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      Biden reaches bipartisan infrastructure deal after meeting with senators

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      Joe Biden announced on Thursday that “we have a deal”, signaling a bipartisan agreement on a $953bn infrastructure plan that would achieve his top legislative priority and validate his efforts to reach across the political aisle.Biden made a surprise appearance in front of the cameras with members of the group of senators, Republicans and Democrats, after an agreement was reached on Thursday. Details of the deal were scarce to start, but the pared-down plan, with $559bn in new spending, has rare bipartisan backing and could open the door to the president’s more sweeping $4tn proposals later on.The president said not everyone got what they wanted and that other White House priorities would be done separately in a congressional budget process known as reconciliation.“We’ve struck a deal,” Biden then tweeted. “A group of senators – five Democrats and five Republicans – has come together and forged an infrastructure agreement that will create millions of American jobs.”The senators have struggled over how to pay for the new spending but left for the White House with a sense of confidence that funding issues had been addressed.Biden’s top aides had met with senators for back-to-back meetings on Capitol Hill and later huddled with the House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer.The agreement comes with a complex legislative push. Pelosi on Thursday welcomed the bipartisan package, but she warned that it must be paired with the president’s bigger goals now being prepared by Congress under a separate so-called the budget reconciliation process.“This is important,” Pelosi said. “There ain’t going to be a bipartisan bill without a reconciliation bill.” The Democratic leader vowed the House would not vote on it until the Senate had dealt with both packages.The major hurdle for a bipartisan agreement has been financing. Biden demanded no new taxes on anyone making less than $400,000, while Republican lawmakers were unwilling to raise taxes beyond such steps as indexing the gasoline tax to inflation. Biden has sought $1.7tn in his American Jobs Plan, part of nearly $4tn in broad infrastructure spending on roads, bridges and broadband internet but also including the so-called care economy of child care centers, hospitals and elder care.With Republicans opposed to Biden’s proposed corporate tax rate increase, from 21% to 28%, the group has looked at other ways to raise revenue. Biden rejected their idea to allow gas taxes paid at the pump to rise with inflation, viewing it as a financial burden on American drivers.The broad reconciliation bill would likely include tax increases on the wealthy and corporations, so a tension still exists over funding for some Republicans and business groups.According to a White House readout of the Wednesday meeting with Schumer and Pelosi, the leaders talked with acting budget director Shalanda Young, National Economic Council director Brian Deese and Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice, and they discussed the two-track approach – the smaller bipartisan deal now emerging and the more sweeping plan of Democratic priorities.Schumer said the leaders “support the concepts” they have heard from the bipartisan negotiations.The Democratic leaders also insisted on the two-part process ahead, starting with initial votes in July to consider the bipartisan deal and to launch the lengthy procedure for the Democrats’ proposal, now drafted at nearly $6tn t.The Democrats’ bigger proposal would run through the budget reconciliation process, which would allow passage of Biden’s priorities by majority vote, without the need for support from Republicans to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. It would require multiple rounds of voting that are likely to extend into fall.Like Pelosi, Schumer said, “One can’t be done without the other.” More

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      House investigates possible shadow operation in Trump justice department

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      Top Democrats in the House are investigating whether Trump justice department officials ran an unlawful shadow operation to target political enemies of the former president to hunt down leaks of classified information, according to a source familiar with the matter.The House judiciary committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, is centering his investigation on the apparent violation of internal policies by the justice department, when it issued subpoenas against Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell in 2018.The use of subpoenas to secretly seize data from the two Democrats on the House intelligence committee – and fierce critics of Donald Trump – would ordinarily require authorization from the highest levels of the justice department and notably, the attorney general.But with the former Trump attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions denying any knowledge of the subpoenas, Democrats are focused on whether rogue officials abused the vast power of the federal government to target Trump’s perceived political opponents, the source said.That kind of shadow operation – reminiscent of the shadow foreign policy in Ukraine that led to Trump’s first impeachment – would be significant because it could render the subpoenas unlawful, the source said.And if the subpoenas were issued without proper authorization from the attorney general level, it could also leave the officials involved in the effort open to prosecution for false operating with the imprimatur of law enforcement.The sharpening contours of the House judiciary committee’s investigation into the Trump justice department reflects Democrats’ determination to uncover potential politicization at the department.Current and former justice department officials have described the subpoenas as part of a fact-gathering effort that ensnared Schiff and Swalwell because they had been in contact with congressional aides suspected of leaking classified information.As the justice department investigated leaks, they obtained records of House intelligence committee staffers, as well as the records of their contacts. Schiff and Swalwell were not the target of the investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported.But Democrats are also concerned about the denials from Barr and Sessions and are set to look at whether they made publicly misleading representations to obfuscate the extent of their involvement.The two former attorneys general appeared to issue very carefully worded denials, the source said, which raised the prospect that they may have been at least aware of the leak inquiries into Schiff and Swalwell.Barr said in an interview with Politico that while he was attorney general, he was “not aware of any congressman’s records being sought in a leak case”, while Sessions also told associates he was never briefed on the subpoenas.In examining the denials, Democrats could demand testimony from Barr and Sessions, as well as other Trump justice department officials. Nadler told the Guardian he would also consider deposing the former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.But the committee is not expected to issue subpoenas for their testimony for some time, in large part because Democrats and counsel on the committee are not yet certain what information they need to compel.The committee took its first step in trying to establish what testimony it needed for its investigation last week, when Nadler sent a lengthy document request to the attorney general, Merrick Garland, and demanded a briefing before 25 June.Democrats on the House judiciary committee are not likely to receive a briefing until next month, the source said. But the House inquiry is sure to be the most potent investigation into the data seizure after Republicans vowed to stymie a parallel inquiry in the Senate.Although justice department investigations into leaks of classified information are routine, the use of subpoenas to seize data belonging to the accounts of sitting members of Congress with gag orders to keep their existence secret remain near-unprecedented.Justice department investigators gained access to, among others, the records of Schiff, then the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee and now its chairman, Swalwell and the family members of lawmakers and aides. More

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      Progressives criticize Biden and Harris for not doing more to help voting rights

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      When the New York Democratic congressman Mondaire Jones, a freshman, was at the White House last week for the signing of the proclamation making Juneteenth a national holiday, he told Joe Biden their party needed him more involved in passing voting legislation on Capitol Hill.Biden “just sort of stared at me”, Jones said of the US president’s response, describing an “awkward silence” that passed between the two.Jones and a growing number of Democratic activists are becoming more vociferous about what they portray as a lackluster engagement from Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris on an issue they consider paramount, as Republican-led state legislatures pass local laws that will lead to restricted voting for many.The White House has characterized the issue as “the fight of his presidency”.But as Democrats’ massive election legislation, the For the People Act, was blocked by Republicans on Tuesday, progressives argued Biden could not much longer avoid the battle over Senate filibuster rules that allow a minority – in this case the Republicans – to block such bills.And questioning whether he was using all of his leverage to prioritize it suggested risk of a first major public rift with his party’s progressive wing if a breakthrough is not found soon.“President Obama, for his part, has been doing more to salvage our ailing democracy than the current president of the United States of America,” Jones said, referring to a recent interview in which the former president pushed for a compromise version of the voting rights legislation put forward by conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia.Jones tweeted on Monday: “Our democracy is in crisis and we need @Potus [the president of the United States] to act like it” with reference to activists complaining that Biden was not holding public events to lobby for the voting rights bill.Biden met with Manchin at the White House, and Manchin at the last minute declared support for the bill’s advance in the Senate on Tuesday, before the Republicans used the filibuster to kill it. But Biden did not meet with Republicans on the issue.The White House argues that both Biden and Harris have been in frequent touch with Democratic leadership and key advocacy groups. Biden spoke out forcefully at times, declaring a new Georgia law backed by Republicans an “atrocity” and using a speech in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to say he was going to “fight like heck” for Democrats’ federal answer, but he left negotiations on the proposal to congressional leaders.On Tuesday the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said Biden was “absolutely revolted” by Republicans’ efforts to suppress access to the ballot box in ways that have greater chilling effects on Democratic voters.Biden tasked Harris with taking the lead on the voting rights issue, and she spent last week largely engaged in private meetings with voting rights advocates as she traveled for a vaccination tour around the nation.But commentary in the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday remarked at “how little we saw of her” publicly lobbying for the legislation.Biden and Harris’s efforts haven’t appeased some activists and progressives, who argue that state laws tightening election laws are designed to make it harder for Black, young and infrequent voters to cast ballots.Some argue Biden ought to come out for a change in the filibuster rules that require 60 votes to advance most legislation, while Democrats only have 50 seats in the 100-seat chamber and Harris as a tie-breaker because the vice- president can preside in the Senate on such matters.“Progressives are losing patience, and I think particularly African American Democrats are losing patience,” said Democratic strategist Joel Payne, a longtime aide to the former Senate majority leader and Nevada senator Harry Reid.“They feel like they have done the kind of good Democrat thing over the last year-plus, going back to when Biden got the nomination, unifying support around Biden, turning out, showing up on election day.”“Progressives feel like, ‘Hey, we did our part.’ And now when it’s time for the bill to be paid, so to speak, I think some progressives feel like, ‘OK, well, how long do we have to wait?’”The progressive congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tweeted: “The people did not give Democrats the House, Senate and White House to compromise with insurrectionists. Abolish the filibuster so we can do the people’s work.”Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former presidential candidate, focused her ire on Republicans, but supports the campaign to overturn the Senate filibuster.“We cannot throw our democracy over a cliff in order to protect a Senate rule that isn’t even part of the Constitution. End the filibuster,” she tweeted.And the former Obama cabinet member and presidential candidate Julián Castro cranked up the pressure on fellow Democrats.“Senate Democrats have a choice: end the filibuster and safeguard our democracy or let an extremist minority party chip away at it until it’s gone,” he tweeted after Tuesday’s legislative defeat.Harris is expected to continue to meet with voting rights activists, business leaders and groups working on the issue in the states and speak out on the issue in the coming weeks.Ezra Levin, co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive grassroots group, said advocacy on the the $1.9tn infrastructure bill has been stronger from the leadership.“The president has been on the sidelines. He has issued statements of support, he’s maybe included a line or two in a speech here or there, but there has been nothing on the scale of his public advocacy for recovery for Covid relief, for roads and bridges,” Levin said.“We think this is a crisis at the same level as crumbling roads and bridges, and if we agree on that, the question is, why is the president on the sidelines?”White House aides point to Biden’s belief that his involvement risks undermining a deal before it’s cut.But in private, advisers, speaking anonymously, currently see infrastructure as the bigger political winner for Biden because it’s widely popular among voters of both parties. More

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      Democrats seek way ahead after voting rights bill hits Senate roadblock

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      After nearly six months of watching Republicans relentlessly make it harder to vote in the US, Democrats suffered a major blow on Tuesday after GOP senators used a legislative maneuver to halt a sweeping voting rights and ethics bill.The vote doesn’t kill the bill, but it marks one of the most significant setbacks for Democrats in Joe Biden’s presidency so far. Democrats heralded the legislation as their No 1 priority, even knowing they were unlikely to get any Republican votes for it. The bill would amount to the most significant expansion of the right to vote in a generation, requiring early voting and automatic and same-day registration, while prohibiting excessive manipulation of electoral district boundaries, a process often called gerrymandering.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterIt wasn’t an unexpected result. Democrats control only 50 seats in the Senate and a procedural rule, the filibuster, blocks most legislation from proceeding to a full debate on the floor unless it has 60 votes. A handful of Democratic senators, most notably Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, support keeping the filibuster in place, saying it helps ensure the minority party has a say. But while the rule remains, Democrats have virtually no chance of passing sweeping voting rights legislation.Democratic senators are now in a quagmire amid escalating concerns that Democrats, who control both Congress and the White House, might not be able to use their power to stop what many experts see as openly anti-democratic efforts by Republicans across the country to make it harder to vote after an election in which there was record turnout, including surges among Black, Asian American and Hispanic voters.Republicans have used partisan majorities in statehouses across the US to pass these measures, even as they have accused Democrats of acting with partisan intent to pass voting reforms.Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, harshly criticized Republican colleagues for refusing to even allow a vote on the bill on the Senate floor.“Surely, some of my Republican friends believe – at the very least – that in this chamber, we should be able to debate about voting rights,” he said. “Voting rights are preservative of all other rights. And what could be more hypocritical and cynical than invoking minority rights in the Senate as a pretext for preventing debate about how to preserve minority rights in the society?”Tuesday’s vote on whether to allow debate on the bill was widely seen as a maneuver to pressure Republicans into taking a public stance on the bill and to pressure moderate Democrats, including Manchin and Sinema, to take a position.In a statement a few hours before the vote, the White House offered a blunt assessment of the attack on voting rights across the United States. “Democracy is in peril,” it said, urging senators to support the bill.“This kicks off the next phase of the fight,” said Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United and Let America Vote, a group running a $30m campaign in support of the bill. “If I had a nickel for every time someone wrote ‘this bill was dead’, I would have enough to fund the entire campaign. People have been counting this bill and these efforts out for the entire year, and not really seeing what was happening across the country.”Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, a Georgia-based group that has worked for years to mobilize voters in the state, called on the White House to increase its efforts to pressure senators who opposed the bill.“Where is the fight?” she said. “I understand that the upper house, the upper chamber, there’s a focus on collegiality … [but] collegiality at the expense of actually getting stuff done, collegiality at the expense of preserving Americans’ ability to participate in our elections, seems misguided.”It’s not clear what the path forward might look like. Last week, Manchin released a compromise that maintained some of the most important provisions in the bill – including making election day a federal holiday, requiring two weeks of early voting, allowing automatic registration at motor vehicle offices, and mandating that states give voters seven days’ notice of a polling place change. However, the proposal does include a voter ID requirement, allowing for more aggressive voter purging, and does not require states to create independent redistricting commissions, which reformers see as a gold standard in curbing excessive gerrymandering.Manchin wound up voting with Democrats on Tuesday to move to advance the bill, an encouraging sign to bill supporters that further highlights Republican obstructionism.“These reasonable changes have moved the bill forward and to a place worthy of debate on the Senate floor,” Manchin said in a statement. “Unfortunately, my Republican colleagues refused to allow debate of this legislation despite the reasonable changes made to focus this bill on the core issues facing our democracy.”Republicans appear unlikely to come around on Manchin’s compromise bill. And while Barack Obama endorsed the compromise on Monday, more than 20 civil rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Black Voters Matter, said the proposal was inadequate.“Senator Manchin’s compromise fails to adequately address the more than 400 voter suppression measures that are being introduced across the country,” they wrote in a joint statement. “Most damaging is its neglect of protections for formerly incarcerated and justice impacted voters; voters with disabilities; Black and all multi-marginalized voters. There has been no indication from Senator Manchin’s reported conversations with conservatives that he has been able to secure Republican support for any of the core elements of [the legislation] which is disappointing to the many activists who are pushing for passage of the bill.”It’s also not clear how Democrats plan to get around the filibuster. Manchin has been steadfast in his commitment to the rule, though privately he has left the door open to lowering the threshold of votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Sinema, another staunch supporter of the filibuster, also authored an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday evening saying she was committed to keeping the procedure in place.Muller pointed to the Senate’s August recess as a deadline to pass a bill, when many states are set to begin drawing electoral districts for the next decade. Republicans control the redistricting process in many states and without the anti-gerrymandering provisions of the bill in place, lawmakers would be free to manipulate districts to give them a significant advantage in elections.“We are literally seeing this very direct undermining of our democracy. And if that goes unchecked, I am very concerned about the future of our democracy,” she said.Nearly 500 state lawmakers wrote to Senate leadership on Tuesday begging them to pass the sweeping bill.“We have attempted again and again to work with our Republican colleagues to set policies that safely and securely expanded voting access – but they simply refuse to act in good faith,” they wrote. “We are out of options. We need your help.” More

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      Biden under pressure to act as landmark voting rights bill faces Senate defeat

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      Joe Biden was facing a huge setback on Tuesday as one of his top priorities, a set of reforms to protect voting rights and shore up American democracy, barrelled towards defeat in Congress.Progressives accused Biden of failing to use his bully pulpit to champion the sweeping legislation, which aims to safeguard elections against attacks by former president Donald Trump and his allies.“OK I have reached my WTF moment with Biden on this,” tweeted Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the grassroots movement Indivisible. “Is saving democracy a priority for this administration or not?”The Senate was due to hold a procedural vote on whether to start debate on the For the People Act, a significant near-900-page overhaul of voting and election law that the White House has described as a “cause” for Biden.But in chamber split 50-50, the bill was poised to fall at the first hurdle. Sixty votes are required to overcome a procedural rule known as the filibuster and there was no prospect of 10 Republicans crossing the floor to join Democrats in advancing the legislation.The For the People Act is seen as a crucial counterweight to hundreds of voting bills introduced by Republican-controlled states, many of which include measures that would make it harder for Black people, young people and poor people to vote. Fourteen states had enacted 22 of these laws by mid-May, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.Biden has spoken passionately about the need to defend democracy but despite his penchant for bipartisanship he has been unable to move the needle. Levin, a former congressional aide, drew a contrast with Barack Obama, who organised a debate with Republicans about his signature healthcare law, and Bill Clinton, who gave 18 speeches to promote a North American free trade agreement.Because of one man’s lie, Republicans are now doing the dastardly act of taking away voting from millions of AmericansHe added: “Democracy is under threat. Fascism is rising. Time is running out. It’s time for the president to get off the sidelines and into the game, or we’re all going to lose.”Obama has also sounded the alarm. Speaking on a call with grassroots supporters, he said: “We can’t wait until the next election because if we have the same kinds of shenanigans that brought about [the insurrection on] 6 January, if we have that for a couple more election cycles, we’re going to have real problems in terms of our democracy long-term.”Democrats’ goals include expanding early voting in elections for president and Congress, making it easier to vote by mail – a tool used by record numbers during the coronavirus pandemic – and improving the transparency of certain campaign contributions. They are also aiming to remove party bias from the once-a-decade drawing of congressional districts.Democrats also accuse Republicans of seeking to reduce polling hours and locations and drop boxes, and tightening voter ID laws, as a direct response to Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen by voter fraud.In remarks on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, likened Trump to “a petulant child”.“Because of one man’s lie, Republicans are now doing the dastardly act of taking away voting from millions of Americans … making it much harder for them to vote, and many, many, many will not,” Schumer said.“From Georgia to Montana, from Florida to Iowa, Republican state legislatures are conducting the most coordinated voter suppression effort in 80 years.”These state houses are making it easier to own a gun than to vote, Schumer said.“Republican legislatures are making it harder to vote early, harder to vote by mail, harder to vote after work. They’re making it a crime to give food or water to voters waiting in long lines. They’re trying to make it harder for Black churchgoers to vote on Sunday.“And they’re actually making it easier for unelected judges and partisan election boards to overturn the results of an election, opening the door for some demagogue, a Trumpian-type demagogue, maybe he himself, to try and subvert our elections in the very same way that Trump tried to do in 2020.”Republicans argue the For the People Act would infringe on states’ rights and that state measures are needed to stop fraud, even though there is no evidence of widespread such problems. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, dismissed the bill as a “partisan power grab” in his own speech on the Senate floor.Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote was a foregone conclusion, there is still suspense around two subplots with wider implications.The bill was co-sponsored by 49 Democratic and independent senators. The sole holdout was Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia who has expressed opposition to the legislation and declined to say if he would support the procedural motion to debate it.If, as expected, Manchin did fall into line, it would intensify pressure for Democrats to abolish the filibuster so legislation can be debated and passed by a simple 51-vote majority – with Vice-President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote. But Manchin and some colleagues have deep reservations about doing so.Kyrsten Sinema, a Democratic senator from Arizona, wrote in the Washington Post: “The filibuster compels moderation and helps protect the country from wild swings.”She said she welcomed a full debate, “so senators and our constituents can hear and fully consider the concerns and consequences”.Biden held talks with Manchin and Sinema at the White House on Monday, aware the congressional stalemate threatens to stall his agenda. Manchin told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday: “We had a very good conversation, very respectful … We’ve just got to keep working.”Both sides are looking for political advantage ahead of next year’s midterm elections, where Republicans hope to win back the House and Senate. More

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      New York City’s tumultuous mayor’s race closes as voters struggle to choose

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      New York City will effectively choose its next mayor in the coming days, drawing to a close a tumultuous election race marred by allegations of sexual misconduct, by the staff of one campaign launching a protest against their own candidate, and by accusations that at least one of the mayoral hopefuls doesn’t actually live in the city.The winner in Tuesday’s Democratic primary will, given the leftward political leanings of the city, almost certainly win the election proper in November, and immediately be tasked with leading New York through its darkest period in several decades.America’s largest city is still recovering from the death of more than 30,000 people from coronavirus, many of them during a harrowing two-month spell in early 2020. It is also engaged in a passionate debate about to rebuild from the pandemic in a way that tackles longstanding issues of inequality.A lack of affordable housing crisis, laid bare during Covid-19, looms over the city, while an election season that began with calls for partially defunding the New York’s police department has pivoted in recent weeks, as a spike in shootings swung the debate in the opposite direction and propelled a Black former police officer, Eric Adams, to the top of the polls.After eight years of Bill de Blasio, who was elected as a progressive mayor but whose time in charge has frequently disappointed both the left and right wings of the Democratic party, the signs are that New Yorkers are ready to swing to the center.But Adams, who would be the second Black man to be mayor of New York City, and his fellow centrist frontrunners Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang, have also been helped by the spectacular implosion of two of the most hotly-tipped left-leaning candidates over the past two months.Many supporters abandoned Scott Stringer, New York’s comptroller, after two women accused him of sexual misconduct, while followers of Dianne Morales, a former non-profit executive, were aghast when most of her campaign staff led an angry demonstration outside her office in May, accusing their candidate of union busting and inaction over allegations of racism.The lack of a serious Republican candidate has added to the certainty that it will be the winner of the Democratic primary who move into Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York City, come January.Despite that added importance of the looming ballot, early voting has so far been very low in a city, and country, that may be suffering from election burnout.Just 32,032 people voted on the first two days they were eligible to do so, which New York magazine pointed out is less than 1% of the city’s 3.7 million registered Democrats and 566,000 registered Republicans.This is the first mayoral election in the city that has featured early voting, however, and the candidates are hoping most voters turn out to the city’s 1,107 polling sites on the day.The polls so far suggest those voters, who are able to rank up to five candidates for the first time in a New York mayoral election, are struggling to make up their minds. Yang, a tech entrepreneur who ran a whimsical bid for president in 2020, led the polls for weeks before being caught by Adams and Garcia, a former New York sanitation commissioner who has been endorsed by the New York Times.Maya Wiley, a civil rights attorney who is running as a progressive, has hoovered up the progressive endorsements lost by Stringer and Morales, however, and surged to second place in a survey last week, while another poll showed Yang, in particular, losing support.Wiley, like Garcia, would be New York’s first female mayor in history, a moment that struck home when she voted – for herself – on Monday.“To see my name on a ballot is very hard to describe,” Wiley said on Twitter. “It’s very moving. And I’m thinking about all of the little girls who I’ve met this year, who have looked into my eyes and seen themselves. I ranked myself #1 for them.”To see my name on a ballot is very hard to describe. It’s very moving. And I’m thinking about all of the little girls who I’ve met this year, who have looked into my eyes and seen themselves. I ranked myself #1 for them. pic.twitter.com/shm7YHeM8y— Maya Wiley (@mayawiley) June 14, 2021
      For Adams, becoming the frontrunner has not been without its problems. In early June Politico reported there was “conflicting information” on whether Adams, the current Brooklyn borough president, actually lives in the neighboring state of New Jersey, where he co-owns a home with his partner.This led to the bizarre scene of Adams giving a tour of what he said was his garden-level Brooklyn apartment.As Adams showed reporters his “small modest bedroom” and “small modest bathroom”, however, internet sleuths noticed that a line of sneakers in what Adams said was his bedroom matched shoes his adult son was seen wearing in Instagram photos, while others noted that the fridge in the Brooklyn apartment was different to fridges Adams had previously shown off in photos on Twitter.Adams later released receipts from his EZpass – an electronic tag which automatically bills any tolls incurred on bridges and tunnels – which he said proved that while he did visit New Jersey, it was never for more than a few hours at a time.Yang, who himself was criticized earlier this year after it emerged he had moved his family out of the city as Covid-19 struck, has had no qualms about pouncing on the issue.“I want to reflect on the oddness and the bizarreness of where we are in this race right now, where Eric is literally trying to convince New Yorkers where he lives and that he lives in this basement,” Yang said at a debate last week.A more unsavory backdrop to the campaigns of both men, and a reality check for those who see New York City as a progressive spark, is the millions of dollars that groups supporting Adams and Yang have received from big money donors who normally save their money for Republican candidates.A brighter spot for many has been the introduction of ranked choice voting for the first time in New York City, although the roll out has not been without its problems. Some Black political leaders have criticized the system, suggesting voters of color were less likely to receive adequate information about how ranked choice works, and less likely to engage in ranking candidates.In a recent poll, 74% of white voters said they planned to pick more than one candidate, but only half of Black and Hispanic voters said they would do the same, an especially disappointing statistic in a race where four of the leading eight candidates are people of color.Climate change, meanwhile, has been largely absent from the televised Democratic debates, a glaring oversight for a coastal city that has an average elevation of 33ft – some areas are much lower – and was decimated by the tidal surge from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.Instead, in the final weeks crime has become a key issue. According to the New York police department’s public database there were 490 shootings in the city between 1 January and 16 May of this year, the highest number since 2002, while there have been 146 murders, a steep climb from 2019 and 2020 and a rise matched by some other large cities in the US.That figure is a long way from the dark days of the 1980s and 90s, when some years saw more than 2,000 people killed, but it has been enough to dominate the discussion.Last summer, as tens of thousands of people attended Black Lives Matter anti-racism protests in New York, many of the candidates appeared to embrace cutting the NYPD’s $6bn budget, but over the past months some have run the other way, with Yang recently calling for a “recruitment drive” to hire more police officers.Unless Wiley, who has stuck by her plan to cleave $1bn from the police budget, can pull off a win, an election that began with a lot of hope for progressives will likely end up in disappointment.But with New York City facing problems of a scale not seen in a generation, a job once dubbed the “second toughest job in America” is likely to live up to its name – whoever takes charge. More

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      Squad goals: Ocasio-Cortez warns Biden patience is wearing thin

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      They were pointed questions, not personal criticisms. But they will have conveyed a warning to Joe Biden that the patience of the left of the Democratic party and its leaders in ‘the Squad’ of progressive politicians is not infinite.“Are we passing the deal that helps working people the most?” asked Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the firebrand New York congresswoman and best known member of the squad. “Are we passing the deal that makes the most jobs? Are we passing a deal that brings down the most climate emissions? Are we passing a deal that raises wages and actually improves our infrastructure for the next generation?”Ocasio-Cortez’s appearance on the influential TV program Morning Joe last week came with the US president weeks into negotiations with Republicans over a massive infrastructure spending package – and apparently little to show for it.The squad and others on the left of the party have remained broadly supportive of Biden as he seeks to restore an era of bipartisan cooperation. But with his agenda stalling on Capitol Hill, frustrations are mounting and threatening to crack the facade of Democratic unity.It was Ocasio-Cortez, a social media star with a global profile, who hailed Biden’s first hundred days in office as having “definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had”. After all, the president’s staggering $1.9tn coronavirus relief package had been swiftly passed by Congress and signed into law, albeit without a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage that liberals have long sought.Now cold reality is intruding, however. Legislation on voting rights, gun safety, immigration and police brutality is faltering in a House of Representatives where Democrats hold a slender 220-211 majority and a Senate split 50-50 with Republicans (vice president Kamala Harris gives the party the tie-breaking vote).Biden’s next big ticket item, the American Jobs Plan, which initially proposed more than $2trn for infrastructure, is facing a rockier road. He conceded ground in negotiations with Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito that ultimately collapsed. Then a bipartisan group of senators came up with a $1.2trn proposal but, progressives say, it fails to address the climate crisis, healthcare and childcare.Democratic leaders are now discussing a two-step process in which they pass a smaller bill with bipartisan support but then follow up with a second measure passed through a process known as budget reconciliation, which would require near total party unanimity.The underlying challenge for Biden is how to keep together an unwieldy Democratic coalition that encompasses conservative senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia – which is Donald Trump country – and senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist from Vermont, who this week drafted a $6trn infrastructure package.Then there is the squad, the left-leaning group of House members that now consists of seven people of color. The more that Manchin digs in his heels against ambitious legislation, the more restive the squad is likely to become, raising difficult questions over whether Biden is applying sufficient pressure to bring the doubters on board.Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the progressive organization Democracy for America, said: “Right now people are really getting frustrated because it’s been six months and we don’t see Joe Biden engaging in the way that he should to push for more support. In fact, he’s negotiating against us and what Democrats want.“So I think there’s a growing sense of frustration among progressives and it’s understandable. We’re feeling like the clock is running out and we’re wasting valuable time and that’s where you’re going to start to see the squad and other members of the progressive movement push back and saying, ‘OK, we’ve got a limited window of time here. We need to put up or shut up’.”With more than two in three Americans supporting the infrastructure bill, according to a Monmouth University poll, Simpson argues that the squad is on the right side of history. “Their relentlessness, their fearlessness and their persistence on this should be rewarded; they should not be punished because they are fighting for what we should be doing anyway.“There’s going to be some blowback if the squad is fighting for things that we actually should get done and the rest of the party is saying, oh no, Republicans aren’t on board, oh no, let one person decide that he’s going to hold up an entire agenda for the entire nation, that the entire nation wants overwhelmingly.”Although the Biden administration has actively engaged with progressives in its early months, there have been some flash points. Ocasio-Cortez and others were quick to speak out when it emerged that Biden intended to retain Trump’s cap on the number of refugees allowed into the US; the administration blinked first and backed down.Squad members including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib sharply criticized Israel for its recent bombing of Gaza and challenged the Biden administration’s unwavering support for the country. And when Harris told Guatemalans, “Do not come” to the US, Ocasio-Cortez called the comment “disappointing” and noted that it is legal to seek asylum. Ocasio-Cortez has also been pushing Biden to face up to the fact that bipartisanship with a radicalized Republican party is a doomed enterprise. She tweeted: “Pres. Biden & Senate Dems should take a step back and ask themselves if playing patty-cake w GOP Senators is really worth the dismantling of people’s voting rights, setting the planet on fire, allowing massive corporations and the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes, etc.”Jamaal Bowman, one of the squad’s newest members, said bluntly that Manchin “has become the new Mitch McConnell”, referring to the Republican senate minority leader infamous for obstruction, after the West Virginia senator declared support for the legislative filibuster while opposing an expansive voting rights bill.The interventions carry weight in part because of the squad’s outsized influence in both mainstream and social media. Ocasio-Cortez has 12.7m followers on Twitter. Activists praise them for speaking with moral clarity about Washington’s failings in a way that strikes a chord with the public.Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said: “I don’t think they are outside mainstream thinking around the frustrations that people have with the Senate as an institution or the limitations that present themselves with such a narrow margin and with Joe Manchin continuing to buck his own caucus. They’re playing a very useful role.”Their willingness to dissent is a sign of party strength, not weakness, Mitchell argues. “When Joe Biden moves the struggle forward, they will give him credit for it. There are examples where the Biden administration has been outside of what we would consider progressive values and they’ve course corrected and it was, I think, because the squad were not afraid to call it.“It led to the Biden administration actually getting better on those issues. That’s an example not of disunity, but co-equal branches operating as they should.”But when it comes to the current legislative gridlock, some commentators argue that the squad would be wrong to take out their frustrations on the president, given the balance of power in the Senate.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “I don’t know how you criticise Biden for Manchin. Biden is putting up the legislation they’d like. The problem is Congress and the sheer numbers. It’s an arithmetic problem more than an ideology problem.”Democrats’ narrow majority in the House should, in theory, give the squad more leverage over party leadership than ever. They threatened to torpedo a $1.9bn spending bill to upgrade US Capitol security in the wake of 6 January insurrection over concerns about more money going to police; eventually three voted no, three voted present and one voted yes; the bill passed by a single vote.Dave Handy, a New York-based political activist and consultant who worked on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, said: “We have a very slim majority in Congress. The squad now wield more power than they’re giving themselves credit for. I don’t know why they’re ignorant of their bargaining position and the hand that they’re holding.”“Everybody else at the table seems to be aware of this. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate are very aware of the cards that they’re holding. The squad is completely aloof. I’m not even sure they know that they’re playing poker. They might think they’re playing checkers.”Handy argues that the squad should pressure Biden and other Democratic leaders much harder. “I don’t think that they’re wielding as much influence as they could be. The squad was elected to be rabble rousers. They are there to agitate. Theirs is the role of a reformer in Congress and, in my estimation, in this current Congress, they have not been doing that.” More