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      House Democrats pass Biden’s expansive Build Back Better policy plan

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      House Democrats pass Biden’s expansive Build Back Better policy planBill now goes back to the Senate, where it faces total opposition from Republicans and an uphill battle against centrist Democrats Joe Biden has hailed the US House of Representatives for passing a $1.75tn social and climate spending bill, a central pillar of his agenda that must now go before the Senate.The Democratic majority in the House approved the Build Back Better Act on Friday despite fierce opposition from Republicans.The bill represents “a giant step forward”, the president said in a statement. “Above all, it puts us on the path to build our economy back better than before by rebuilding the backbone of America: working people and the middle class.”House passes Biden’s $1.75tn Build Back Better plan after months of negotiations – liveRead moreAfter months of fits and starts, gridlock and intra-party warring, Democrats leveraged their thin House majority to pass the most sweeping expansion of the social safety net since the 1960s.. The vote went almost wholly along party lines, 220 to 213, with Jared Golden of Maine the sole Democrat to oppose it.Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy had derailed the schedule to vote on Thursday by delivering a marathon overnight speech of eight hours 32 minutes. It was the longest speech ever made on the House floor but could only delay rather than deny the inevitable.The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, triumphantly brought down her gavel to mark the bill’s passage to enthusiastic applause throughout the chamber from Democratic members. There were chants of, “Build Back Better! Build Back Better!”“The Build Back Better Act is passed,” Pelosi announced minutes later, smiling with arm aloft, to more cheering and chants of “Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!”Soon after, a triumphant Pelosi said at a press conference: “We will be telling our children and grandchildren that we were here this day.”The bill is “monumental, it’s historic, it’s transformative, it’s bigger than anything we’ve ever done,” she added.On climate crisis action, Pelosi said: “If you care about the planet and how we pass it on, this bill is for you.”President Biden will transfer power to Vice President Kamala Harris for the brief period of time when he is under anesthesia today while getting a colonoscopy, the White House says. “The Vice President will work from her office in the West Wing during this time.”— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) November 19, 2021
      The Build Back Better Act provides hundreds of billions to new social programs and action to mitigate the effects and worsening of the climate crisis.Outside the US Capitol, progressive leader and Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal said there was not agreement on every element of the bill but that she was pleased with the overwhelming support.She called the bill “a very strong vote to send to the Senate”.South Carolina congressman James Clyburn, who was instrumental in shepherding Black voters to support Joe Biden when he was struggling in the primaries during the 2020 campaign, eventually seeing him win the nomination and the White House, spoke of “a good day” as he appeared alongside Pelosi after Friday’s vote..@SpeakerPelosi: “The Build Back Better Bill is passed.”The House of Representatives passes President Biden’s Social Spending Plan. The bill goes now to the U.S. Senate. pic.twitter.com/zxTxPCPz70— CSPAN (@cspan) November 19, 2021
      The bill now goes to the Senate, where it faces total opposition from Republicans and an uphill battle, in its current form, against centrist Democratic senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has indicated that he wants the bill to pass the Senate, return to the House and be on the president’s desk by Christmas for signing, a tall order with more fierce debate yet to come and a crowded legislative calendar on Capitol Hill in December.The huge bill will use the reconciliation process for budgetary-related legislation, meaning it can be passed in the Senate with a simple majority, rather than a 60-vote threshold, so that Democrats alone can see it through the chamber if they support it.But in a hint of the wrangling to come, Bernie Sanders, an independent senator for Vermont, said: “The Senate has an opportunity to make this a truly historic piece of legislation. We will listen to the demands of the American people and strengthen the Build Back Better Act.”The package is ambitious: it aims to dramatically reduce childcare costs, provide universal pre-kindergarten for children, lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, expand Medicare to cover hearing aids, extend work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants and provide the largest-ever investment in efforts to combat the climate crisis.The House version of the legislation also includes four weeks of paid family and medical leave, though the provision faces opposition from Manchin.Pelosi told reporters: “We had so much agreement within the bill … and then whatever comes out in the Senate, we’ll be working together with them so that we have agreement when it comes back to us. The biggest challenge was to meet the vision of President Biden.”Five days ago Biden signed the bipartisan $1.2tn infrastructure bill into law at the White House, dealing with rebuilding America’s roads and bridges and spreading broadband internet.The president is attending Walter Reed hospital for a routine medical check on Friday, the day before his 79th birthday.His medical required a colonoscopy, which required going under anesthesia. As such, he briefly transferred power to the vice-president, Kamala Harris, the first time the US has had, albeit briefly, a woman as acting president.Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, tweeted that Biden had spoken to Harris at about 11.35am, adding:“@POTUS was in good spirits and at that time resumed his duties. He will remain at Walter Reed as he completes the rest of his routine physical.”TopicsHouse of RepresentativesJoe BidenUS politicsUS CongressDemocratsRepublicansLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Pelosi confident of Build Back Better plan’s passage as bill advances

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      Pelosi confident of Build Back Better plan’s passage as bill advancesDemocrats have a slim majority on the $2tn package that would offer reduced costs for child care and prescription drugs House Democrats on Thursday moved to advance an ambitious $2tn domestic policy package that would overhaul large swaths of the American economy, with House speaker Nancy Pelosi confident they would ultimately deliver the second pillar of Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.“This is historic; it is transformative,” Pelosi said during a press conference on Thursday, as lawmakers debated the measure on the House floor.After months of gridlock and intra-party warring, Pelosi expressed optimism that the House was on the cusp of passing the measure, just two weeks after the House gave final approval to a separate effort investing in the nation’s aging infrastructure.‘We’re here to deliver’: Biden touts infrastructure win as midterms loomRead moreWith their paper-thin majority, Democrats can spare only a handful of defections on the package, called Build Back Better. Party leaders had hoped to pass the measure in tandem with the infrastructure bill, but a last minute objection from a small band of centrist Democrats concerned over the cost of the package derailed those hopes.Pelosi said the House would proceed to a vote on the measure following the release of a cost estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as requested by the group of centrists. The agency said it would complete the analysis on Thursday.The package, which would spend nearly $2tn over 10 years, is expansive: it aims to dramatically reduce child care costs, provide universal pre-kindergarten for children, lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, expand Medicare to cover hearing aids and provide the largest ever investment in efforts to combat the climate crisis.Biden argues that the plan is fully paid for by a slew of new proposals targeting millionaires and big corporations that currently pay nothing in federal tax.Even if the House approves the legislation on Thursday, it faces a complicated path forward in the Senate, where any single Democrat could upend the fragile state of negotiations.Two of the Senate’s 50 Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have not yet committed to supporting the package, even as negotiators reshaped the climate and tax portions of the package to meet their demands.Opening the debate on Thursday, Democrats touted the historic nature of the legislation. Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chair of the House budget panel, which played a critical role in shaping the package, said any single element of the bill alone would be significant, but together they represent the “most consequential legislation for American families since the New Deal”.“It’s a hell of a bill,” he said.Democrats and Republicans sparred on the House floor over the economics of the plan. Republicans assailed it as reckless spending that would exacerbate the trend of rising inflation and slow economic growth. Democrats argued the opposite, that the bill would actually combat inflation while relieving many of the financial stressors Americans face, such as the cost of child care and prescription drugs.Though many of the bill’s provisions remain broadly popular, including among Republicans, boiling economic discontent have sent Biden’s approval ratings tumbling.Despite a mass vaccination campaign, falling unemployment and legislative achievements that include the passage of a nearly $2tn relief package in March and the bipartisan public works bill this month, 63% of Americans say he has not accomplished much after 10 months in office, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.Facing daunting challenges in next year’s midterm elections, Democrats are hopeful that enacting Biden’s agenda in full will bring something of a reversal of fortunes for the party. TopicsUS politicsBiden administrationHouse of RepresentativesDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      This is what gerrymandering looks like | The fight to vote

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      This is what gerrymandering looks likeWe zoomed in on four districts that provide some of the clearest examples of how US politicians are locking in election results for the next decade Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHello, and Happy Thursday,A few months ago, I sat down with my colleagues Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon on the Guardian’s visual team asked to do something that I thought would be exceedingly difficult: could we show what gerrymandering looks like to our readers?While there’s a growing awareness of how gerrymandering “debased” American democracy, in the words of supreme court justice Elena Kagan, articulating exactly how it works can be extremely difficult. The boundaries that make up our political districts are invisible, so when politicians move them every 10 years, voters don’t feel it in their everyday lives. Looking at gerrymandered districts can feel like you’re just looking at a bunch of squiggly lines (trust me, I’ve been there).Over the last few weeks, Andrew put together four maps that overcome this problem. And the final product is, I believe, the best visualization of how gerrymandering works that I’ve seen to date.We zoomed in on four districts – two in North Carolina and two in Texas – that provide some of the clearest examples of how politicians are gerrymandering this cycle. Using the 2020 election results and demographic data, we showed how politicians are transforming districts to virtually lock in election results for the next decade.Just take a look at what happened to the sixth congressional district in the north-central part of North Carolina. It’s currently represented by Democrat Kate Manning, and Joe Biden won the district by 24 points in 2020, a sign that it’s a heavily Democratic area. But when Republicans in the state legislature drew the new lines, they cracked the district into four pieces. The Democratic voters in the sixth district were tossed into four districts that strongly favor the GOP, ensuring Republicans will have a powerful advantage in elections for years to come.All four districts we focused on were drawn by Republicans, who have an immense advantage across the country in drawing district lines this year. But where Democrats do have the upper hand, in places like Oregon and Illinois, they’ve shown a willingness to gerrymander as well.Amid the complexity of redistricting, there’s an important, and often ugly, story about how voters are grouped based on race. In north-eastern North Carolina, for example, we showed how Republicans lowered the share of Black voters in a district, probably making it harder for Black voters there to elect the candidate of their choice. GK Butterfield, a Black Democrat who has represented the district since 2004, is now likely to announce his retirement this week. While courts have historically protected the ability of Black voters to elect the candidate in their choice in the district, that’s now in jeopardy.“I’m fairly certain that this district, if GK were to retire, would be a district that Black voters don’t have the opportunity any longer to elect their candidates of choice,” Allison Riggs, a prominent voting rights attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in North Carolina, told me last week.We also showed how Hispanic voters in the Democratic-leaning suburbs of Dallas and Fort Worth are being tossed into a largely rural district where Republicans dominate.Civil rights groups are bringing a flood of lawsuits to challenge these maps. But they face a huge uphill battle. In 2019, the US supreme court said for the first time that federal courts can’t address partisan gerrymandering. And while plaintiffs can challenge discriminatory maps on different grounds, those suits can take years to resolve in court, enabling politicians to hold several elections using discriminatory maps.Reader questionsRobert writes: With all the talk about eliminating the filibuster, what do you suppose is going to happen to it if Republicans once again achieve a solid majority as now appears likely? Just sayin’.This is a concern that some Democrats who defend the filibuster share. But those who support getting rid of the rule point out that Republicans have distorted the filibuster from a tool that is supposed to forge compromise to one that prevents the majority party from governing at all. And I think there’s also a belief that Republicans might be willing to do away with the filibuster when they get back into the majority, regardless of what Democrats do.Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and I’ll try to answer as many as I can.Also worth watching …
      Ohio Republicans were so secretive in drawing new gerrymandered state legislative maps that they shut out members of their own party. Now, they’re pushing ahead with drawing a gerrymandered congressional map.
      Georgia Republicans unveiled a new congressional map that heavily favors the GOP.
      Civil rights groups have filed a challenge to Texas’s new electoral maps.
      TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteRepublicansDemocratsUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘What is so hard about saying this is wrong?’, says AOC over Paul Gosar’s violent tweet – video

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      Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has blasted Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy for failing to condemn the violent tweet of fellow Republican Paul Gosar ahead of a censure vote against him. The Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives was poised to punish a Republican lawmaker over an anime video that depicted him killing Ocasio-Cortez and swinging two swords at President Joe Biden. ‘What is so hard, what is so hard about saying that this is wrong?’ Ocasio-Cortez said. ‘This is not about me. This is not about representative Gosar. But, this is about what we are willing to accept.’ 

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      Republicans are ‘cracking and packing’ voters to secure minority rule | David Daley

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      Republicans are ‘cracking and packing’ voters to secure minority ruleDavid DaleyThis partisan free-for-all could perpetuate Republican minority rule in Congress and state legislatures for the next decade – if not longer Salt Lake is the largest county in Utah, containing not only the state’s capital, Salt Lake City, but 40% of the state’s population. While Donald Trump carried the safely conservative state, Joe Biden defeated him in Salt Lake county, soundly, by 53% to 42.1%. Two different Democrats have captured a competitive congressional seat there over the last decade, most recently Ben McAdams, who defeated the incumbent Mia Love by fewer than 700 votes in 2018, then lost by less than a percentage point to Burgess Owens in 2020.Don’t expect a tight rematch next year. Utah’s new congressional map, approved by the state legislature this week, divides Salt Lake county into four pieces, attaching pieces to conservative rural counties hundreds of miles away. It ignores the recommendation of an independent commission established by initiative in 2018, and scatters voters here across four districts so uncompetitive and safely Republican that the non-partisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project graded it an F.It’s a similar story in Oklahoma, where the new Republican map cracks Oklahoma City into three different congressional districts, dismantling the competitive fifth district – captured in 2018 by a Democrat, Kendra Horn – and ensuring a big Republican advantage for every seat. The cartography needed to be more creative in New Hampshire, where Republicans took two competitive districts that have largely elected Democrats over the last 15 years and guaranteed themselves one by moving 75 towns and 365,000 people into a new district.The quiet evisceration of the few remaining competitive seats in conservative-leaning states has flown under the radar compared with greedier Republican gerrymanders in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, where the estimated net of seven to 10 Republican seats would be enough to flip the US House of Representatives in 2022 and perhaps keep it in Republican hands for the next decade.Yet Republicans could reinforce their primacy through 2031 – and cut off an important road that helped Democrats retake the House in 2018 – by turning battleground seats into safe strongholds not only in Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City, but with creative cracking and packing of Democratic voters in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Little Rock, Omaha, Louisville, Nashville, Kansas City and Spartanburg.Nebraska’s second congressional district, for example, one of just 16 remaining “crossover” districts where the vote for the US House and president diverged, becomes slightly more Trumpy, trading suburbs close to Omaha for rural counties to the west. This district has national implications, as it is one of two nationwide that award presidential electors. The subtle shift matters; Biden carried this district by fewer than 23,000 votes.In Indiana’s fifth, Republicans locked in a map giving them a 7-2 advantage by shifting Democratic suburbs in Marion county into an adjacent Democratic district – packing the liberal voters into a single Indianapolis district. By reworking that seat, the Republican party pinned Democrats into two overwhelmingly Democratic districts, eliminated the last competitive seat that might have become closer over the next decade, and assured themselves 78% of the seats in a state Trump won in 2020 with 57%.​In Arkansas, where the new congressional map divides Black neighborhoods in Little Rock across multiple districts to ensure a partisan edge for Republicans, the Republican governor found the racial gerrymander so distasteful that he refused to sign it. (It became law anyway, without his signature.)Kansas has not yet introduced a new congressional map, but during the 2020 campaign, the state senate president vowed to gerrymander the state’s single Democratic member of Congress out of office if Republicans won a veto-proof supermajority in the state legislature. They did.South Carolina, meanwhile, has slow-walked new maps and pushed the process into next year, most likely to narrow the window for litigation challenging the plan. Republicans are expected to reinforce the first district seat, won by a Democrat in 2018 by 4,000 votes, and then recaptured by the Republican challenger in 2020 by 5,500 votes.Democrats have done some gerrymanders of their own this cycle. It’s just that Republicans are better equipped to make gains. Oregon Democrats claimed the state’s new seat for themselves; that pickup will be mitigated by a new conservative seat nabbed by Republicans in Montana. Illinois Democrats added one liberal seat and eliminated a conservative seat; Ohio Republicans did the opposite move. Democrats might make a move on the last conservative seat in Maryland and look to gain two or three seats in New York; but that only counters Republican pickups in North Carolina – where new Republican maps will require Democrats to win by seven percentage points to have a shot at even half of the 14 congressional seats.The maps offer no additional gains for Democrats. Republicans still net seats in Texas, Georgia, Florida, New Hampshire and Kansas, in addition to likely gains in Tennessee and Kentucky, and sandbagging competitive seats in Utah, Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Carolina and Indiana. It shrinks the map dangerously for Democrats, at a time when Republicans need to win only five seats to capture the House. And it portends a future in which an election similar to 2020 – in which Democratic US House candidates won 4.6m more votes than Republicans – could place the House under Republican rule regardless of the people’s will.This partisan free-for-all could perpetuate Republican minority rule in Congress and state legislatures for the next decade, if not longer. Much of it was made possible by the gerrymanders of a decade ago, still providing Republican advantages in states like North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. It has been enabled by the US supreme court, which closed the federal courthouses to partisan gerrymandering claims in 2019 and gave lawmakers a green light for ever more egregious redistricting schemes. These maps have been enacted by Republicans at the same time that they have blockaded congressional action on democracy reform and the Freedom to Vote Act that would end this anti-democratic behavior by all sides. And all of this could hasten a constitutional crisis in 2024 if a gerrymandered US House and gerrymandered state legislatures refuse to certify electors, or send multiple slates of electors, to Congress.When Utah’s governor refused entreaties to veto his state’s gerrymandered congressional maps, which effectively preclude competitive elections until at least 2032, he told voters that they should simply elect people who might be interested in fair maps next time around. Easy, right? Only how are they supposed to do that when the current legislators control the maps and draw themselves every advantage?Republican legislators are barricading themselves into castles of power and pulling up the drawbridge. It’s close to checkmate. Voters are running out of avenues – and time – to do anything to stop it.
      David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote
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      Is Donald Trump plotting to steal the 2024 election?

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      Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 US election was ultimately thwarted, but through efforts at state level to elect loyalists to key positions, the stage is set for a repeat showing in 2024

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      Cast your mind back to last November and the US presidential election. Donald Trump initially claimed victory and then, over the subsequent days as postal votes came in, it became clear he wasn’t in fact close to winning. Within five days, the election was called for Joe Biden. Trump had joined that unenvied club: the one-term presidents. But as the Guardian US chief reporter, Ed Pilkington, tells Michael Safi, Trump didn’t let the matter lie. Instead, he’s been touring the country and rallying his supporters with speeches pushing the conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. And while he’s been doing this, his supporters have been busy at state and local level challenging incumbents in elected roles who oversee state election counts. The very people Trump tried and failed to convince last time around to endorse his claim to victory. More