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      Cuomo made suggestive remarks about size of his hands, accuser says

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      As New York governor Andrew Cuomo tried to focus on work on Monday, one of his sexual harassment accusers met for more than four hours with investigators working for the state attorney general.Charlotte Bennett revealed new details about Cuomo’s behavior and what she said was a “sexually hostile work environment”, according to her lawyer, including a claim the governor frequently made suggestive remarks about the size of his hands.“One piece of new information that came to light today was the governor’s preoccupation with his hand size and what the large size of his hands indicated to Charlotte and other members of his staff,” her lawyer, Debra Katz, said in a statement.Bennett also provided 120 pages of records to corroborate her accusations, Katz said.Bennett, 25, is one of a number of women who have accused Cuomo of harassment. Some have said he demeaned them with nicknames or objectifying remarks, subjected them to unwanted kisses and touches or asked about their sex lives. A few, including Bennett, said they believed the governor was gauging their interest in a sexual relationship.Cuomo also faces an allegation that he groped a female staff member after summoning her to the governor’s mansion in Albany late last year.The claims have led to a chorus of Democrats demanding Cuomo’s resignation, including both New York’s US senators. Overshadowed by scandal, Cuomo has tried to press on. On Monday he appeared at a vaccination site on Long Island and talked about the importance of getting a new state budget done by 1 April.That process normally involves intense negotiations and deal-making between Cuomo and leaders in the state legislature – people who have demanded he step down. More than 130 state lawmakers have said Cuomo should go, including Senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. The state assembly has opened an impeachment investigation.“The majority of the legislature has called for his impeachment or resignation,” said Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio. “How can you work with a legislature that is composed of his antagonists? It doesn’t work.”Assembly speaker Carl Heastie said he would try.“I’m going to proceed as if it’s a normal negotiation,” he said.The state attorney general, Letitia James, last week named a former federal prosecutor, Joon Kim, and employment discrimination attorney Anne Clark to lead the Cuomo investigation. They have full subpoena power and will document their findings in a public report.Cuomo has said he will “fully cooperate”. His office did not comment on Monday when asked about Bennett’s interview with investigators.The attorney general’s investigation is on top of scrutiny from federal prosecutors over how Cuomo’s administration handled data on Covid-19 at nursing homes. Cuomo has insisted he won’t be distracted and won’t resign. At his event on Monday, from which reporters were barred, ostensibly because of Covid-19, the governor spoke generally of comebacks in the face of adversity.“Sometimes, God comes and he knocks you on your rear end for one reason or another, or life comes and knocks you on your rear end for one reason or another,” Cuomo said. “The question is what you do when you get knocked on your rear end. And New Yorkers get up, and they get up stronger, and they learn the lesson.” More

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      Biden's make or break moment: president aims to build on success of relief bill

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      In the White House Rose Garden, where for four years Donald Trump raucously celebrated political wins with his allies, it was now the turn of Democrats to take a victory lap – masked and physically distanced, of course.Kamala Harris, the vice-president, heaped praise on Joe Biden for signing a $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill, the biggest expansion of the American welfare state in decades. “Your empathy has become a trademark of your presidency and can be found on each and every page of the American Rescue Plan,” Harris said.Democrats this week passed the plan into law; now they have to sell it. Friday’s event with members of Congress fired the starting gun for Biden, Harris and their spouses to mount an aggressive marketing campaign, travelling the country to tell Americans directly how the hard won legislation will improve their lives.Salesmanship was always seen as Trump’s forte but this is a golden opportunity for Biden, a once unlikely saviour. The oldest president ever elected – at age 78 – is riding high in opinion polls. His rescue plan is endorsed by three in four citizens. His opposition is in disarray with Republicans struggling to find a coherent counter- narrative, squabbling over Trump and obsessing over culture wars.But Biden’s long career will have taught him the laws of political gravity: presidents and prime ministers who start on the up inevitably take a fall. He has also spoken of the need to avoid the fate of Barack Obama who, having intervened to stave off financial disaster in 2009, was repaid with a “shellacking” for Democrats in the midterm elections.Politics is about momentum and, with vaccines coming fast, the economy set to roar back, and spring in the air, Biden has it for now. Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush administrations, said: “In politics, good gets better, bad gets worse. Biden is on something of a roll right now and so it’s good for him to be a little more aggressive and be seen out and about.“They do want to take credit and he should. The tides will turn; there’ll be periods when they look like they can’t do anything right.”In what the White House calls a Help is Here tour, first lady Jill Biden is set to travel to Burlington, New Jersey, on Monday, while the president will visit Delaware county, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will go to Las Vegas on Monday and Denver on Tuesday. Emhoff will remain out west and make a stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Wednesday.At the end of the week, Biden and Harris will make their first joint trip in office to Atlanta where Democrats’ victories in two Senate runoff elections in January were pivotal to getting the relief package passed against unyielding Republican opposition.The White House has acknowledged that the public relations offensive is an attempt to avoid a repeat of 2009, when the Obama administration did not do enough to explain and promote its own economic recovery plan. Biden, who was vice-president at the time, told colleagues last week that Obama was modest and did not want to take a victory lap. “We paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility,” he said.That price included a backlash in the form of the Tea Party movement and rise of rightwing populism. But there were important differences in substance as well as style. Obama’s $787bn bill, which followed the bailout of the banks, delivered a recovery that felt abstract and glacial. This time the impact is more immediate and tangible: some Americans will receive a $1,400 stimulus payment this weekend, with mass vaccinations and school reopenings on the way.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington and former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “I underestimated the extent to which the experience of 2009 has seared itself into the memory of senior Democrats: the interpretation of going too small and paying the price in a painfully slow recovery, spending too long at the beginning negotiating with members of the other party who were never going to agree and never going to compromise, not telling the American people what they had accomplished for them.“The list of lessons learned is a very long one and, to an extent that I find surprising, the administration is refighting and winning the past war.”Despite preventing financial meltdown, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections, the biggest shift since 1948. That fit a pattern in which the incumbent president’s party tends to fare badly in the first midterms, and so Republicans are upbeat about their chances of regaining both the House and Senate next year.Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama, argues that the Covid relief bill is the start of the battle for the 2022 midterms and warns that Democrats cannot take the credit for granted since Americans “currently have the long-term memory of a sea cucumber”.He wrote in the Message Box newsletter last week that despite Obama’s speeches and visits to factories, “it was nearly impossible to break through the avalanche of bad news”. But “this plan’s benefits are more specific, more easily understood, and likely to be broadly felt before too long”.Pfeiffer urged grassroots supporters to join Biden and Harris in the messaging effort via social media. “I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because not enough people knew about how Barack Obama had helped prevent the economy from tumbling into a second Great Depression,” he added. “Let’s not do that again.”The plan will also require strict oversight to ensure money is not misspent or wasted. Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee, said: “It is a massive bill with massive consequences but it requires not just the president and vice-president and cabinet but state and local governments to also work together to ensure that the vaccines are rolled out in an equitable way and ordinary citizens are able to take advantage of some of the wonderful initiatives that are in the bill.”There has been a striking contrast between Biden and Harris’s disciplined focus on passing historic legislation and Republicans’ fixation on “cancel culture”, from Dr Seuss, after the children’s author’s publishing house announced it was discontinuing several books that contained racist imagery, to confusion over whether the Mr Potato Head toy will still be a “Mr”.The issue, which often gets more coverage on conservative media than coronavirus relief, is seen as a way of animating the base in a way that attacks on Biden do not. The president is not Black like Obama, nor a woman like Hillary Clinton, nor a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders, all of which seem to have inoculated him against demonisation by the rightwing attack machine.And despite its popularity with the public, every Republican senator opposed the American Rescue Plan, offering Biden’s team a chance to score political points. Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “It’ll be interesting to see how much they make it about the benefits of the plan versus about Republicans not having voted for the plan.”Chen, policy director for the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign, added: “The challenge for Democrats is going to be as elements of this come out that will be unpopular, is it going to be defined by the things that are unpopular or the things that would appear to be politically quite favourable?” The OECD predicts that the rescue plan will help the US economy grow at a 6.5% rate this year, which would be its fastest annual growth since the early 1980s. But as Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Tony Blair discovered, all political honeymoons come to an end.Republicans are already exploring a new line of attack by accusing the president of ignoring the burgeoning crisis of a surge in children and families trying to cross the southern border. The rare outbreak of unity among Democrats – in the Rose Garden, Biden thanked Sanders for his efforts – is not likely to endure. And the next major item on the legislative wishlist, infrastructure, is likely to be even tougher.But it is the American Rescue Plan, and the political battle to define it, that could make or break Biden’s presidency. Michael Steel, who was press secretary for former Republican House speaker John Boehner, said: “They’re making a bet on economic recovery and I hope they’re right because I want the US economy to recover swiftly.”But, he added, “I think that people will continue learning more about the things in this legislation that are not directly related to Covid relief or economic stimulus. There’s definitely a real risk of blowback.”Steel, now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a public affairs consulting firm, added: “We could be on the on the verge of a new Roaring Twenties with a booming economy and so much pent up demand for people to travel and live and spend money. We could also be priming the pump for a devastating wave of inflation. The economy is generally the number one issue going into an election and there’s a very real chance that we have a tremendous upside or some dangers ahead.” More

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      The fight for voting rights in the US: Politics Weekly Extra podcast

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      As Republicans continue to pass bills that would restrict voting rights for many, and as the Democrats try to fight back on the federal level, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund about the importance of the battle for minority voters across the country

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      As Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to pass laws that would lead to voter suppression, Jonathan and Janai discuss the long struggle for voting rights for millions of voters since the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Follow the work of the NAACP LDF here Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      The Green New Deal's time has come – but where has Labour's radicalism gone? | Adam Tooze

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      What a difference power makes.The past 18 months saw political defeats for the left on both sides of the Atlantic. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party came to an end after a resounding Conservative victory. The Bernie Sanders campaign went down at the hands of the Democrat establishment. And yet the bitter irony of 2020 was that just as the political hopes of the left were dashed, the strategic analysis of the Green New Deal – the centrepiece of its policy vision – was spectacularly vindicated.The Green New Deal demanded that social and economic policy should be oriented towards the immediate planetary challenge of the environment. Its proponents, groups such as the Sunrise Movement, put a “just transition” front and centre; this means fairly managing the social harms such as unemployment that would arise from an accelerated shift away from fossil fuels. Then, as if on cue, the coronavirus arrived, and delivered a devastating “inequality shock” forcing even the likes of the Financial Times to talk about a new social contract.The Green New Deal’s politics emerged from a recognition of the fact that there was unfinished business from the financial crisis of 2008; climate activists warned that we were harnessed to a dangerous financial flywheel and demanded that finance be turned in a constructive direction. The thinking was based on the notion that the status quo was the one thing that we could not have: the events of 2020 confirmed precisely how dangerous and precarious our reality is.In the US, this feeling was compounded by Donald Trump’s terrifying antics and the killing of George Floyd. Even Joe Biden, as centrist as it gets, has been moved to speak of four converging crises – Covid-19, the economy, racial justice and the climate. Nor is this merely a rhetorical framing. The Biden administration has assimilated a large part of the Sanders agenda. The double stimulus programmes planned for 2021 are unprecedented. The administration is clearly serious about climate. It is forced, by the balance of power inside the Democratic party, to put race and environmental justice at the heart of its policies.This assimilation of the left programme into the centre is made possible by victory. It is based on a confidence that a broad-church progressive coalition can win a majority in the US. Furthermore, the Republicans have done the Democrats the favour of vacating the middle ground almost entirely.The contrast to the UK is painful. Reeling from its bitter defeat, languishing in the opinion polls, Keir Starmer’s Labour party diagnoses a polycrisis too, but it consists not of issues of global significance, but of Brexit, the collapse of the “red wall” and the question of Scotland. Questions of identity overshadow everything. Rather than seriously questioning what the nation might be, as the combination of Trump and Black Lives Matter is forcing liberal America to do, Labour appears to be content with trying to reclaim the union flag from the Conservative party.Starmer’s long-awaited “big speech” last month was an exercise in sophomoric national cliche. He managed to be sentimental even in the passages about British business. References to the blitz and 1945 formed the anchor. The climate crisis got a single line, with one other passing reference. The Mais lecture by the shadow chancellor, in January, was weightier. Unlike Starmer, Anneliese Dodds did in fact seriously discuss the climate emergency, but it is no longer the organising framework that it once was, no longer the pacesetter, the imperative to action. The only thing that matters is to convince some key voters that Labour is responsible enough to be trusted as a steward of the economy. Though “acceleration” was one of Dodds’s key terms – a reference to the way the pandemic has amplified pre-existing trends such as flexible working and digitalisation – she managed nevertheless to offer a curiously muted vision of the huge challenges facing the UK and the world economy.No doubt the pollsters have fine-tuned these messages with target segments of the electorate. But if you do not belong to that audience, if you understand your identity to be complex and multiple, if you have ever been on the bitter end of the politics of patriotism, then flag-waving repels. If a little thought about society and politics has taught you to regard “common sense” as the most dangerous of snares, you cannot but worry about a party so desperate to please the Daily Mail.Labour’s retreat from radicalism means that the initiative belongs to the Johnson government. Having done Brexit, it can look to the future. It leads even on climate. After destroying the miners union in the 1980s, the Tories may end up presiding over historic decarbonisation. After vaccines they will claim Britain’s hosting of Cop26 as a victory too. Ahead of the 2024 election, the Tories will no doubt pivot to “fiscal responsibility”, but as the budget makes clear, they are spending as the situation demands. Labour is left to harp on value for money.The independent Bank of England created by Gordon Brown is now merrily buying bonds to finance Rishi Sunak’s spending. Whereas experts aligned with the Labour party were once leading a global conversation about redefining central bank independence in a progressive direction, the shadow chancellor now proposes to treat its independence as inviolable. Not so the Tory chancellor, who has added climate to the bank’s mandate.No doubt the Corbynite left was too in love with its own radicalism. But the Green New Deal was not radicalism for its own sake. It was radical because reality demanded it. Faced with the 2008 global financial crisis and its aftermath, the world historic presence of China, Trump, the escalating climate crisis, and an unprecedented global pandemic, what more is needed to demonstrate this point? A politics that does not want to mobilise around these challenges, which prefers to deal in patriotic pastiche, forfeits any claim to be progressive.The disinhibited politics of the new global right recognises this radical reality, though in the form of fantasy, denial and conspiracy. Global capital is swinging full tilt behind its own version of a Green New Deal. Hundreds of billions is now sloshing into renewable energy. The restructuring and job losses about to happen in the global automotive industry will put every previous reorganisation in the shade.In the age of the great acceleration, Corbyn’s politics at least rose to the challenge of recognising that the future would be different. Labour’s new look – the Little Britain to come – promises a nostalgic road back to the future. It is, in reality, a dangerous dead end. More

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      The best way for Democrats to weaken the far right? Build up the labor movement | Brendan O'Connor

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      The election and inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris does not represent the defeat of the far right, as even the most mainstream Democrats must rhetorically acknowledge. The more critical question, however, is whether those same Democrats are willing to support the changes necessary to actually achieve this victory: not through the introduction of new domestic terror legislation and the expansion of the security state, but through passing laws that allow poor and working people to build power for themselves, in their own organizations and institutions, on their own terms.The incoming administration has already signaled its sensitivity to the urgency of the moment: within hours of taking office, Biden signed a slew of executive orders on the pandemic, immigration, and the climate that began the work of undoing some of what the Trump administration was able to accomplish without congressional involvement. But many of these orders only return federal policy to the pre-Trump status quo, which was already insufficient; those that go beyond that previous status quo do so in the most minimal or superficial of ways. If the Biden administration is serious about legislating towards a more just and equitable society, it must not only pursue reforms to the way that Congress itself works – abolishing the filibuster, for example – but it must prioritize structural reforms like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would open the door to a transformation of the US labor movement.Mostly overshadowed by the storming of the US Capitol, the second impeachment of Donald Trump, and the inauguration of Joe Biden, a slew of worker struggles in the United States are entering critical phases. On Martin Luther King Day in New York, in two very different parts of the city, the New York police department descended upon peaceful demonstrators who had taken to the streets in support of separate, but related causes: in an encore of their performance this summer, hundreds of cops beat and arrested dozens of Black Lives Matter protesters marching through downtown Manhattan, near city hall; 11 miles and an hour’s subway ride away, in the Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood, hundreds more NYPD cops swarmed a picket line of workers on strike for a $1-an-hour raise, arresting six. The co-op that runs the market has reportedly hired a private security firm to keep fruits and vegetables moving, with help from the NYPD. Six workers at the market, mostly members of the striking Teamsters Local 202, have died since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.Without a robust labor movement, the sole bulwark against far-right violence will be the stateThis month alone, in addition to the workers who keep New York supplied with fresh produce going on strike, white-collar workers at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced the formation of a union, which grew from 225 members to more than 700 within a week. Elsewhere in California, gig workers, supported by the Service Employees International Union, are suing to overturn a ballot measure stripping them of their rights as workers that platform companies like Uber and Lyft spent $200m to get passed last year. Chicago’s formidable teachers’ union is threatening to strike over school reopenings. And a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama is headed to a vote beginning next month. Nearly half a million unionized essential workers’ contracts will be up for renegotiation this year, Luis Feliz Leon reports in the New Republic, setting the stage for a potential strike wave.Victory is not only necessary to improve the conditions of the workers engaged in these particular struggles, but because an organized working class that can fight (and win) is our only hope to defeat an increasingly militant far right. Without a robust labor movement, guided by the principles of anti-fascism and anti-racism, the sole bulwark against far-right violence will be the state – specifically, the law enforcement agencies whose repressive power has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and is inevitably turned against workers, the poor, the racialized and the left.In the weeks and months since the election, Washington’s liberal establishment dissuaded anyone from counter-demonstrating against the fascists who repeatedly marched through the city to protest Donald Trump’s election loss. The momentum those fascists were able to build carried them up the steps of the US Capitol, leaving five dead; consequently, tens of thousands of national guards members and police were ordered into DC.“Their America has always done this elsewhere,” the writer and army veteran Matt Gallagher told the Guardian, speaking of the young troops occupying the city. “Now it’s happening here.” Even though leftwing organizations weren’t actively targeted, leftwing organizing efforts were disrupted as a result, with mutual-aid networks disrupted by blockades and checkpoints.The point is not to attempt to win over people who would take up arms to oppose a multiracial, socially equitable democracy; the point is to build a movement that can fight for a society where the appeal of such ideologies is obviated. The more successful any fascist or far-right populist movement is, the more working-class people will be absorbed into it, won over by its subversiveness, its superficial anti-capitalism, and its appeals to blood and soil. But at their core, these movements are not for working people and the poor; they are based in the reactionary middle classes: the heirs to suburban fortunes; the cops and prison guards and border patrol agents; the serial entrepreneurs who never have to suffer the consequences of their failures.The struggle against fascism does not begin or end with fighting fascists in the street. In fact, the most successful antifascist mobilization is not one in which the fascists get beaten up, but one that is so well-organized, publicized, and receives such popular support that the fascists never show up at all. Admittedly, this does not make for dramatic photography or videos. It deprives journalists of the spectacle of violence, but it also keeps people safe.Sustaining such mobilization over time will not be possible without a dynamic, vital labor movement, freed to experiment with new organizational forms that reach new layers of the American working class – a movement that can also lead the fight against climate change, police violence and mass incarceration, and against the capitalist order that, when in crisis, gives rise to fascism in the first place. More

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      Senate minimum wage battle could play out in midterm elections

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      Sara Fearrington, a North Carolina waitress, joined the Fight for $15 campaign two years ago. A server at a Durham Waffle House, her take-home pay fluctuates between $350 and $450 a week, leaving her struggling to pay bills every month. She voted for Joe Biden, who had pledged to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. It was the first time Fearrington, who is 44, had ever voted in a presidential election.“It would mean everything. It would create stability for my household,” she said of the impact that a higher wage could have on her and her family of five, which includes her husband, who suffers from a rare lung condition, and a granddaughter who has asthma.The Democrats will need her support for their US Senate nominee next year if they are to maintain and strengthen their tenuous hold on the upper chamber. Some of 2022’s hotly contested Senate races are expected to play out in low-wage regions like Fearrington’s home state.The purple states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have rock-bottom minimum wages of just $7.25 per hour – the current federal minimum. Georgia, where the Democrat Raphael Warnock will fight to hold on to the Senate seat he wrested from the Republican senator Kelly Loeffler in November, abides by the federal minimum wage, even though the one it has on the books is $5.15. Recent polling suggests Republicans could gain a seat in New Hampshire, another low-minimum-wage state, where the Democratic senator Maggie Hassan is facing a potential challenge from the state’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu.The federal minimum wage has not increased from $7.25 since 2009, and for 21 states in the country the minimum wage law that governs employers is no higher than the federal minimum. Fearrington earns an hourly wage of just $3.10 an hour as a tipped worker, making her income unpredictable.Biden had hoped to include a $15-an-hour minimum wage increase in his $1.9tn economic stimulus package, which is expected to pass this week, and would also gradually phase out the sub-minimum wages for tipped workers like Fearrington. But prospects for the minimum wage provision evaporated after the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the wage hike could not remain in the budget reconciliation bill where Democrats had placed it in order to avoid a Republican-led filibuster they lacked the votes to override.Progressives inside and outside Congress pressured Senate Democrats and the Biden administration to override the parliamentarian and take the matter to a vote.“Then, at least, it’s a public conversation, where people are fighting for what they said they were going to fight for, for the poor and low-income people who turned out in record numbers in this past election,” said the Rev Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the National Poor People’s Campaign.Whether such a conversation ever takes place is a growing concern to progressives and a source of discord within the coalition that brought Biden to the White House – at a moment when the battered US economy stands at a crossroads. On Friday, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders made an 11th-hour effort to reinsert the provision into the stimulus package. Eight Democrats crossed over to vote it down, including two senators from his neighboring state, New Hampshire.Delivering a minimum wage increase before the midterm elections would give bragging rights to Democratic senatorial candidates in low-minimum-wage states. In North Carolina, 33% of workers would experience an increase in wages. Once the raise was fully implemented, the average annual benefit to a North Carolina worker who works year round would be $4,065, according to Capital & Main’s analysis of data released by the non-profit Economic Policy Institute in a recent study. Workers in other states would reap similar benefits.The ruling by the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, prompted online protests by liberal swing-state candidates in Pennsylvania, including the lieutenant governor, John Fetterman, who is seeking the US Senate seat occupied by retiring the Republican Pat Toomey.“Since the Senate parliamentarian won’t allow a $15 minimum wage to go through reconciliation, then it’s time to end the filibuster and raise the minimum wage,” Fetterman said in a statement. Biden, who generally supports the traditions of the Senate, is coming under increasing pressure to end the filibuster in order to deliver on his agenda.Delivering a minimum wage hike to voters – or at least fighting tooth and nail to get it passed – may also be key to keeping Biden’s fragile coalition together heading into the midterms. The failure to do so could also make for some fractious Democratic primaries. “Every single Dem who voted against a $15 minimum wage should be primaried,” said Krystal Ball, host of HillTV’s Rising.Polls show strong support for a $15 minimum wage, especially among Democrats and independents. And a recent poll by the non-profit National Employment Law Project found that two-thirds of voters in battleground congressional districts supported gradually raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 84% of Biden voters and 63% of non-college-educated white people.The popularity of a minimum wage increase led to Republicans floating watered-down (and, mostly likely, doomed) proposals to hike the country’s base wage. Senator Mitt Romney and Senator Tom Cotton proposed a plan to increase the minimum wage to $10 an hour over four years that is tied to stepped-up immigration enforcement. On Friday, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, proposed a $15-an- hour minimum wage plan that would apply to businesses with annual revenue in excess of $1bn. Taxpayers, not the employer, would foot the bill for Hawley’s proposed increase.Opponents of the proposed gradual increase to $15 an hour over five years – like the Business Roundtable, which represents chief executives of major US companies – have argued that wage increases should be calibrated to regional differences in the cost of living. But Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says $15 an hour makes sense as a wage floor and is even low when the cost of living is taken into account. In addition, the minimum wage would jump to $9.50 in the first year, well below its 1968 peak of just over $12 (when accounting for inflation).“In 2021, virtually anywhere in the country, a single adult will need to be working at least full time and earn at least $16 an hour in order to meet their family budget,” says Zipperer.Jim Wertz, chair of the Erie County Democratic party in Pennsylvania, argues that the Senate’s failure to pass the $15-an-hour minimum wage should push people to vote for more Democrats, not keep them from the polls.“The reason we can’t get it done is because of a couple of centrist or right-leaning Democrats,” he said, referring to the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona who have said they do not support such a large increase in the minimum wage and voted against Sanders’ failed attempt to restore the minimum wage hike to the stimulus bill.Fearrington is not paying close attention to the byzantine rules of Congress or its politics. She lost two members of her extended family to Covid-19 this year, and to protect vulnerable members of her family, she spent Christmas and her birthday in isolation after she contracted the virus.Still, she’s undeterred in her determination to vote in next year’s Senate race regardless of the outcome of this latest battle in DC. The Republican senator Richard Burr, who voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, is retiring, leaving the seat open.“I’m going to go for the Senate seat that’s going to listen to the mass majority of people that are saying we need this to help our society, our community and our economy – blue or red,” she said.This article is published in partnership with the award-winning not-for-profit publication Capital and Main More