more physical goods in September 2021 than in February 2020.Now the Biden administration fears that its supply problems will wipe out its demand successes. In recent remarks, Biden took aim at those who would lower prices by breaking the buying power of the working class. “If car prices are too high right now, there are two solutions,” Biden said. “You increase the supply of cars by making more of them, or you reduce demand for cars by making Americans poorer. That’s the choice. Believe it or not, there’s a lot of people in the second camp.”He’s right, but this is a practical fight, not just an ideological one, and the Biden administration is making its own mistakes. His administration is suffering right now from directly mismanaging Covid supplies. It did an extraordinary job in its first months, flooding the country with vaccines. Today, any adult who wants one, or three, can get the shots. But vaccines aren’t the only public health tool that matters, and there was every reason to believe the Biden administration knew it. The American Rescue Plan had about $20 billion for vaccine distribution, but it had $50 billion to expand testing and even more than that to retrofit classrooms so teachers and children alike would feel safe. Where did that money go?Getting the pandemic supply chain right would help ease every other supply chain, too. If Americans could move about their lives more confidently, they could buy services instead of things, and if companies could test and protect their work forces more effectively, they could produce and ship more goods.But the Biden administration hasn’t fully embraced its role as an economic planner. When Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, was asked about testing shortages in December, she shot back, “Should we just send one to every American?”Psaki’s snark soon became Biden’s policy. The administration is launching a website where any family can request four free tests. That’s a start, but no more than that. For rapid testing to work, people need to be able to do it constantly. But because the administration didn’t create the supply of tests it needed months ago, there aren’t enough tests for it or anyone else to buy now. Part of this reflects the ongoing failure of the Food and Drug Administration to approve many of the tests already being sold in Europe.The same is true, I’d argue, about masks. There’s simply no reason every American can’t pick up an unlimited supply of N95s and KN95s at every post office, library and D.M.V. Instead, people are buying counterfeit N95s on Amazon and wearing cloth masks that do far less to arrest spread. Now the Biden administration is moving toward supplying masks. But more needs to be done: How about ventilation? How about building the vaccine production capacity needed to vaccinate the world and prevent future strains from emerging? How about building capacity to produce more antiviral pills so that the next effective treatment can ramp up more quickly?For decades, Democrats and Republican administrations alike believed the market would manage supply. We live in the wreckage of that worldview. But it held for so long that the U.S. government has lost both the muscle and the confidence needed to manage supply, at least when it comes to anything other than military spending. So Biden’s task now is clear: to build a government that can create supply, not just demand.This may not be the presidency Biden prepared for, but it’s the one he got.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Your Monday Briefing: Omicron Evades Many Vaccines

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      And elections in Hong Kong.Good morning. We’re covering the latest Omicron news, the Hong Kong elections and a Times investigation into civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes.People waiting in line for AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines in Dhaka, Bangladesh.Mohammad Ponir Hossain/ReutersOmicron outstrips many vaccinesA growing body of preliminary research suggests most Covid vaccines offer almost no defense against infection from the highly contagious Omicron variant. The only vaccines that appear to be effective against infections are those made by Pfizer and Moderna, reinforced by a booster, which are not widely available around the world.Other vaccines — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows. Because most countries have built their inoculation programs around these vaccines, the gap could have a profound impact on the course of the pandemic.Still, most vaccines used worldwide do seem to offer significant protection against severe illness. And early Omicron data suggests South Africa’s hospitalizations are significantly lower in this wave.U.S.: A fourth wave has arrived, just days before Christmas. More than 125,000 Americans are testing positive every day, and hospitalizations have increased nearly 20 percent in two weeks. Only one in six Americans has received a booster shot.Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.In other developments:Some Southeast Asian tourism spots have reopened, but few foreigners are making the trip.Two lawyers and a civil rights activist are on trial in Iran after trying to sue the country’s leaders over their disastrous handling of the pandemic.The U.K. is considering a lockdown as cases skyrocket.National security organizations vetted candidates running in Sunday’s legislative elections. Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York TimesBeijing steers Hong Kong’s voteHong Kong held legislative elections this weekend, the first since Beijing imposed a drastic “patriots only” overhaul of the political system, leaving many opposition leaders in jail or in exile.Understand the Hong Kong ElectionsHong Kong’s legislative election on Dec. 19 will be the first since Beijing imposed a drastic overhaul of the island’s political system.What to Know: New electoral rules and the crackdown on the opposition have eliminated even the slightest uncertainty of previous elections.An Unpopular Leader: Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, appears to relish the new state of affairs.Seeking Legitimacy: The outcome is already determined, but the government is pressuring opposition parties to participate. A Waning Opposition: Fearing retaliation, pro-democracy politicians who had triumphed in the 2019 local elections have quit in droves.Under the overhaul, only 20 seats were directly elected by residents; the rest were chosen by industry groups or Beijing loyalists. The establishment’s near-total control of the legislature is now guaranteed, reports my colleague Austin Ramzy.Analysis: Even though the government has effectively determined the outcome of the elections, it is pressuring voters and opposition parties to participate in order to lend the vote legitimacy.Profile: Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, is the territory’s most unpopular leader ever, polls show. But Lam appears reinvigorated and is poised to seek a second term — if Beijing allows it.A 2016 airstrike aimed at an Islamic State recruiter in Iraq hit Hassan Aleiwi Muhammad Sultan, now 16 and in a wheelchair.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesA pattern of failures A five-year Times investigation found that the American air wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan have been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, thousands of civilian deaths — with scant accountability.The military’s own confidential assessments, obtained by The Times, document more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties since 2014, many of them children. The findings are a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity.Details: Here are key takeaways from the first part of the investigation. The second installment will be published in the coming days.Records: The Times obtained the records through Freedom of Information requests and lawsuits filed against the Defense Department and the U.S. Central Command. Click here to access the full trove.THE LATEST NEWSAsiaA child recovered belongings from his home, which was severely damaged by Super Typhoon Rai.Jay Labra/Associated PressOfficials now believe that more than 140 people died after a powerful typhoon struck the Philippines last week.Police in Japan identified a suspect in the Friday arson fire that killed 24 people in an office building in Osaka.U.S. Olympic leaders criticized China’s response to allegations of sexual assault from one of its star athletes, while trying not to jeopardize American athletes headed to Beijing.Marja, a district in Afghanistan, was once the center of the U.S. campaign against the Taliban. Now residents there are increasingly desperate for foreign humanitarian aid.“In my mind, I was dead,” said Ko Aung Kyaw, a journalist in Myanmar who said he was tortured by the military junta, adding: “I didn’t look like a human.”World NewsRussian troops participated in drills at a firing range last week.Associated PressRussia laid out demands for a Cold War-like security arrangement in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which were immediately rejected by NATO.Chileans began voting for president on Sunday after one of the most polarizing and acrimonious election campaigns in the country’s history.Israel is threatening to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but experts and officials say that is beyond the capabilities of its military.The Baghdad International Book Fair drew readers from across Iraq eager to connect with the outside world through literature.What Else Is HappeningLegal and military experts are considering whether to seek a ban on killer robots, which are technically called “lethal autonomous weapons systems.”Senator Joe Manchin said he would not support President Biden’s expansive social spending bill, all but dooming the Democrats’ drive to pass it as written.Asian and Black activists in the U.S. are struggling to find common ground over policing and safety.Lawyers for Britney Spears are questioning whether her manager improperly enriched herself during the conservatorship.A Morning Read“I wanted to perform rakugo the exact same way that men do,” Niyo Katsura, right, said after winning a top award.Shiho Fukada for The New York TimesRakugo, one of Japan’s oldest and raunchiest comedic arts, has long been dominated by men. But a woman artist, Niyo Katsura, is now winning acclaim for her uncanny ability to portray a range of drunks and fools — male and female alike.ARTS AND IDEAS Clockwise from top left: Reuters, The New York Times, AFP, The New York Times, AFP, ReutersThe faces of 2021The New York Times Faces Quiz offers a chance to see how well you know some of the defining personalities of 2021. We have chosen 52. When we show you each face, you need to tell us the name. (And yes, we’re lenient on spelling.)Play it here, and see how well you do compared with other Times readers.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookChristopher Simpson for The New York TimesPernil, a pork shoulder roast from Puerto Rico that is often made for holidays or special occasions, is slow-roasted on high heat to achieve a crisp skin known as chicharrón.What to ReadHere are nine new books to peruse, which include a cultural history of seven immigrant cooks, reflections on suicide and a biography of H.G. Wells.What to WatchAn experimental Canadian drama, an Egyptian weight lifting documentary and a Chilean buddy comedy are three of five international movies available to stream this month.Now Time to PlayHere’s today’s Mini Crossword.And here is today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. Carlos Tejada, The Times’s deputy Asia editor and a fierce advocate for our journalism, died on Friday of a heart attack. We will miss him.The latest episode of “The Daily” is about the next phase of the pandemic.You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More

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      So You Lost the Election. We Had Nothing to Do With It.

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      Among Democrats, there is no question that the Democratic Party is sailing in rough waters. Yes, it assembled a winning national majority in the 2020 presidential election, but it has struggled to sustain itself at every other level of government.The Republican Party controls a majority of states and state legislatures, holds a modest advantage in the fight for control of the House ahead of the 2022 midterm elections and holds a substantial advantage in the fight for control of the Senate on account of the chamber’s rural bias. It also has a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court and can more easily win the Electoral College — and thus the presidency — without winning a majority of votes, as it did in 2000 and 2016.Everyone, within the Democratic Party, can see the problem. The question is who, or what, is to blame. For the past year, the answer from many moderate Democrats — and a sympathetic coterie of journalists, commentators and strategists — is that progressives have sailed the ship aground with their views on race, crime, immigration and education, which alienate potential swing voters, including working-class and blue-collar Hispanics.Writing on this problem for The Atlantic, Ron Brownstein quotes the demographer and election analyst Ruy Teixeira, who argues, “The more working class voters see their values as being at variance with the Democratic Party brand, the less likely it is that Democrats will see due credit for even their measures that do provide benefits to working class voters.”In a similar piece, my colleague Tom Edsall quotes William Galston of Brookings, who also argues that progressives threaten to limit efforts to win blue-collar support and that “Some progressives, I fear, would rather be the majority in a minority party than the minority in a majority party.”It is true that some progressives — either Democratic lawmakers or affiliated activists — hold unpopular views or use unpopular language. It is also true that Republicans have amplified this to some electoral success. But missing in this conversation is one inconvenient fact: Progressives are not actually in the driver’s seat of the Democratic Party.It’s easy to think otherwise. Even the most sober version of this critique makes it sound as if the Democratic Party is in the grip of its most left-wing officials and constituents. But it isn’t — to the dismay and frustration of those officials and constituents.The president of the United States, and leader of the Democratic Party, is Joe Biden, the standard-bearer for a bygone era of centrist governance and aisle-crossing compromise, who made his mark in domestic politics as a drug warrior in the 1980s and a “law and order” Democrat in the 1990s.The speaker of the House is Nancy Pelosi, a long-serving liberal establishmentarian. Her leadership team — the majority leader, Steny Hoyer; the majority whip, James Clyburn; the assistant speaker, Katherine Clark; and the Democratic caucus chairman, Hakeem Jeffries — are similarly positioned in the center-left of the Democratic Party. The same is true of Chuck Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate, as well as the people who run the various organizations of the institutional Democratic Party.Although the share of progressives within the Democratic Party is much larger than the share of progressives writ large (12 percent of the party versus 6 percent nationally, according to the most recent political typology survey from the Pew Research Center), a large majority of Democrats are moderate to moderately liberal on most issues. That’s why — and how — Joe Biden won the nomination for president in the first place, easily beating his more left-wing opponents in the South Carolina primary and rallying much of the rest of the party behind him on Super Tuesday and beyond.In office, Biden has led from the center of the Democratic Party. His main legislative achievement so far, Covid relief notwithstanding, is a bipartisan infrastructure bill. The next phase of his agenda, the Build Back Better plan, now rests in the hands of the most conservative Democrats in Congress. He does not celebrate violent protests; he denounces them. He supports law enforcement and the criminal justice system — see his comments on the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict — and avoids most cultural battles. This is true, as well, of most elected Democrats in Washington.There was a battle for control of the Democratic Party, and the moderates won. They hold the power and they direct the message. But despite this victory, moderate Democrats and their allies can’t seem to take responsibility for the party’s fortunes. When faced with defeats — as they were last month when Terry McAuliffe fell to Glenn Youngkin in the race to succeed Ralph Northam as governor of Virginia — they blame the left. It’s the same song, each time. If progressives would just stop alienating the public, then they could make gains and put power back in Democratic hands. Somehow, the people in the passenger’s seat of the Democratic Party are always and forever responsible for the driver’s failure to reach their shared destination.Writing for his newsletter, the journalist Osita Nwanevu made a version of this point earlier in the year. Progressive politicians and activists may be occasionally off-message but in the main, “The simple truth is that most of the things moderate liberals tend to argue Democrats should be doing and saying are, in fact, being done and said by the Biden administration, Democratic leaders in Congress, and the vast majority of Democratic elected officials.”If, despite their influence, moderate Democrats are not satisfied with the state of their party, then they might want to turn their critical eye on themselves. What they’ll find are a few fundamental problems that may help explain the party’s current predicament.After all, 2020 was not the first year that Democrats fell short of their expectations. They did so in 2010, when moderates had an even stronger grip on the party, as well as in 2014 and 2016. Here, again, I’ll echo Nwanevu. Despite pitching his administration to the moderate middle — despite his vocal critiques of “identity politics,” his enthusiastic patriotism and his embrace of the most popular Democratic policies on offer — Barack Obama could not arrest the Democratic Party’s slide with blue-collar voters. For the past decade, in other words, “the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects have been in decline for reasons unattributable to progressive figures and ideas that arrived on the political scene practically yesterday.”Perhaps the problem, then, lies less with the rhetoric (or existence) of progressive Democrats and more with any number of transformations in the material circumstances of American life and the response — or lack thereof — from the Democrats with the power to do something. What was the Democratic Party’s response to a generation of neoliberal economic restructuring? What was its response to the near-total collapse of private-sector unions? What was its response to the declining fortunes of American workers and the upward redistribution of American wealth?The answer, for most of the past 30 years, is that the moderate Democrats who led the party have either acquiesced in these trends or, as in the case of the Clinton administration, actively pushed them along. And to the extent that these Democrats offered policies targeted to working Americans, they very often failed to deliver on their promises.As a result, as David Dayen of The American Prospect notes in “The Case for Deliverism,” “cynicism finds a breeding ground. People tune out the Democratic message as pretty words in a speech. Eventually, Democratic support gets ground down to a nub, surfacing only in major metropolitan areas that have a cultural affinity for liberalism.” These Democrats, in their failure to deliver, lend credence to the view that Washington is more a hindrance than a help. We can see this right now, as moderate and conservative Democratic resistance to the most ambitious parts of Biden’s agenda has bogged down the entire party and hurt its overall standing.Read in this light, the frequent focus on progressives as the cause of Democratic woes looks less like hard-nosed analysis and more like excuse-making. And my sense is that this excuse-making will only get worse as Republicans weaponize the institutions of American politics to entrench their power and lay the conditions for durable minority rule.Right now, the moderate Democrats who run the party have a narrow and slipping hold on Congress against an opposition that relies on structural advantages, which could be mitigated, or at least undermined, with federal power. They have failed to act, and there’s no sign, so far, that anything will change.If and when Democrats lose one or both chambers of Congress — and when we all face the consequences of their failure — I am confident that we’ll hear, once again, how it’s everyone’s fault but their own.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      There Is Another Democrat A.O.C. Should Be Mad At

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      Progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives can be forgiven their anxiety about whether Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will support the more than $1.8 trillion Build Back Better plan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, for example, rues the two senators’ outsize influence, while her colleague Rashida Tlaib of Michigan worries that Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema are “corporate Dems” led astray by special interests.But if disappointed progressives are looking for a Democrat to blame, they should consider directing their ire toward one of their party’s founders: James Madison. Madison’s Constitution was built to thwart exactly what Democrats have been attempting: a race against time to impose vast policies with narrow majorities. Madison believed that one important function of the Constitution was to ensure sustained consensus before popular majorities could prevail.Democrats do represent a popular majority now. But for Madison, that “now” is the problem: He was less interested in a snapshot of a moment in constitutional time than in a time-lapse photograph showing that a majority had cohered. The more significant its desires, Madison thought, the longer that interval of coherence should be. The monumental scale of the Build Back Better plan consequently raises a difficult Madisonian question: Is a fleeting and narrow majority enough for making history?In this Madisonian sense, Democrats are tripping over their own boasts. Even in announcing that the spending plan had been scaled back, President Biden repeatedly called the measure “historic.” No fewer than four times in a single statement, his White House described elements of the Build Back Better framework as the most important policy innovations in “generations.” Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, called the bill the House passed last week “historic, transformative and larger than anything we have done before.”Before the plan was trimmed from its original $3.5 trillion price tag, Democratic descriptions of it were even more grandiose. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, called the party’s initial proposal “the most significant legislation to expand support for American families since the era of the New Deal and the Great Society. If not quite Rooseveltian in scope, it is certainly near-Rooseveltian.” Ms. Pelosi said the legislation would “stand for generations alongside the New Deal and the Great Society as pillars of economic security for working families.”Madison might ask why legislation that will stand for generations should be enacted in months. The pragmatic answer, of course, is that Democrats may lose their majorities in the House and Senate next November. But that is part of the problem. Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson passed the New Deal and Great Society with enormous, broad-based legislative majorities. The policies were so popular that they commanded at least some bipartisan support.There is a reason Madison thought it should be that way. In evaluating public opinion, he saw two distinctions as essential. The first was whether the public’s views were based on reason or passion. The second was whether the views were settled or fluctuating.According to Madison’s political psychology, passions were inherently short-lived. That was why he could say in Federalist 10 that factions would not overtake a geographically large republic: In the time it took for them to spread, passions would cool and dissipate. By contrast, opinions based on reason could withstand the test of time.Madison encapsulated his theory of democracy in Federalist 63, which pertained to the unique role of the Senate in pumping the brakes on speeding majorities. He assumed that “the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers,” just as there would be unusual moments when the people would get swept up in passionate measures “which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn.”The most significant Madisonian fact is that majority rule is both a good idea and an inevitable one: public opinion both “ought” to and “will” win out in a republic. But, crucially, it will do so “ultimately,” not immediately. One original purpose of the Senate’s six-year terms was to give its members time between elections to resist public opinion. The different electoral clocks for representatives, presidents and senators require that public opinion cohere to prevail.In 1791, with the young Constitution in operation and nascent partisan alliances appearing, Madison wrote in a newspaper essay that the government owed deference to public opinion only when that opinion was “fixed” rather than fluctuating: “This distinction, if kept in view, would prevent or decide many debates on the respect due from the government to the sentiments of the people.”It is difficult to identify a case in American history of sustained, broad public opinion that did not ultimately manifest itself in public policy. Americans have been thwarted or delayed with respect to vague ideas like expanding access to health care. But they have also disagreed profoundly and deeply about what form those ideas should concretely take. When Americans have settled into an enduring consensus on particulars, they have almost always prevailed.One way proponents of particular policies encourage consensus is by appealing to public opinion. But according to Madison, the constitutional system judges majorities on their durability. A nearly $2 trillion bill that fundamentally alters relations between the government and the governed — even if in constructive and needed ways — should demonstrate broad and enduring support. A tied Senate and nearly tied House, acting in a space of months, cannot demonstrate that support on Madisonian terms.Democrats should not be overly faulted for failing to attract Republican support. At least since Democrats took the House in 2018, and arguably for longer, Republicans have been dogmatically uncooperative and uninterested in legislating.But the overuse of omnibus bills that throw every possible priority into a single measure make bipartisan support nearly impossible. Madison may have predicted the future of factions poorly. But his assumption was that coalitions would shift from issue to issue. A stand-alone bill on any one Democratic priority might well receive votes from across the aisle, as the recent $1 trillion infrastructure bill did. One reason for that bipartisan support is that isolating issues raises the cost of opposing them.In addition, the fact that one of the country’s two major political parties refuses to budge and — the decisive fact — feels no pressure from its constituents to do so is evidence that the Madisonian tests of durability and fixity have not been met. If majorities of the American people truly support the Democratic approach to social policy, the party’s candidates should be able to make that case on the campaign trail. The fact that they are trying to beat the clock instead suggests they know their support is fragile. Fragility is a poor foundation for major legislation.Polarization, especially when it falls along geographic lines, does not help. Madison, who foresaw that the enslavement from which he benefited might split the nation, warned against geographic fault lines. But to write off Republican politicians is also to write off broad swaths of voters who support them.Similarly, to blame Mr. Manchin for obstructing Democrats, as Representative Cori Bush of Missouri did in denying his authority “to dictate the future of our country,” is to ignore the fact that a 50-50 Senate gives every member of the body that power. A broader majority would deprive Mr. Manchin or Ms. Sinema of it. But because they serve as a moderating force that ensures wider support for legislation, disempowering them also risks increasing polarization.Devices like gerrymandering have the effect of exaggerating Republican support in the House. So does the geographic polarization reflected in the narrowly divided Senate. Consequently, Democrats’ slender margins in Congress may understate the degree of public support for their policies. But there is no constitutional means of registering public opinion other than elections. And it is equally unquestionable that the tragic flaw of many successful candidates for public office is exaggerating their mandates. The narrow majorities Democrats possess in Congress counsel caution instead. Mr. Biden’s mandate was largely for normalcy after four years of mania. It’s hard to make a case for being F.D.R. without a Great Depression.If progressive Democrats want to do more, they should demonstrate what Lincoln called “a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people.” If the people stand with them, Democrats will eventually — just not immediately — prevail.Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption University, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Madison’s Metronome: The Constitution, Majority Rule, and the Tempo of American Politics.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      John Yarmuth of Kentucky, House Budget Chairman, Announces Retirement

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      Mr. Yarmuth, the lone Democrat in his state’s congressional delegation and a key proponent of President Biden’s domestic agenda, said he would not seek re-election.WASHINGTON — Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the lone Democrat in his state’s congressional delegation and the chairman of the House Budget Committee, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in 2022.Mr. Yarmuth, who is playing a leading role in shepherding President Biden’s sprawling domestic agenda through Congress, is the first senior House Democrat to say he will not run in the midterms, when Republicans are widely believed to have a good chance of wresting the majority.In a video circulated on social media, Mr. Yarmuth, who will be 75 at the end of the current Congress, said he was leaving because of “a desire to have more control of my time in the years I have left” and to spend more time with his family.He also faced the prospect that his Louisville-centered district could be redrawn this year, potentially leading to a more difficult re-election race, though Mr. Yarmuth told reporters later on Tuesday that he was confident the district “won’t change significantly.” Even if he were to prevail, he would face the loss of his committee chairmanship if Democrats lost the House.“I know that on my first day as a private citizen, I will regret this decision, and I will be miserable about having left the most gratifying role of my professional life,” Mr. Yarmuth said in the video. “But I also know that every day thereafter, I will find other ways to help my fellow citizens, and I will be more confident that the decision I announced today is the right one.”He has held his seat since 2006 and has been the only Democrat in the congressional delegation since 2013.Mr. Yarmuth is among the most high-ranking Democrats set to depart Congress at the end of 2022, joining a trickle of rank-and-file lawmakers who have decided to seek a different political office or vacate a district that is likely to change significantly once state officials redraw them using data from the 2020 census.“In Chairman John Yarmuth, the Louisville community and indeed all Americans have had a fierce and extraordinarily effective champion for their health, financial security and well-being,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said in a statement. With his retirement, she added, “the Congress will lose a greatly respected member, and our caucus will lose a friend whose wise counsel, expertise, humor and warmth is cherished.”In his role leading the Budget Committee, Mr. Yarmuth helped oversee passage of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package in March, which he called the proudest moment of his congressional career. He has also drafted the $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that Democrats pushed through over the summer to pave the way for Mr. Biden’s signature domestic bill addressing climate change, expanding health care and public education programs and increasing taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals.Asked by reporters on Capitol Hill about the reaction to his announcement, Mr. Yarmuth said “it’s been overwhelming — I’ve been doing my best to keep it together all day.” More