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Sanders: ‘anti-democratic’ Republicans to blame for Biden woes, not just Manchin and Sinema
Sanders: ‘anti-democratic’ Republicans to blame for Biden woes, not just Manchin and SinemaSenator confirms he will campaign against moderate Democrats if they face primary challenges
Robert Reich: Manchin and Sinema are all about their egos
Bernie Sanders on Sunday sought to turn fire aimed by Democrats at two of their own, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, onto Republican senators he said were “pushing an anti-democratic agenda”.Kyrsten Sinema: Arizona Democrats censure senator for voting rights failureRead more“Republicans are laughing all the way to election day,” the Vermont senator told CNN’s State of the Union. “They have not had to cast one bloody vote which shows us where they’re at.”But the Vermont progressive also confirmed that he will campaign against Manchin and Sinema, both Democrats, should they face viable primary challengers.Manchin, from West Virginia, and Sinema, from Arizona, have blocked Democratic priorities including the Build Back Better spending plan and, this week, voting rights reform.Their refusal to contemplate reform to the filibuster, the rule which requires 60-vote majorities for most legislation, meant two voting rights bills in answer to Republican attacks on voting in states were always doomed to fail.On Saturday, Sinema was formally censured by her state party. Sanders said he supported that move. He also confirmed his threat to campaign against Sinema and Manchin in 2024.“If there was strong candidates prepared to stand up for working families who understand that the Democratic party has got to be the party of working people, taking on big money interests, if both candidates were there in Arizona and West Virginia, yes, I would be happy to support them.”But, Sanders insisted, “it’s not only those two. It is 50 Republicans who have been adamant about not only pushing an anti-democratic agenda but also opposing our efforts to try to lower the cost of prescription drugs, trying to expand Medicare … to improve the disaster situation in home healthcare, in childcare, to address the existential threat of climate change. “You’ve got 50 Republicans who don’t want to do anything except criticise the president and then you have, sadly enough, two Democrats who choose to work with Republicans rather than the president, and it will sabotage the president’s effort to address the needs of working families in this country.”Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press, Sanders insisted the Biden administration made “a great start”, in part with a Covid relief bill passed with just 50 votes and the casting vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, but was now bogged down thanks in large part to Manchin and Sinema.“The president and the Democratic Congress,” Sanders said, “… looked at the economic crisis that was caused by Covid. We passed the American Rescue Plan … and we also passed along the way the strongest infrastructure bill that has been passed since Dwight D Eisenhower … We were off to a great start. “And then I will tell you exactly what happened. Fifty members of the Republican party decided that they were going to be obstructionist … and then you had two United States senators joining them, Mr Manchin and Senator Sinema. “For five months now there have been negotiations behind closed doors trying to get these two Democratic senators on board. That strategy, in my view, has failed. It has failed dismally. We saw it last week in terms of the Voting Rights Act. We now need a new direction.”Asked if he was frustrated, Sanders told CNN he was.But, he insisted, “we need to start voting. We need to bring important pieces of legislation that impact the lives of working families right onto the floor of the Senate. And Republicans want to vote against lowering the cost of climate change, home healthcare, whatever it may be. And if the Democrats want to join them, let the American people see what’s happening. “Then we can pick up the pieces and pass legislation.”Abolishing the filibuster won’t lead to a ‘tyranny of the majority’. It’s quite the opposite Read moreSome Democrats advocate splitting Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan into separate bills, in order to pass what they can.Sanders conceded that most such legislation will not pass, given Republican obstruction and the machinations of Manchin and Sinema. Bringing bills to the floor, he conceded, would really be about electoral politics ahead of midterms this year in which Republicans expect to take back the House and possibly the Senate, and the presidential contest in two years’ time.“Once we know where people are at,” he said, “then we can say, ‘All right, look, we have 50 votes here, we have just one vote here, 49 votes here. “But what has bothered me very much is Republicans are laughing all the way to election day. They have not had to cast one bloody vote, or two, which shows us where they’re at. And we’ve got to change.”TopicsBernie SandersUS SenateUS CongressDemocratsBiden administrationUS politicsUS domestic policynewsReuse this content More - in US Politics
Florida man pleads guilty to threatening to kill Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi
Florida man pleads guilty to threatening to kill Ocasio-Cortez and PelosiPaul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, also pleads guilty in federal court to threats against Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in Illinois A Florida man has pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, two leading Democrats in Congress, and Kim Foxx, a prominent district attorney in Illinois.‘The walls are closing in’: Trump reels from week of political setbacksRead moreThe US attorney’s office for the southern district of Florida said Paul Vernon Hoeffer, 60, entered his plea in federal court in Fort Pierce on Friday.Hoeffer admitted calling Pelosi’s Washington office in March 2019, threatening “to come a ‘long, long, way’ to rattle her head with bullets and cut her head off”.He admitted a call to Foxx on the same day, saying bullets would “rattle her brain”.In November 2020, Hoeffer called the office of Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive from New York. This time, the DoJ said, Hoeffer “threatened that he would ‘rip her head off’, and told her to sleep with one eye open”.Citing the plea agreement, NBC News reported that Hoeffer also “warned of ‘all-out war’ and a ‘civilian army’” and made racist remarks in his call to Foxx.Hoeffer made his calls before the attack on the US Capitol on January 6 2021, in which supporters of Donald Trump sought to overturn his election defeat.Some looked for lawmakers to capture or kill. One rioter, from Texas, faces charges including a threat to “assassinate” Ocasio-Cortez. His case has yet to be tried.Capitol police have reported an increase in threats against lawmakers. NBC cited the chief of Capitol police, J Thomas Manger, as saying there were around 9,600 threats in 2021, up from more than 8,000 in 2020.As prominent Democratic women, Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi are common targets for threats, from within the walls of Congress as well as without.Ocasio-Cortez was elected in 2018, as Democrats took the House in opposition to Trump. She quickly became a national star. In 2019, Time magazine began a profile by describing nerves in her Washington office.US man charged with threatening to ‘assassinate’ Alexandria Ocasio-CortezRead more“Every 10 minutes or so,” the magazine said, “someone knocks on the big wooden door of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office on Capitol Hill. The noise makes staffers stiffen.“It’s almost always a harmless fan, one of dozens who arrive each day, leaving neon-colored Post-it notes as devotional offerings.“But in her first three months in Congress, aides say, enough people have threatened to murder Ocasio-Cortez that Capitol police trained her staff to perform risk assessments of her visitors.”This, the magazine said, was “the daily reality for America’s newest human Rorschach test. Wonder Woman of the left, Wicked Witch of the right”.At sentencing in April, Hoeffer will face up to 15 years in prison.TopicsDemocratsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezNancy PelosiUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
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Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts
Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corruptsRobert ReichThe two Democratic senators chose to wreck American democracy, simply to feed their sense of their own importance What can possibly explain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to sink voting rights protections? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone, themselves included, knew bipartisanship was impossible?Arizona Democrats censure Kyrsten Sinema for voting rights failureRead moreWhy did they say they couldn’t support changing Senate filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes?Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?Part of the answer to all these questions can be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But if you want the whole answer, you need also to look at the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: ego. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had heard of Manchin and almost no one outside Arizona (and probably few within it) had ever heard of Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated.I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood and the United States Senate.Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told Manchin asked Joe Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of Build Back Better and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on Build Back Better, he’s got to rename it because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office.Yet out of 100 senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for attention.Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her national celebrity as a spoiler.Biden prides himself on having been a member of the senatorial “club” for many years before ascending to the presidency and argued during the 2020 campaign that this familiarity would give him an advantage in dealing with his former colleagues. But it may be working against him. Senators don’t want clubby familiarity from a president. They want a president to shine the national spotlight on them.Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreSome senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological.Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
TopicsUS voting rightsOpinionUS politicsDemocratsUS SenateBiden administrationUS CongressJoe ManchincommentReuse this content More - in US Politics
If the Democrats don’t shape up, Biden’s presidency will lead to a Trumpian sequel | Astra Taylor
If the Democrats don’t shape up, Biden’s presidency will lead to a Trumpian sequelAstra TaylorThe president has failed to capitalise on progressive sentiment: his party needs to stand up for the working class How should one feel about the first year of the Biden presidency?I can’t really say I’m disappointed, since I didn’t have high hopes going into it. But I do feel dread. This last year has felt a bit like being trapped in a nail-biting intermission between two horror films. The opening instalment consisted of Donald Trump’s first four years in office – it ended with the cliffhanger of a deadly plague and a surreal, poorly executed, but still terrifying ransacking of the Capitol. The sequel practically writes itself, as the man ascends to power a second time, even more emboldened and determined to hold on to power.Winter of peril and impossibility: Biden faces hard truth at anniversary press conferenceRead moreOf course, the script is not yet set in stone. If regular people in the US get organised, we can help push the political class toward a different ending. But to do this effectively, we need to tell a story that begins earlier. To continue with the bad movie metaphors, the prequels are what got us into this mess.For decades, senior Democrats tacked rightward, helping to create the social conditions that Trump and his cronies took advantage of to propel themselves to the White House. Instead of rolling back Reaganism and standing up to a swiftly radicalising conservative base, the party elite helped implement and further entrench an undemocratic, corporate agenda. Democratic functionaries slashed welfare, invested in the military and policing, deregulated the financial sector, increased fossil fuel production and lobbied for disastrous international trade deals.The people who did this are Biden’s natural milieu – and they want Americans to believe their problems began in 2016. Establishment Democrats are desperate to paint Donald Trump and the Covid-19 pandemic as aberrations to an otherwise agreeable status quo. Thus a speedy “return to normal” is all it will take to cure what ails us.The problem, however, is that “normal” was a crisis.The political scientist Corey Robin recently pointed out a core paradox of the Biden administration. On the one hand, Biden has some important accomplishments under his belt: two enormous spending bills and crucial federal appointments, including dozens of judges. But, as Robin notes, they are tainted by an awareness of their fundamental inadequacy. These perilous times require more than generous spending bills and staffing tweaks – Americans need to restructure the economy, stabilise the environment and democratise the political system, before it’s too late.Though never the progressive candidate, Biden briefly appeared to be willing to break with tradition and embrace a bolder approach. “When President Biden took office, he promised to make ending poverty a theory of change,” Shailly Barnes, policy director at the anti-poverty group, Poor People’s Campaign, told me. “While we saw glimmers of what that might have been, we have yet to see this implemented in practice. The 140 million people who are poor or one emergency away from economic ruin … need more than short-term or temporary assistance programmes.”Consider one area I know well: the fight for student debt cancellation. Short-term assistance is all these borrowers have received, despite Biden’s promise of mass relief. Student debt cancellation is an interesting litmus test for the administration. While other proposals he campaigned on – such as raising the minimum wage and securing voting rights – require legislation to pass, the president has the power to cancel all federal student loans with a single signature. But instead of picking up the pen, the president has balked and backtracked, misleadingly focusing on the few Ivy League graduates who would benefit from write-offs. At the end of last year, his administration publicly declared that turning student loan payments back on was a high priority for the administration. Why? A concern about optics: his advisers worry that further relief programmes would undercut messaging about the economy’s good health. Given this intransigence, activists like myself have had to fight the White House tooth and nail just to get it to extend the student loan payment pause to 1 May.Here, the folly of Biden’s first year is on full display. Student debt cancellation would be a win for the American people and the administration. The more loans are cancelled, the more the economy is boosted and the more the racial wealth gap narrows. It is also incredibly popular with young voters, Black voters, and even Republicans. Given that it is a midterm year, delivering on this promise should be a no-brainer. Reform of the criminal punishment system is another area where progress has stalled, despite Biden having come to power after a wave of historic racial justice protests. Members of the dominant, corporate wing of the Democratic party like to marginalise progressives and activists while presenting themselves as savvy and responsible realists. This strategy is both insulting and absurd: there’s nothing naive or irresponsible about wanting a decent and equitable society where people aren’t buried in unpayable debt and don’t have to live in fear of the police.But the strategy is also self-defeating. “They think they are pissing on the left, but what they are really doing is failing to fight visibly [and] vocally for millions of everyday working people,” rural Pennsylvania organiser and author Jonathan Smucker told me. “There is no world in which that is good politics.”The Biden administration has instead been engaged in a dispiriting saga of insider negotiations – negotiations that make an already restive public feel even more frustrated and abandoned.Where the build back better bill is concerned, the president should have instructed his allies in Congress to load it up with extra investment that would mollify opposition and make it harder for his party’s obstructionists, like Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, to hold it hostage. As the organiser Will Lawrence, a co-founder of the youth-led environmental justice-focused Sunrise Movement, put it on Twitter: include a “buyout of coal industry shareholders, and a generous lifetime pension for every miner in West Virginia. Blanket the airwaves promoting it for two weeks in West Virginia. Then put it to a vote and dare Manchin to vote against it.”If you are going to lose because a coal-baron senator is determined to derail your entire agenda and doom millions to deepening poverty and climate chaos, you may as well go down with a real fight. This fight should clarify for the public where the real problem is – not in culture war distractions, but the corruption of our political system by corporate interests – and it would make clear that the Democrats were firmly on their side.President Biden’s first year has ultimately demoralised people, while also providing an opportunity for Republicans to appear poised to seize power. Last spring, a strategic memo by Representative Jim Banks, leader of the largest bloc of House conservatives, was leaked: “URGENT: Cementing GOP as Working-Class party.” It laid out one plot for the second feature of the horror film I keep imagining. Of course, reactionaries will never actually defend working people. But they’re busy crafting a deceptive and destructive script. And if the current administration doesn’t act, we’ll all be watching it soon.
Astra Taylor is a writer, organiser and documentary maker
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After Democrats’ historic defeat on voting rights, what happens next?
After Democrats’ historic defeat on voting rights, what happens next?In an extremely bruising loss for Biden, Republicans used the filibuster to block the sweeping bill from passing Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterFor a little over a year, America has faced a democratic crisis unlike any it has seen in recent history.As Republicans have spread lies about the 2020 presidential election, confidence in it remains staggeringly low and about 1 in 3 Americans now believe Joe Biden was not legitimately elected. Republicans who claim the election was stolen are trying to grab key election administration roles, prompting unprecedented alarm that a future election could be overturned.And after an election with record participation, Republicans have pushed a wave of new laws making it harder to vote, placing new restrictions on longstanding policies that went unquestioned for years. “We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the civil war,” Biden said in July.On Wednesday night, Democrats’ biggest hope of blunting that threat failed in a historic defeat as Republicans used the filibuster – a technical senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation – to block a sweeping voting rights bill from passing.For months Democrats had offered the legislation as an antidote to the anti-democratic sickness that is plaguing America. The bill would have been the most dramatic expansion of the right to vote in a generation. It would have outlawed partisan gerrymandering, protected election officials from partisan interference, required early voting and same-day registration, and restore the pre-clearance provision at the heart of the Voting Rights Act.Politically, the loss was extremely bruising for Biden, who has spent an enormous amount of his political capital in recent weeks only to end up on the losing side. And – even worse – though the measure was blocked by 50 Republicans who refused to even negotiate around it, the moment was one of clear weakness for Democrats. The party has control of both chambers in Congress yet appeared helpless as two of its conservative senators joined with Republicans to preserve the filibuster and doom the legislation.But the deeper stakes of the failure go far beyond politics.It was a moment in which an American government system, crippled by deep partisanship and an arcane rule, turned its back on a rising threat of a dangerous anti-democratic tide. It’s a moment that future historians will be mystified by, a group of scholars warned in November.“To lose our democracy but preserve the filibuster in its current form – in which a minority can block popular legislation without even having to hold the floor – would be a short-sighted blunder that future historians will forever puzzle over,” they wrote.What happens next isn’t exactly clear.Biden suggested the 2022 elections could be illegitimate absent congressional action, a claim the White House quickly walked back on Thursday. “He was explaining that the results would be illegitimate if states do what the former president asked them to do after the 2020 election: toss out ballots and overturn results after the fact,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, tweeted.Cliff Albright, a co-founder of the group Black Voters Matter, said the vote Wednesday was “disappointing”, but said that his group would continue to push for significant voting reforms. He noted how successful pressure from his group and others had been in getting Biden and other Democrats to support changing the filibuster and pointed out that historic past campaigns to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act required continued pushing after setbacks.“Those debates and those votes were important, to put them on record. So that’s a victory for movement,” he said. “I don’t think this moment will be forgotten.”Tiffany Muller, the president and executive director of Let America Vote/End Citizens United, similarly pledged her group would “regroup” and “keep going” to push voting reforms.“We’re going to take that fight to the states. And we’re going to continue to elect champions down the ballot who will prioritize our democracy, and we’re gonna make sure that we’ll hold Republicans accountable at the ballot box in 2022,” she said. “There is no doubt about it that last night’s vote makes the best option on the federal level not available to us anymore. But we’re still gonna look at ‘are there ways to get other pieces of legislation passed on the federal level?’”Politically, Democrats have pledged to fight on.Previewing what could be a midterm message to frustrated voters on Thursday, Jaime Harrison, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, said the failure in the Senate was evidence for why there needed to be more Democrats in the US Senate.“We can send more Democrats to the US Senate and give President Biden and Vice-president Harris the votes they need to pass voting rights legislation. We can show those who stand in the way of voting rights that their actions have consequences,” he said in a statement.Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who laid out a plan for a talking filibuster, said in a statement he would continue to push to reform the rule.“We fell short. But this is not the end of the story,” he said. “When I came to the Senate, 48 senators voting to change the filibuster seemed like a distant dream, something that would never happen. We’re not there yet, but we’re closer than we’ve ever been.”With broad voting reform stalled, there appears to be some bipartisan appetite in congress for changing the Electoral Count Act, a confusing 19th century law that sets out the procedures for counting electoral votes. Trump’s legal team planned to use ambiguities in the law to try and overturn the election, and election scholars for years have said that it needs to be fixed. “There’s a good win there,” Manchin said after the vote on Wednesday. “I mean, my goodness, that’s what caused the insurrection.”But Democrats have rejected fixing the law alone as an acceptable solution, saying it’s unacceptable to fix the way votes are counted if the rules of voting are rigged. It would be a bit like deciding to fix an unreliable scoreboard in a game of basketball where the rules are rigged against one team. Muller also said she was skeptical of how sincere Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, was in his wish to change the law.“We are supportive of reforming the act. But that’s not going to be nearly enough to protect voters in all of these states. It does nothing to fight back against these voter suppression laws,” she said.Meanwhile, congressional inaction is also likely to encourage those seeking to undermine democracy to be even more aggressive, Sherrilyn Ifill, the director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told Congress on Thursday.“In 2021, we saw a repeat of history – a steady drip of old poison in new bottles. Whereas in a bygone era, discriminatory intent in voting restrictions was dressed up in ideals such as securing a more informed and invested electorate, the new justification is fighting imaginary voter fraud, a phantom conjured only to attack,” she said, according to prepared remarks.“With no pushback from Congress, those intent on subverting the next election by continuing to raise doubts about 2020 are becoming more brazen, not less,” she added.Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia who studies the Reconstruction era in US history, said it was difficult to predict how future historians would remember this moment. He said there were parallel moments in history when congressional efforts to protect voting rights were thwarted by the filibuster, such as in 1890 when federal voting protections backed by Henry Cabot Lodge were defeated after a filibuster in the senate.“Historically, the filibuster has been used for one reason: that is to prevent legislation supporting the rights of Black people,” he said. “Let’s not try to glorify the filibuster as having any reasonable reason for existence other than allowing a minority to rule over a majority.”TopicsUS politicsThe fight to voteDemocratsRepublicansBiden administrationanalysisReuse this content More
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Senate Democrats fail to pass voting rights bill: Politics Weekly Extra
As Joe Biden marks his first year in the White House, Democrats will be reeling from their loss to Republicans in the Senate, after Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema chose to let an important voting rights bill fail over a technicality. The Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act would have helped bolster voting rights for many minorities who have felt disenfranchised by recent legislation.Jonathan Freedland speaks to Errin Haines of The 19th about how black voters – who were instrumental in getting Biden elected in 2020 – think the president has done in his first year.
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