Democrats

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares128 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Using us as political pawns’: federal workers reel over threats of firings and withheld back pay

      by

      With no end of the federal government shutdown in sight, an estimated 750,000 workers remain furloughed. Hundreds of thousands more are working without pay. They are being “held hostage by a political dispute”, according to union leaders, as Republicans and Democrats remain deadlocked.In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Donald Trump suggested that furloughed employees would not necessarily receive back pay – despite a legal guarantee – prompting further unease throughout the federal workforce. “There are some people that don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way,” the US president said.The administration, meanwhile, continues to threaten mass firings if Democrats stand by their demands. “If this keeps going on, it’ll be substantial,” Trump told reporters. “And a lot of those jobs will never come back.”On Friday, Russell Vought, the White House office of management and budget (OMB) director, announced on social media that layoffs had begun. Several federal agencies started announcing layoffs, but details remained scant on how many workers would be impacted.After a brutal year for the federal workforce, employees who spoke to the Guardian expressed growing anxiety over their pay – and the future of their jobs.“This is the third time I’ve been furloughed in my federal career,” said Priscilla Novak, a furloughed federal employee researcher. “But this is the first time there were threats of having people be fired en masse. I’ve been checking my email every day to see if I’m fired yet.”“Even before the shutdown, it’s just kind of been one thing after another for us,” said Peter Farruggia, a furloughed employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “I think a lot of us are expecting the worst, hoping for the best.”“Not knowing when my next paycheck is going to get here is definitely very daunting,” Farruggia, also executive committee chair of AFGE Local 2883, which represents CDC workers, added. “But at least I paid rent this month, so that was probably the most important thing. If some of my other bills go by the wayside, then it is what it is, and I don’t really have any other options to seek out.”“What I’m hearing is a lot of anxiety, confusion, and chaos,” said Brent Barron, a US Department of Labor employee who serves as president of the National Council of Field Labor Locals, which represents workers at the department outside Washington DC. Some staffers don’t even know whether they’re furloughed or not, he claimed, let alone “whether or not they’re going to continue to have a job” for much longer.“There are a lot of employees out there that can’t even miss one check, let alone have this thing drag on for weeks and weeks and weeks,” said Barron. About three-quarters of the labor department has been furloughed. “All we want to do is do our jobs.”A law signed by Trump during his first term, the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, guarantees all federal workers receive retroactive back pay once a government shutdown is over.“It really baffles me that this administration can just flaunt whatever law and say they don’t have to follow it,” said Barron. “This is a law that was passed in 2019 by Congress and signed by the president. And we all know who was president in 2019.”Trump officials are now facing calls to clarify that the federal government will follow the law, and ensure that every furloughed employee receives back pay.“Given the clarity of the law, there is no place for the Administration to backpedal on its obligation to pay furloughed workers,” labor unions and Democracy Defenders Fund, a watchdog group, wrote to the OMB on Wednesday. “The Administration’s statements appear to be a naked attempt at inflicting pain on innocent parties to gain advantage in the shutdown.”OMB is led by Vought, an architect of the rightwing Project 2025 blueprint. In a private speech in 2023, Vought spoke of wanting to put officials “through trauma” to reduce the capacity of the federal government. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.”As the administration continues to threaten mass layoffs, raising the prospect of further cuts beyond the 300,000 federal employees set to be removed from the government by the end of this year through firings and attrition programs, officials have also been ordered by a federal judge to provide specifics on the status of any layoff plans, the agencies affected, and whether any federal employees have been recalled to work to carry out reductions in force.“The American people and the workers who keep this country running are being held hostage by a political dispute, by a petty political dispute that they have nothing to do with,” Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s transportation trades department, said during a press conference this week. “This is entirely vindictive and the only victims are going to be this country.“We’ve all seen the reports every single time we go through this stupid process of a shutdown, how much the American taxpayers lost. It’s a drain on our economy. It’s a drain on our safety. It’s a drain on the people that live here. So we need to put this to an end.”‘People cannot focus on their jobs’Almost all Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees are required to work without pay during shutdowns, in a bid to minimize the threat of disruptions at key travel hubs like airports.The uncertainty has been particularly unnerving for newer, lower-paid employees, according to Cameron Cochems, a lead TSA officer and vice-president for AFGE Local 1127, which represents the administration’s employees in Idaho.Workers are worried about when they start missing paychecks, he said, adding that several have asked where to get low interest loans to float them through missed paychecks.“It feels kind of like there’s just a train coming and you can hear the whistle blowing, but every day it gets a little closer and closer to us,” Cochems told the Guardian. “And right now we can barely hear the whistle because we’re still focused on our jobs, we’re still focused on the mission, which is protect the nation’s transportation system to ensure freedom of movement for people in commerce.“But once that paycheck doesn’t come, I think that that train whistle is going to get louder in everyone’s heads, and it could get so loud that people cannot focus on their job because they’re focusing on things like ‘The bank is calling me for the fifth time today’, or ‘I don’t know how to pay for my daycare,’ things like that.”Threats made about federal workers not being entitled to back pay by Trump and his top officials have heightened anxieties and fears and “thrown a lot more people for a loop, especially the people that are disadvantaged, single parents or living paycheck to paycheck”, added Cochems.“It just feels like they’re intentionally using us as political pawns, and they intentionally want to make our jobs and lives unstable,” he said.“Even worse than morale is the future implication for how our government runs,” added Novak. “I think having a strong civil service that is not politically motivated is the most effective to render modern services for our citizens. Furloughed workers want to go back to work. We need Congress to pass a budget.”The White House and office of management and budget did not respond to multiple requests for comment. More

    • 125 Shares112 Views

      in US Politics

      Democrats refuse to fold over shutdown as Republican outrage builds

      by

      When he sat down to talk about the US government shutdown with reporters from a closely read political newsletter this week, Chuck Schumer sounded as if he were relishing his standoff with the Republicans.“Every day gets better for us,” he told Punchbowl News. As the shutdown got under way, Schumer explained, the Republicans believed that Democrats would quickly fold and vote to reopen the government, but instead they had stuck to their guns for a week and a half, demanding an array of concessions on healthcare and other issues.Outrage followed from Republicans, who printed out the Senate minority leader’s remark on posters and condemned it before press conferences. The shutdown has prompted federal agencies to close or curtail operations nationwide, and forced hundreds of thousands of employees to stay home without immediate pay. Schumer, Republicans argued, was being callous.“I’ve been asked many times in interviews the last couple days: ‘You seem angry – you don’t get angry a lot.’ I don’t, but this is beyond the pale,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said at a press conference on Friday morning, the 10th day of the shutdown. “What Chuck Schumer is doing right now, it’s sickening.”Hours later, the White House took it upon itself to increase the misery for government employees when Russ Vought, the director of the office of management and budget, began following through on his threat to carry out layoffs. The budget office said that more than 4,000 federal workers were being fired from a variety of agencies that had already shrunk in the second Trump administration, and the funding situation was “fluid and rapidly evolving”. Legal challenges are likely to follow, but still, now it was the Democrats’ turn to accuse the GOP of brutality.“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said in a statement. “They don’t have to do it; they want to. They’re callously choosing to hurt people – the workers who protect our country, inspect our food, respond when disasters strike. This is deliberate chaos.”It was the latest salvo in a battle that began when government funding lapsed on 1 October and has since degenerated into legislative trench warfare. Seven Senate votes have resulted in no breakthroughs, with lawmakers from both parties preventing the other’s proposals from reaching the 60-vote threshold needed to advance.Democrats are maximizing the leverage they have in the upper chamber by refusing to reopen the government until premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans are extended into next year. They also want cuts to the Medicaid program for poor and disabled Americans reversed, funding to public media outlets such as PBS and NPR restored and Donald Trump’s use of “pocket rescissions” to slash spending curbed.Most of those are non-starters for Republicans, who insist government funding be restarted before negotiations take place. They’ve ascribed a variety of motivations to Democrats’ intransigence, from the rise of Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic nominee for New York mayor to the influence of a “far-left base” that has the party’s leaders in their thrall.On Friday, Johnson posited that Democratic senators were holding out because they were concerned about a “No Kings” protest planned for 18 October – which he called a “hate America rally” and where attendees might target party leaders if they decided to end the shutdown.“It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes, but the Democrats in the Senate have shown that they’re afraid of that crowd,” Johnson said, alleging that “the antifa crowd, and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists” would be in attendance.“They’re willing to hold the American people hostage so that they don’t have to face an angry mob – that’s a big chunk of their base,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere are indeed outside influences pressuring Democrats to stand firm on their demands, and so far they are happy with the results.“The Democrats, I think, have taken in the blowback, have understood where their folks want them to go, and are actually taking it and fighting back. And it’s a sight to see. It’s a welcome strategic shift,” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of progressive organizing group Indivisible, said.In March, Schumer opted to work with Republicans on keeping the government open, prompting Indivisible to call for him to step aside as minority leader. Months later, Levin says his group is coordinating with Schumer’s office on actions to support Democratic lawmakers as the shutdown wears on, and believes the party should not compromise on its demands.Not only are Democrats’ demands “wildly popular”, Republicans are not to be trusted to honor any agreement, he said. Trump and his allies in Congress have made clear their interest in rescissions packages, which can be passed on a party-line vote, to cut spending approved with bipartisan support. After passing one in July that clawed back $9bn in funding for public media and foreign aid, Johnson said he is considering putting together another.“This regime is treating the federal budget like a personal bank account for Donald Trump, and we should stop that,” Levin said. “No deal is a real deal unless you have rescission and payment language.“We’ve got the goods. We are fighting for popular things. The Republicans are closing rural hospitals, increasing costs and giving a lawless administration more power to do what it wants. That’s a losing hand, and we want to see Democrats fight back.” More

    • 138 Shares123 Views

      in US Politics

      White House announces federal worker layoffs as shutdown nears third week

      by

      The White House announced layoffs of federal workers on Friday, making good on a threat it had made in response to the US government shutdown, which now appears set to stretch into a third straight week.Russell Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget, wrote on social media that “RIFs have begun”, referring to the government’s reduction-in-force procedure to let employees go.While Vought provided no details on the departments and agencies at which the layoffs were taking place, a treasury spokesperson said notices had been distributed within the department. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Guardian that layoffs would also happen at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. And a union representing federal workers confirmed that members at the Department of Education would also be affected by the reduction in force.Union leaders warned the layoffs would have “devastating effects” on services relied upon by millions of Americans, and pledged to challenge the moves in court.“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 800,000 federal and DC government workers.Vought had warned that federal agencies could slash jobs if the government shuts down, but the Trump administration largely held off after funding lapsed last week. Asked at a press conference before Vought’s announcement why no layoffs had occurred, the top Senate Republican, John Thune, signaled they would happen soon.“The White House has now for 10 days laid off doing anything in hopes that enough Senate Democrats would come to their senses and do the right thing and fund the government,” he said.View image in fullscreen“My expectation is, yes, they’re going to start making some decisions about how to move money around, which agencies and departments are going to be impacted, which programs are going to be impacted, which employees are going to be impacted. That’s what a shutdown does.”The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, responded to Vought’s post on Friday, saying: “America’s unions will see you in court.”Last week, the AFGE and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) filed for a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from carrying out any reductions in force (RIFs) during the shutdown. The unions filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order on Friday, following Vought’s post.Lee Saunders, president of the AFSCME, said: “These mass firings are illegal and will have devastating effects on the services millions of Americans rely on every day. Whether it’s food inspectors, public safety workers, or the countless other public service workers who keep America running, federal employees should not be bargaining chips in this administration’s political games.“By illegally firing these workers, the administration isn’t just targeting federal employees, it’s hurting their families and the communities they serve every day. We will pursue every available legal avenue to stop this administration’s unlawful attacks on public service workers’ freedoms and jobs.”Congressional Democrats have refused to vote for a Republican-backed bill to restore funding unless it includes an array of healthcare-centered concessions. After holding seven unsuccessful votes on the parties’ spending bills, the Senate’s Republican leaders have put the chamber in recess until next Tuesday, meaning the standoff is unlikely to be resolved before then.The layoffs came on the same day government employees received only a partial paycheck covering the final days of September but not the beginning of October, since appropriations lapsed at the start of the month.At a Friday-morning press conference, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, blasted Senate Democrats for not supporting the GOP’s bill, which passed his chamber on a near party-line vote.If the government is not reopened by next Wednesday, US military personnel are set to miss a paycheck.“This is the last paycheck that 700,000 federal workers will see until Washington Democrats decide to do their job and reopen the government,” Johnson said.View image in fullscreen“Starting next week, American service members, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, are going to miss a full paycheck. If Democrats don’t end this shutdown by Monday, then that October 15 date will pass us by.”Johnson has kept the House out of session throughout the shutdown in an effort to pressure Senate Democrats into supporting the Republican funding proposal. Earlier this week, a group of House Democrats sent the speaker a letter asking him to allow a vote on legislation that would ensure US troops get paid during a shutdown, but Johnson has refused to bring lawmakers back to Washington.The Senate has become a chokepoint in the funding battle because any legislation needs at least 60 votes to advance in the chamber. In exchange for their support, Democratic senators are demanding that premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans be extended beyond their end-of-the-year expiration date.They are also seeking safeguards against Donald Trump’s rescissions of congressionally approved funding, a restoration of money for public media outlets, and an undoing of cuts to the Medicaid healthcare program for poor and disabled Americans.Max Stier, the president and CEO of the non-profit Partnership for Public Service, condemned the gridlock’s impact on government workers.“It is wrong to make federal employees suffer because our leaders in Congress and the White House have failed to keep our government open and operational,” Stier said.“Our air traffic controllers, VA nurses, smoke jumpers and food inspectors are not responsible for this government shutdown, and they shouldn’t bear the financial burden created by the failures of our elected officials. The irony is that members of Congress and senior White House leaders are continuing to be paid.”Earlier this week, on 7 October, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to provide specifics on the status of any layoff plans, the affected agencies and whether any federal employees have been recalled back to work to carry out layoffs, by Friday, 10 October.A report by the Center for American Progress on 30 September argued that a government shutdown limits the ability of the Trump administration to carry out firings, citing guidance from the office of management and budget that admitted any permanent layoffs need to have been initiated before the shutdown began.“Constraints on permanently firing federal employees during a shutdown largely exist because of the Antideficiency Act and the distinction between ‘shutdown furloughs’ that happen during a lapse in congressional appropriations and ‘administrative furloughs’, which are department and agency procedures on how to permanently let staff go, including – for example – through a RIF,” the report, authored by Greta Bedekovics, associate director of democracy policy at the Center for American Progress, states. “The Trump administration’s threats to layoff federal employees should be understood as a goal of the administration that will be pursued with or without a government shutdown and should not drive lawmakers’ decisions on whether to support government funding bills.”Shrai Popat contributed additional reporting More

    • 213 Shares171 Views

      in US Politics

      Who will run against Trump in 2028? Please step forward now – don’t wait | David Kirp

      by

      The Democratic politicians on the national scene, charged with leading the opposition, continue to bring a butterknife to the ongoing gunfight that is US politics under Donald Trump. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, comes across as a weary grandpa, glasses perched halfway down his nose as he reads his script in sleep-inducing monotone. Quick – who’s the minority leader of the House? You get bonus points if you can identify Hakeem Jeffries. Charismatic he is not.What’s to be done?Democrats cannot afford to play possum and wait for Trump to implode, as onetime political guru James Carville urged in a New York Times opinion piece. That won’t be Trump’s fate – his boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any voters isn’t far off the mark.Barack Obama could go toe-to-toe with Trump. He’s the most popular living president – a YouGov poll, taken just before the last election, showed that over half of all Americans would most likely vote for him. Although the two-term president can’t run again, he’d garner the attention that Democrats badly need.But the former president has had next to nothing to say about Trump’s initiatives. While he has scolded Democratic politicians for not speaking out, he has gone silent. He hasn’t appeared at any public event staged by opponents of the president. Instead, he’s producing movies and documentaries, playing golf (as of 2016, he was an “honest 13”) and building an $18m mansion in Hawaii.What’s the alternative?Several presidential hopefuls have already hit the rubber-chicken circuit, making coy noises about their intentions for 2028, but that’s not nearly good enough. These desperate times demand boldness. Here’s my proposition: a leading Democrat, backed by substantial funding, should enter the 2028 presidential race right now.Hear me out before you start laughing.For starters, the reign of the ancien regime and its timid successors like Kamala Harris is finally over. That’s the message delivered by 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, who trounced septuagenarian Andrew Cuomo, avatar of the past, in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Whoever runs for president should take a leaf from Mamdani’s playbook. No more tedious, repetitious TV ads. It is essential to reach voters where they are, knocking on doors, listening to what they say about what matters to them, then turning out a stream of TikTok and Instagram videos, delivering messages that resonate.Goodbye to laundry lists of forgettable nostrums, like the multipoint policy plans that Harris lugged around. My ideal candidate must have the skill to communicate ideas – bold ideas, not small-bore suggestions – in a non-wonky way. As former New York governor Mario Cuomo memorably put it: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”While it’s hard to imagine any Democrat winning over the Maga diehards, Republican voters who held their noses and voted for Trump could be swayed by someone who concentrated on meat-and-potato issues, pledging to build millions of units of affordable housing, deliver universal preschool and affordable healthcare, picking up the bill with a fair tax law. That was Mamdani’s message, and a considerable number of Trump backers voted for him after hearing his pitch.My candidate should be prepared to take on some of the Democratic party’s sacred cows. Assailing Israel for the war crimes committed in Gaza comes to mind.The toughest hurdle is raising enough money to be taken seriously, but it isn’t impossible. Billionaires including the Democratic mega-donor George Soros, Bill Gates, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman recently formed a group called Billionaires Against Billionaires to do battle with Trump’s coterie of billionaires. Imagine the impact if these mega-donors join forces with grassroots groups nationwide.The Democratic Party has a deep bench, and there’s no shortage of politicians who could fill the bill. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Arizona senator Ruben Gallego and Kentucky governor Andy Beshear are among those who come to mind. And while the first profile-in-courage candidate will have first-mover advantage, others may well enter the fray.Let’s be clear – there isn’t a candidate, no matter how artful, who has a prayer of dislodging Trump from his imperial perch. But the presidential hopeful who decides that now is the time to present themself as a genuine alternative will attract attention, and right now, attention is what matters most. Unless someone steps up – and improbable as this scenario is, I haven’t come up with a better alternative – the Democrats will be giving Trump a free pass for the next three and a half years. Think about what this human wrecking ball can achieve in that time.

      David Kirp is professor emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California-Berkeley More

    • 188 Shares125 Views

      in US Politics

      Why is the US House speaker refusing to seat an elected Democrat? | Moira Donegan

      by

      The people of Arizona’s seventh congressional district – a vast territory extending across the state’s south, along the Mexican border – have been denied representation in Congress for weeks. That’s because Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, their representative-elect, who won a special election to fill the seat vacated by her father, the late Raúl Grijalva, in a landslide late last month. Grijalva, a Democrat, has been largely ignored by the speaker. Unlike sworn representatives, she has to go around the Capitol with an escort. There’s an office with her name on the door, but she hasn’t been allowed inside, and has worked instead out of a conference room on another floor.It is an unprecedented abuse of procedural power on the part of the speaker, one that has had the effect of silencing a political opponent and denying representation to the citizens of her district. In refusing to seat Grijalva, Johnson has defied the will of Arizona’s voters, and effectively nullified, at least for the time being, a legitimate congressional election. He has persisted in this even in defiance of his own promises, after saying on Friday he would seat her this week once the House returned to session – and then telling lawmakers they wouldn’t reconvene this week after all. Last week, Grijalva showed up to a three-and-a-half-minute pro forma session, hoping to be sworn in then. (Johnson has sworn in other representatives at pro forma sessions in the past.) But the Republican presiding over the session, Morgan Griffith, ignored the effort. On a weekend talkshow, Grijalva said she had heard “absolutely nothing” from the speaker about the timing of her swearing in.Grijalva thinks she knows why. There is no political calculation that could justify Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat a duly elected member of the House: Grijalva won her race, and both his oath to the constitution and his responsibilities to the body that he leads require Johnson to seat her. But in lieu of deference to these higher aims, Grijalva suspects that Johnson is pursuing a much more cynical one: in refusing to swear her in and allow her to take up the office to which she has been elected, Johnson, Grijalva thinks, is aiming to stop her becoming the final member of Congress whose signature is needed to force a vote on the release of confidential files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Currently, the petition has 217 signatures; it needs only 218. Grijalva has pledged to support it. “Why the rules are different for me – the only thing that I can think of is the Epstein files,” Grijalva told the New York Times.The Epstein scandal, and the ensuing fallout from new and resurfaced revelations about Donald Trump’s deep and longstanding friendship with the deceased child sex trafficker and financier, has long plagued the Trump administration. One of the few genuine threats to Trump’s grip over his coalition came a few months ago, when his justice department refused to release files relating to the case, causing outrage among a group of rightwing podcasters, media personalities and conspiracy theorists who had long traded on speculation about the case and accusations that powerful Democrats were involved in a cover-up.The discharge petition, if passed, would not be likely to result in the actual release of the documents. The move has little support in the Republican-backed Senate; there is no chance that Donald Trump, who has opposed the release of the Epstein files, calling them a “waste” of “time and energy”, would sign a bill into law making them public. But what the move would accomplish is forcing a full chamber vote on the matter, requiring every member of the Republican caucus to go on the record either endorsing the release of the files – and thereby displeasing Trump – or opposing it – thereby displeasing their voters. The Times has reported that Johnson’s delay is giving the White House more time to pressure Republicans who have already signed on to the discharge petition to remove their signatures before the Grijalva is sworn in.And so it seems that Johnson is ignoring the constitution and subverting the will of the voters in order to buy time, in an effort to spare his party embarrassment over their president’s one-time close confidence with a pedophile.But the refusal to seat Grijalva has broader implications. In using his procedural control over the functioning of Congress to deny a seat to an elected Democrat, Johnson is setting a dangerous precedent and raising questions about future transfers of power. If a Democratic majority is elected in 2026, will the outgoing Republican speaker duly swear in its members? Or will he use his procedural powers to delay one, several or many of them from taking their oaths of office – either under the pretext of election fraud or personal ineligibility, or out of sheer, bald unwillingness to hand over power to members of a party that the president and his allies have repeatedly described as illegitimate?These are no longer fanciful questions; they are ones that must be asked. The Republicans who refused to subvert the law for Trump’s benefit on January 6 are now largely gone; the ones who have replaced them appear much more willing to place party before country. Every day that Grijalva is not sworn in, the shadow they cast over 2026 darkens.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 238 Shares96 Views

      in US Politics

      Democratic candidates can win Rust Belt voters by … attacking the Democratic party | Jared Abbott and Bhaskar Sunkara

      by

      If anyone could have broken through as a progressive in red America, it was Sherrod Brown. For decades, the Ohio senator railed against corporations for shipping good-paying jobs overseas and pleaded with Democrats to take the struggles of deindustrialized communities seriously. Yet in 2024, even Brown, a model economic populist, fell to a Republican challenger.Does that prove, as writers such as Jonathan Chait have argued, that the idea of winning back the working class with progressive economic policies has been tried and has failed?We wanted to know why Democrats keep losing working-class support in the Rust belt, and what could turn things around. So, with colleagues at the Center for Working-Class Politics, the Labor Institute and Rutgers University, we surveyed 3,000 voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. The research suggests the story is more complicated – and that Democrats’ problems in the Rust belt are real, but solvable.We found a consistent pattern we call the “Democratic penalty”. In a randomized, controlled trial, respondents were shown hypothetical candidates with identical economic populist platforms. The only difference was that some were labeled Democrats, while others were labeled independents. Across the four states, the Democratic candidates fared eight points worse.In Ohio the gap was nearly 16 points; in Michigan, 13; in Wisconsin, 11. The voters most alienated by the party label were the very groups Democrats most need to win back: Latinos, working-class Americans, and others in rural and small-town communities.This pattern helps explain why figures like Brown can run as tough economic populists and still struggle, while independents like Dan Osborne in Nebraska dramatically overperformed expectations on nearly identical platforms. It’s the Democratic brand that’s unpopular, not the populism.What’s at the root of the mistrust? After the 2024 election, many commentators pointed to “wokeness” as the culprit. But our research tells a different story. When we asked voters to write a sentence about what first came to mind when they thought of Democrats, 70% offered negative views. Yet only a small minority mentioned “wokeness” or ideological extremism – 3% of Democrats, 11% of independents, 19% of Republicans. The dominant complaints weren’t about social liberalism but about competence, honesty and connection. Democrats were seen as out of touch, corrupt or simply ineffective: “falling behind on what’s important” and having not “represented their constituents in a long time”. While some of these critiques bled into broader claims that Democrats are focused on the wrong priorities, the responses suggest cultural issues are not voters’ dominant concern.This should be a wake-up call. Rust belt voters aren’t gullibly distracted by culture wars but, rather, are frustrated that Democrats haven’t delivered. What does resonate with them is a tougher, more credible economic message.Even if the Democratic label is a serious drag in red and purple states, our results show that full-throated economic populism that speaks directly to workers’ sense that the system is rigged can substantially boost candidates’ appeal, particularly in areas that have lost millions of high-quality jobs over the past 40 years. Standard “bread-and-butter” Democratic messaging performed over 11 points better when paired with strong anti-corporate rhetoric (condemning companies for cutting good jobs) than with a “populist-lite” frame that merely knocks a few price-gougers while acknowledging that most businesses play by the rules.When we forced respondents to choose tradeoffs among 25 economic policy proposals, the results were even clearer. Across partisan and class divides, voters consistently prioritized concrete measures framed in terms of fairness and accountability for elites: capping prescription drug prices, eliminating taxes on social security income, and raising taxes on the super-wealthy and large corporations. These policies polled far ahead of flashy ideas such as $1,000 monthly cash payments or trillion-dollar green industrial plans, and well ahead of traditional conservative staples such as corporate tax cuts and deregulation.Even on immigration, Rust belt voters proved more open than expected. Nearly two-thirds supported legalization for long-settled undocumented workers who had played by the rules. Despite years of rightwing fearmongering, a progressive position carried the day.So what’s the path forward? Not every candidate can reinvent themselves as an independent populist. In many districts, doing so would simply split the anti-Republican vote. But Democrats can blunt the “Democratic penalty” by speaking against their own party establishment and making a populist case that neither major party has delivered for working people. Candidates who take this approach appeal more effectively to the very voters Democrats have been losing.The electoral map itself makes the stakes plain. Without states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, Democrats cannot hold national power. Sherrod Brown’s defeat underlined that even the most credible economic populists can only run so far ahead of the party’s damaged brand.If Democrats remain seen as out of touch with working-class concerns, more Browns will fall, and Republicans will keep gaining ground in once-reliable Democratic strongholds. But if Democrats take on corporate elites, level with voters about their own party’s failures, and fight for policies that put working families first, they might finally chart a path back to the working class – and to the future.

      Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin More

    • 150 Shares126 Views

      in US Politics

      Senate Republicans vote against check on Trump using deadly force against cartels

      by

      Senate Republicans voted down legislation Wednesday that would have put a check on Donald Trump’s ability to use deadly military force against drug cartels after Democrats tried to counter the administration’s extraordinary assertion of presidential war powers to destroy vessels in the Caribbean.The vote fell mostly along party lines, 48-51, with two Republicans, Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski, voting in favor and the Democrat John Fetterman voting against.It was the first vote in Congress on Trump’s military campaign, which according to the White House has so far destroyed four vessels, killed at least 21 people and stopped narcotics from reaching the US. The war powers resolution would have required the president to seek authorization from Congress before further military strikes on the cartels.The Trump administration has asserted that drug traffickers are armed combatants threatening the United States, creating justification to use military force. But that assertion has been met with some unease on Capitol Hill.Some Republicans are asking the White House for more clarification on its legal justification and specifics on how the strikes are conducted, while Democrats insist they are violations of US and international law. It’s a clash that could redefine how the world’s most powerful military uses lethal force and set the tone for future global conflict.The White House had indicated Trump would veto the legislation, and even though the Senate vote failed, it gave lawmakers an opportunity to go on the record with their objections to Trump’s declaration that the US is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels.“It sends a message when a significant number of legislators say: ‘Hey, this is a bad idea,’” said the senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat who pushed the resolution alongside Adam Schiff, a Democrat of California.Wednesday’s vote was brought under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was intended to reassert congressional power over the declaration of war.“Congress must not allow the executive branch to become judge, jury and executioner,” Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has long pushed for greater congressional oversight of war powers, said during a floor speech.Paul was the only Republican to publicly speak in favor of the resolution before the vote, but a number of Republican senators have questioned the strikes on vessels and said they are not receiving enough information from the administration.The senator Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, acknowledged “there may be some concern” in the Republican conference about the strikes. However, Republican leaders stridently argued against the resolution on the Senate floor Wednesday, calling it a political ploy from Democrats.“People were attacking our country by bringing in poisonous substances to deposit into our country that would have killed Americans,” said the senator Jim Risch, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee. “Fortunately most of those drugs are now at the bottom of the ocean.”Risch thanked Trump for his actions and added that he hoped the military strikes would continue.Members of the Senate armed services committee received a classified briefing last week on the strikes, and Cramer said he was “comfortable with at least the plausibility of their legal argument”. But, he added, no one representing intelligence agencies or the military command structure for Central and South America was present for the briefing.“I’d be more comfortable defending the administration if they shared the information,” he said.Kaine also said the briefing did not include any information on why the military chose to destroy the vessels rather than interdict them or get into the specifics of how the military was so confident the vessels were carrying drugs.“Maybe they were engaged in human trafficking, or maybe it was the wrong ship,” Schiff said. “We just have little or no information about who was onboard these ships or what intelligence was used or what the rationale was and how certain we could be that everyone on that ship deserved to die.”The Democrats also said the administration has told them it is adding cartels to a list of organizations deemed “narco-terrorists” that are targets for military strikes, but it has not shown the lawmakers a complete list.“The slow erosion of congressional oversight is not an abstract debate about process,” the senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate armed services committee, said in a floor speech. “It is a real and present threat to our democracy.”The secretary of state Marco Rubio visited the Republican conference for lunch Wednesday to emphasize to senators that they should vote against the legislation. He told the senators that the administration was treating cartels like governmental entities because they had seized control of large portions of some Caribbean nations, according to the senator John Hoeven of North Dakota.Rubio told reporters at the Capitol: “These drug-trafficking organizations are a direct threat to the safety and security of the United States to unleash violence and criminality on our streets, fueled by the drugs and the drug profits that they make. … And the president, as the commander in chief, has an obligation to keep our country safe.”Still, Democrats said the recent buildup of US maritime forces in the Caribbean was a sign of shifting US priorities and tactics that could have grave repercussions. They worried that further military strikes could set off a conflict with Venezuela and argued that Congress should be actively deliberating whenever American troops are sent to war.Schiff said, “This is the kind of thing that leads a country, unexpectedly and unintentionally, into war.” More

    • 113 Shares195 Views

      in US Politics

      US shutdown deadlock deepens as senators reject competing bills

      by

      The deadlock over ending the US government shutdown deepened on Wednesday, with senators once again rejecting competing bills to restart funding as Democrats and Republicans remain dug in on their demands for reopening federal agencies.The funding lapse has forced offices, national parks and other federal government operations to close or curtail operations, while employees have been furloughed. Signs of strain have mounted in recent days in the parts of the federal government that remained operational, with staffing shortages reported at airports across the US as well as air traffic control centers. Further disruptions may come next week, when US military personnel and other federal workers who remain on the job will not receive paychecks, unless the government reopens.When the Senate met on Wednesday afternoon, it became clear that sentiment had not shifted in the eight days since the shutdown began. For the sixth time, Democratic and Republican proposals to restart funding both failed to receive enough support to advance, and no senators changed their votes from recent days.Democrats are demanding that any bill to fund the government be paired with an array of healthcare-centered provisions, including an extension of premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans. Those expire at the end of the year, and costs are set to rise for the plans’ roughly 20 million enrollees if they are not renewed.Donald Trump has sought to pressure the Democrats to accept the GOP’s proposal, which would only extend funding through 21 November. On Tuesday, the White House office of management and budget released a memo arguing that federal workers were not entitled to back pay, despite a 2019 law saying they should be.The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, poured cold water on that prospect at a press conference the following day, saying: “I think it is statutory law that federal employees be paid. And that’s my position. I think they should be.”Both parties otherwise remained unmoved in their demands. The House of Representatives passed the GOP’s bill on a near party-line vote last month, and Johnson has kept the chamber out of session ever since in a bid to force Senate Democrats to approve it.At his press conference, the speaker alleged that top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer was opposing the Republican bill out of fear from a primary challenge by the “communists” in his party.“They are worried about the Marxist flank in their Democrat party,” Johnson said.“He’s terrified that he’s going to get a challenge from his far left. I’ve noted that Chuck Schumer is a very far-left politician, but he is not far enough left for the communists, and they’re coming for him, and so he has to put up his dukes and show a fight.”In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer once again faulted Republicans for refusing to negotiate on the Democrats’ healthcare demands. The Senate’s majority leader John Thune has said he will discuss the ACA tax credit issue, but only when government funding is restored.“We can do both: fix healthcare and reopen the government. This is not an either-or thing, which Republicans are making it. The American people don’t like it,” Schumer said.While both parties’s rank-and-file lawmakers have appeared united around their leaders’ strategies, the GOP suffered a high-profile defection on Monday when far-right lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene backed negotiations over the tax credits. However in the days since, no other Republicans have publicly joined her.Jen Kiggans, a Virginia Republican congresswoman representing a swing district, has received bipartisan support for legislation that would extend the credits for a year, and is viewed a potential compromise in the funding standoff.At a press conference on Tuesday, top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries called the idea a “nonstarter”.“It was introduced by the same people who just permanently extended massive tax breaks for their billionaire donors,” Jeffries said, referring to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Republicans passed this year without Democratic votes. More