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    Senate Democrats poised for voting rights push to counter Republican restrictions

    US voting rightsSenate Democrats poised for voting rights push to counter Republican restrictionsSenate expected to reintroduce Democrats’ marquee election reform bill known as the For the People Act before summer recess Hugo Lowell in Washington DCTue 10 Aug 2021 13.46 EDTLast modified on Tue 10 Aug 2021 14.40 EDTTop Democrats in the Senate are poised to make another attempt to push through voting rights legislation before the chamber leaves Washington for a summer recess, in a sign of their determination to counter a wave of Republican-led ballot restrictions across the nation.The Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is expected to reintroduce Democrats’ marquee election reform bill known as the For the People Act, with additional votes on one measure to end partisan gerrymandering and another measure to tighten campaign spending, sources said.None of the measures, for which Schumer hopes to schedule votes immediately after the Senate takes up the $3.5tn budget blueprint for infrastructure, is expected to garner any Republican support and will thus likely follow the demise of the For the People Act in June.The move by Senate Democrats will encourage voting rights activists, who have watched with alarm that the issue appeared to have taken a back seat as protracted negotiations over the $1tn bipartisan infrastructure package consumed the Senate.Yet in the face of united Republican opposition, the endgame for Democrats – even as they scramble to enact voting rights legislation to roll back a wave of GOP ballot restrictions in time for the 2022 midterm elections – remains unclear.The only conceivable path for Democrats to ensure passage of the voting rights bills would require reforming the Senate’s filibuster rule, an option not currently available to party leaders after holdouts last week reiterated their opposition.Senator Kyrsten Sinema on Friday told ABC that she continued to support the 60-vote requirement for the filibuster, days after senator Joe Manchin said anew that he would not acquiesce to carving out a voting rights exemption from the rule.Democrats face a time crunch as they prepare for the 2022 midterms, when they hope to mitigate Republican gains after House district lines are redrawn on the results of last year’s census.Democrats are particularly determined to curb partisan redistricting, which could allow Republicans to gain enough seats to reclaim the House majority and thwart their ambitions of enacting Joe Biden’s legislative agenda in the second half of his first term.And with some Republican-led states racing to redraw lines once the Census Bureau releases detailed population data on 12 August, advocates for stronger federal voting rights laws have warned that Congress needs to act before mid-September in order to affect 2022 balloting.To that end, a group of Democrats led by Senate rules chair Amy Klobuchar and Senator Jeff Merkley have continued to work on voting rights legislation in an attempt to keep up momentum against GOP ballot restrictions based on Trump’s lies about a stolen election.Some Democrats involved in the effort were optimistic that they could introduce this week a For the People Act version 2.0 that incorporated elements from a three-page, scaled-down version of the bill proposed by Manchin two months ago, the sources said.But the legislation was not complete as of Tuesday, and Democrats crafting the voting rights legislation now expect Schumer to try to again advance the For the People Act after the Senate completes a set of marathon rapid fire votes on the $3.5tn budget blueprint.The group, which also includes Senators Alex Padilla and Raphael Warnock, anticipate Schumer will then schedule votes on two measures from Manchin’s proposal: one that aims to counter partisan gerrymandering, and another to combat so-called dark money in politics.The stakes are significant both for Warnock, who is on the ballot next year, as well as for the Democratic caucus more widely, since the loss of his seat in the battleground state of Georgia could shunt the party back into the minority in the 50-50 Senate.And Warnock faces an uphill struggle in seeking re-election as he prepares to run in a state where Republicans have moved decisively to limit mail-in-ballots, curb early voting and shift electoral power towards the Republican-led state house.After Republicans blocked the For the People Act, the most far-reaching election reform legislation to come before Congress in a generation, the Senate majority leader vowed to redouble his efforts.“In the fight for voting rights, this vote was the starting gun, not the finish line,” Schumer said. “We will not let it go. We will not let it die. This voter suppression cannot stand.”But some Democrats have signalled skepticism about forcing an almost certainly futile votes measure now, in a rushed move they say could erode potential Republican support should they try to enact bipartisan voting rights bills in the future.Before the vote on S1, Democrats reached out across the aisle to encourage centrists such as Lisa Murkowski to back the legislation. In a sign of the pessimism about the passage of the two new bills, there has been no such effort this time, the sources said.TopicsUS voting rightsUS SenateUS politicsDemocratsBiden administrationnewsReuse this content More

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    Remember Obama’s drill, baby, drill days? Democrats aren’t innocent on climate | David Sirota

    OpinionClimate changeRemember Obama’s drill, baby, drill days? Democrats aren’t innocent on climateDavid SirotaObama campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose. Joe Biden may well follow in his footsteps Tue 10 Aug 2021 06.25 EDTLast modified on Tue 10 Aug 2021 16.29 EDTIf after Monday’s news you didn’t feel a pang of doom, you’re either a zen master, a recluse living in a news vacuum, or a nihilist. The new United Nations report on climate change predicts an actual, bona fide apocalypse unless our civilization discards our fetish for incrementalism, rejects nothing-will-fundamentally-change fatalism and instead finally takes the crisis seriously.The bad news is that we’ve been here before during the last era of Democratic supremacy, and if the Obama era we sleepwalked through now repeats itself, we’re done. It’s that simple.IPCC report shows ‘possible loss of entire countries within the century’Read moreThe glimmer of good news is that we still have time to defuse the worst effects of the climate bomb, and at least one part of the political dynamic may finally be changing.But if we allow corporate media and the political class to erase our memory of how we arrived here, then history will probably recur and we will all burn.The bad news: we’ve been here beforeAt its core, the climate crisis is a product of bipartisan corruption and greed. Politicians bankrolled by oil and gas interests ignored scientists’ warnings, and financed a fossil fuel economy knowing full well it would destroy the ecosystem that supports all life on the planet.Republicans were more explicit about their corruption, actively denying the scientific facts and resurrecting their own version of a Flat Earth Society that reassured voters that nothing has to change and everything will be fine. Democrats settled on a different, but similarly pernicious, form of climate denialism: They acknowledged the science and issued progressive sounding press releases about the environment, and then they continued supporting fossil fuel development.This strategy satiated liberals’ top priority: enjoying erudite speeches from Ivy League politicians that make affluent liberals feel smart, smug and superior, regardless of whether the rhetoric is subsequently betrayed and discarded in the actual legislative process, which Democrats’ MSNBC-addled base doesn’t seem to care about in the red-versus-blue partisan wars.The cynical formula crescendoed in the presidency of Barack Obama, who campaigned in climate poetry and then governed in fossil fuel prose.When Obama won the 2008 election, liberals lauded him for declaring: “Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all. Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”Little noticed was the concurrent Obama-Biden pledge to “promote the responsible domestic production of oil and natural gas,” “prioritize the construction of the Alaska natural gas pipeline,” and extract “up to 85bn barrels of technically recoverable oil [that] remains stranded in existing fields”.And so four years after that campaign, Obama delivered a speech in Cushing, Oklahoma, which perfectly summarized his actual legacy – and which future post-apocalypse historians (if any survive) will likely see as one of the pivotal moments in the cataclysm:“Under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years,” he said in a speech promising to increase pipeline capacity to flood the world with even more fossil fuels.“Over the last three years, I’ve directed my administration to open up millions of acres for gas and oil exploration across 23 different states. We’re opening up more than 75% of our potential oil resources offshore. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to encircle the Earth and then some. So we are drilling all over the place – right now.”You can try to tout Obama’s support for stuff like the Paris accords and electric vehicles, but his own boasts illustrate a record of climate denialism, as did Obama’s 2018 declaration one month after an IPCC sounded an alarm. Amid the worsening emergency, he told a Texas audience that “suddenly America is like, the biggest oil producer. That was me, people … just say, ‘Thank you,’ please.”Obama: “Suddenly America is the largest oil producer, that was me people … say thank you.” pic.twitter.com/VfQfX1SR0x— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 28, 2018
    The self-congratulation came only two years after Obama tweeted: “Climate change is happening now. Denial is dangerous.” And in that contrast, we see the fundamental formula at work.Obama, like so many politicians, seems to believe that regardless of what’s happening in the physical world, he and his fellow elites can just tweet, Instagram influence, and speechify their way through it, and nobody will care.But this isn’t merely a sleight of hand. There’s also an ideology here – or, more accurately, a sociopathy. Obama’s presidency was an eight-year quest to secure the vaunted “pragmatic” label from corporate media’s bipartisanship fetishists, no matter the human cost of that pursuit.From the all-too-small stimulus, to the watered-down Wall Street reform bill, to the Heritage Foundation–originated healthcare legislation to the push for social security cuts to the approval of toxic chemicals to the Oklahoma speech’s embrace of drill-baby-drill, most major Obama initiatives represented an attempt to appease the right and punch a left.The Obama administration’s top-line goal was to prove to Washington pundits and corporate donors that the Democratic party will always prioritize compromise – even when it means compromising the lifespans of millions of people.All of this was enabled and fortified by Democrats who enjoyed giant majorities in Congress – and yet did nothing to change the dynamic. On climate in particular, that was most obvious: the Democratic House did pass a cap-and-trade bill, but Obama abandoned it in yet another effort to reach out to Republicans, and therefore it went nowhere in the Democratic Senate.Obama and congressional Democrats then helped the Republican party lift the crude oil export ban, and Democrats’ support for natural gas was so aggressive, one oil and gas law firm said it was a “case of policy continuity from Obama to Trump”.The good news: a line in the sand (maybe)Joe Biden, congressional Democrats and Democratic primary voters were not innocent bystanders in all this. Biden was the vice-president and had his name on the original initiatives to flood the world market with US fossil fuels during the climate crisis. Primary voters rewarded him with the presidential nomination as he was lauded by the fossil fuel industry for campaigning against a fracking ban – just as those same voters continue rejecting progressive climate candidates in favor of corporate-friendly incrementalists.Colorado’s 2020 Senate primary was the iconic example of that trend: a reliably blue state’s Democratic electorate obediently followed orders from party leaders in Washington and gave its US Senate nomination to one of America’s most ardently pro-fossil-fuel politicians – all while the local media and political class scoffed at his progressive primary opponent for airing an ad rightly predicting that climate change would prevent Coloradans from safely going outside.That past was a prelude to the last few months, which have seen Biden begin to pull an Obama.On the stump, he’s offered climate poetry, telling America that climate is the “No 1 issue facing humanity” and done photo-ops driving an electric truck. And like Obama, he’s breaking all sorts of campaign promises and governing in fossil fuel prose, increasing drilling to George W Bush levels, backing Trump-era fossil fuel projects, touting auto-emission rules weaker than Obama’s, deploying his energy secretary to promise a bright future for the fossil fuel industry.Now, Biden is championing a bipartisan infrastructure bill that omits major climate initiatives – and that legislation is moving through a Congress whose most powerful Senate Democrat profits off the coal business, and whose most powerful House Democrat laughed at the “green dream or whatever”. It doesn’t help that the party is run by a gerontocracy that can laugh off the emergency, knowing they won’t be around to suffer through the worst consequences of its climate compromises and capitulations.Clearly, if nothing fundamentally changes in our politics and for the donor class that is disproportionately driving the climate crisis, then everything in our natural world is going to change for the worse, with ecocidal consequences on a scale that our species has never experienced, and might not survive.Thankfully, that reality seems to finally be seeping into the consciousness of at least a handful of lawmakers – and even more thankfully, the narrowly divided congressional chambers mean only a small group of legislators are needed to actually alter the legislative dynamics.In recent weeks, progressive lawmakers from Representative Mondaire Jones, a Democrat from New York, to Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, have promoted a simple mantra: “No Climate, No Deal.” The idea is that they will vote down any bipartisan infrastructure bill until it is coupled with legislation that could be the last chance to mobilize the country for the epic battle against climate change, before Republicans win back Congress.This ultimatum is required in order to prevent Biden, Republicans and corporate Democrats from doing what they clearly want to do: simply pass an infrastructure bill that props up the fossil fuel industry with subsidies and road infrastructure, and then leave for vacation without any new climate initiatives as the world incinerates.Until now, progressive lawmakers have made a lot of noise and a lot of sententious declarations about the need for bold action and fearlessness – and then they’ve refused to follow up that sound with the fury of withheld votes. Most notably, they did not withhold their votes on the Covid relief bill in order to force the inclusion of a $15 minimum wage – and now that much-promised initiative has been surgically erased from the discourse, like the memory of an old flame in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.So, yeah, it’s fair to remain circumspect that these Democratic lawmakers would actually follow through on their new ultimatum, for fear of being labeled seditious traitors to the party – which is now considered the highest form of treason in American politics. Such skepticism is especially warranted since these legislators have not made clear what they consider “climate” and exactly what they are demanding for a deal.Then again, what ultimately constitutes “climate” in any agreement may be somewhat vague, but it’s kind of like the obscenity standard – you know it when you see it. Plus, Democratic lawmakers even threatening to act as a climate voting bloc is already providing far more pressure on Biden than Obama ever faced from his own party when he was bragging about his unrelenting support for the fossil fuel industry. And that pressure has at least produced an initial reconciliation proposal that is somewhat serious. So that’s something.As the IPCC report suggests, whether or not these Democrats follow through and force a climate confrontation in Congress – and whether or not their own constituents demand they hold out – could be the difference between a livable planet and a hellscape.It’s the difference between Democrats in 10 years bragging, “That was me, people!” about rescuing the world from disaster, or hunkering down at their Martha’s Vineyard compounds after they’ve laid waste to the planet.
    David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter
    This piece was originally published in the Daily Poster
    TopicsClimate changeOpinionOilDemocratsBarack ObamaJoe BidenUS politicsEnergycommentReuse this content More

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    Reign of Terror review: from 9/11 to Trump by way of Snowden and Iraq

    BooksReign of Terror review: from 9/11 to Trump by way of Snowden and IraqSpencer Ackerman, once of the Guardian, displays a masterful command of the facts but sometimes lets his prejudice show Lloyd GreenSun 8 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 02.01 EDTThis 11 September will be the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the crash of Flight 93. Two wars have left 6,700 Americans dead and more than 53,000 wounded. After the Trump presidency, America roils in a cold civil war. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is on the move again. Saddam Hussein is dead and gone but Iraq remains “not free”.‘A madman with millions of followers’: what the new Trump books tell usRead moreIn other words, the war on terror has produced little for the US to brag about. In an April Pew poll, two-thirds of respondents rated international terror as a “big” problem, albeit one that trailed healthcare, Covid, unemployment and 10 more.Against this bleak backdrop, Spencer Ackerman delivers his first book under the subtitle “How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump”. It is part-chronicle, part-polemic. The author’s anger is understandable, to a point.Ackerman displays a masterful command of facts. No surprise. In 2014, he was part of the Guardian team that won a Pulitzer for reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency.Ackerman stuck with the topic. A contributing editor at the Daily Beast, he has also been its senior national security writer. Ackerman is fluent in discussing the so-called security state, and how it is a creature of both political parties.In the face of Snowden’s revelations, congressional leaders came out for the status quo. According to Harry Reid, then the Democratic Senate majority leader, senators who complained about being left in the dark about the NSA had only themselves to blame. All other Americans were to sit down and shut up.Nancy Pelosi, then House minority leader and a persistent critic of the Patriot Act, a chief vehicle for surveillance powers, declined to criticize Barack Obama or high-tech intrusion in general. Instead, she called for Snowden’s prosecution. He made Russia his home.Ackerman notes that the American Civil Liberties Union and Rand Paul, Kentucky’s junior senator, were notable exceptions to the rule. At the time, Paul remarked: “When you collect it from a billion phone calls a day, even if you say you’re going to keep the name private, the possibility for abuse is enormous.”Ackerman also shines a light on how the far right played an outsized role in domestic terrorism before and after 9/11, reminding us of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, teasing out McVeigh’s ties to other white nationalists.The attack on the US Capitol on 6 January this year is one more chapter in the story. Trump falsely claimed Antifa, leftwing radicals, were the real culprits. The roster of those under indictment reveals a very different story.In congressional testimony in April, Merrick Garland, the attorney general, and Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, described “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” as the greatest domestic threat. Garland also singled out “those who advocate for the superiority of the white race”.Chad Wolf, Trump’s acting homeland security chief, made a similar point last fall. Of course, his boss wasn’t listening.Ackerman delves meticulously into the blowback resulting from the war on terror. Unfortunately, he downplays how the grudges and enmities of the old country have been magnified by key social forces, immigration chief among them.Joe Biden, then vice-president, condemned the Boston Marathon bombers as “knock-off jihadists”. But Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev had received asylum. The immigrant population stands near a record high and the US fertility rate is in retrograde. On the right, that is a combustible combination. When Tucker Carlson is in Hungary, singing the praises of Viktor Orbán, the past is never too far away.In his effort to draw as straight a line as possible between the war on terror and the rise of Trump, Ackerman can overplay his hand. Racism, nativism and disdain for the other were not the sole drivers of Trump’s win, much as Islamophobia was not the sole cause of the Iraq war, a conflict Ackerman acknowledges he initially supported.Trump’s victory was also about an uneven economic recovery and, when it came to America’s wars, who did the fighting and dying. Overwhelmingly, it wasn’t the offspring of coastal elites. In 2016, there was a notable correlation between battlefield casualties and support for Trump.According to Douglas L Kriner of Boston University and Francis X Shen of the University of Minnesota, “Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan could very well have been winners for [Hillary] Clinton if their war casualties were lower.” Residents of red states are more than 20% more likely to join the military. Denizens of blue America punch way above their weight when it comes to going to college.Ackerman, a graduate of New York’s hyper-meritocratic Bronx High School of Science, bares his own class prejudices much in the way Clinton did at a notorious Wall Street fundraiser. Hillary dunked on the “Deplorables”. Ackerman goes after those he sees as socially undesirable.In his telling, Trump is “an amalgam of no less than four of the worst kinds of New Yorkers”. According to his taxonomy, those are “outer-borough whites”, wealth vampires, dignity-free media strivers and landlords.I Alone Can Fix It: Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker on their Trump bestsellerRead moreThis year, many of those “outer-borough whites” voted for a Black candidate, Eric Adams, in the Democratic mayoral primary. Adams, Brooklyn’s borough president, is a former police captain.The real estate industry is a critical part of the city economy. Strivers have been here since the Dutch came onshore. As for “wealth vampires” – come on, really?The city’s economy reels. Murder is way up. Law and order matters. Ackerman’s disdain is misdirected.Nationally, the security state is not going to just disappear. But not all is gloom and doom. In a break with Obama and Trump, the Biden White House has pledged to no longer go gunning for reporters over leaks.The US is leaving Afghanistan. Unlike Trump, Biden was not dissuaded. And last Wednesday, the Senate foreign relations committee voted to end the 1991 and 2002 authorizations of use of military force in Iraq. Even the leviathan can budge.TopicsBooksSeptember 11 2001Donald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsreviewsReuse this content More