Joe Biden

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court ‘creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism’, AOC says

      by

      The conservative supreme court is “creeping dangerously towards authoritarianism”, the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday, raising again the unlikely scenario of impeaching justices for recent actions.Her comments came just days after the nation’s highest court released a batch of incendiary and far-reaching rulings striking down affirmative action in colleges, LBGTQ+ rights and Joe Biden’s student loan relief program.“These are the types of rulings that signal a dangerous creep towards authoritarianism and centralization of power in the court,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.“In fact, we have members of the court themselves, with justice Elena Kagan, saying that the court is beginning to assume the power of a legislature right now.“They are expanding their role into acting as though they are Congress itself. And that, I believe, is an expansion of power that we really must be focusing on, the danger of this court and the abuse of power.”Referring to ethics scandals that have involved two of the conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, Ocasio-Cortez repeated previous calls for Congress to look at removing them, a proposal that would be dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.Senate Democrats and independents who caucus with them, meanwhile, hold only a slim majority.Alito is accused of not disclosing gifts from a rightwing billionaire who lobbied for the court to end Biden’s loan relief program. Thomas is also alleged to have taken undeclared gifts, among other alleged transgressions, prompting an ethics watchdog last month to urge him to resign.“We must pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines, where we see members of the supreme court potentially breaking the law,” she said.“There also must be impeachment on the table. We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power in the supreme court [that] has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy.“And in the process, they themselves have been destroying the legitimacy of the court, which is profoundly dangerous for our entire democracy.”Ocasio-Cortez also called on Biden to expand the court to 13 justices, something the president has said he is unwilling to attempt.Her comments reflect a wave of Democratic outrage at the decisions, which came after Donald Trump’s appointments of justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett gave conservatives a 6-3 majority on the supreme court.Ocasio-Cortez’s fellow progressive Ayanna Pressley, Democratic congresswoman for Massachusetts, was equally scathing on MSNBC’s Katie Phang show, calling the conservative majority “far-right extremists”.“They continue to overturn the will of the majority of the people and to make history for all the wrong reasons, legislating from the bench and being political from the bench,” she said.The panel’s most controversial ruling last year, written by Alito, reversed its 1973 decision on Roe v Wade and ended almost half a century of federal abortion protections in the US.As Biden put it after an address at the White House on Friday: “This is not a normal court.”A poll released Sunday by ABC’s This Week showed that 52% of Americans believed that justices ruled “mainly on the basis of their partisan political view rather than on the basis of the law”, a significant rise from January 2022 when only 38% felt that way.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe poll, however, did show that a majority, 52%, approved of the decision ending affirmative action in colleges.Condemning the ruling that allowed a Colorado website designer to refuse business from a same-sex couple, transport secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, noted the court addressed a situation “that may have never happened in the first place”.“We’re seeing more of these cases, of these circumstances that are designed to get people spun up and [are] designed to chip away at rights,” he told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday.“You look at the supreme court taking away a woman’s right to choose, Friday’s decision diminishing … same sex couples’ [quality of life], you look at a number of the decisions, they pose the question, ‘Did we just live to see the high-water mark of freedoms and rights in this country before they were gradually taken away?’“Because up until now, not uniformly, but overall, each generation was able to say they enjoyed greater inclusion, greater equality, and more rights and freedoms than the generation before.”In other interviews on Sunday, two prominent Republican presidential candidates said they supported the supreme court’s recent rulings, with one, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, accusing Democrats of hypocrisy.“For decades the Democratic party cheered a supreme court that went outside the constitution and made extra-constitutional decisions, in my opinion, because the decisions went in a philosophical direction that they liked,” Christie said on State of the Union.“Now, when the court makes decisions they don’t like, all of a sudden the court is ‘not normal’. This is a results-oriented type of judgment. Instead, what they should look at, is the way they analyze the law.”Former vice-president Mike Pence, speaking on CBS, praised the website ruling. He said: “I’m a Bible believing Christian, I believe marriage is between one man and one woman, and I believe every American is entitled to live, to work, to worship, according to the dictates of their conscience.“The supreme court drew a clear line and said yes to religious liberty.” More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Bidenomics’ is a business opportunity. But who can cash in?

      by

      This past week Joe Biden gave a speech in which he touted his economic policies and, rather than deflecting, he leaned into what many of his opponents called “Bidenomics”.Bidenomics is the opposite of “trickle-down” theory, which holds that tax cuts to wealthy individuals and corporations ultimately find their way to the rest of the population through more spending and investment. For the president and his supporters, Bidenomics means government spending and investment in infrastructure and services that create jobs and growth.“I didn’t come up with the name, I really didn’t,” he said in his remarks. “I now claim it.”If you’re a small business owner or an entrepreneur a president’s economic policies – assuming they can get congressional support – really do matter. This is not to claim that Biden’s economic agenda will be any more or less successful than his predecessors’: for many the trickle-down v spending debate will never be resolved. But when a president sets an agenda it reveals where money will be spent. And my smartest, most experienced clients are watching closely. Why? Because regardless of where they stand politically, what’s best for their business is always, always, always to follow the money.They know that when you own a business your job is to create value and build an organization that provides a livelihood for all the people that rely on you. This includes your customers, your suppliers, your partners and of course your employee and their families, as well as your family. Which means that you put politics aside (until it’s time to cast your vote) and instead you follow the money. Get it?So where is the Bidenomics money going?For starters, there’s almost $300bn going towards building chip manufacturing plants under the 2022 Chips Act. There’s also another $391bn that’s being spent on companies that are improving their energy efficiency and making greener products under the Inflation Reduction Act. A trillion dollars is being expended on roads, buildings and other infrastructure projects thanks to the 2021 Infrastructure Act. That’s about $1.7tn, which is a lot of money. The president is also telling us that more will be spent on affordable healthcare, social services and education.That’s where the money’s going over the next few years and even more will be spent if he wins re-election in 2024. When it comes to your business, it doesn’t matter whether you agree with these policies. What matters is that you take advantage of them for the benefit of your business. So how are my clients doing this?If you want to sell products and services to the chip manufacturers and other players in the industry (and the most active ones – like Intel, Samsung, GlobalFoundries and Skywater Technologies – are already in line for the funding) then target these companies and their projects and consider what products and services of yours can be sold to them. Or you can do your research, identify opportunities and start filling out applications at places like the Department of Commerce’s Chips.gov, or at Chips Act which is a private organization that provides support for businesses looking for help writing grants and submitting proposals. Or you can go directly to the Semiconductor Industry Association or read the excellent guidance provided by Semi, an organization that supports companies in the electronic manufacturing and supply chain industries.If you want to get funding for energy-efficient projects or to help develop energy efficient products you should start with the White House Inflation Reduction Act Guidebook which lists dozens of government agencies that are doling out money to organizations of all sizes for just that purpose. The Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains has $6bn available for projects and, wow, you can’t get any more government-sounding than that, right? Or if you merely want to maximize your use of the expanded tax credits under the legislation visit the IRS’s Inflation Reduction Act web area.Maybe you want to get in on the $1tn infrastructure spending? The White House, Federal Highway Administration, Department of Energy and Department of Commerce all have funding opportunities related to the 2021 legislation.Follow the money. Start at any of the places I’ve mentioned above and get ready to go down the Federal Rabbit Hole.Finding this money, let alone applying, isn’t easy. Which is why many of my clients don’t do this. They’re lazy. My best clients – and I have a handful – have already hired summer interns whose jobs are to peruse the maze of government bureaucracy, identify opportunities and start filling out forms. Doing this takes time, effort, tenacity. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.Even if you’re not in the construction industry you can still leverage Bidenomics. That’s because all of the companies that are getting funding will need your products or services. Chip manufacturing plants will have employees that eat pizza. Highways have buildings that need to be cleaned. “Green” products need to be transported. People in these industries getting all that money will need accountants, lawyers, architects, marketing professionals and workplace consultants.Bidenomics. Obamacare. Supply side. Trickle down. These are just words. Political phrases to create headlines and catch the attention of voters. Smart business owners know this. They don’t get distracted by these terms. And they don’t let their politics muddle their strategies. What they do is follow the money. And my best clients have taught me that whether you’re a fan of Biden’s – or any president’s economic policies – there’s always plenty of money and opportunities to pursue if you just follow the money. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      The Big Break: Ben Terris on his portrait of Washington after Trump

      by

      If you were a pollster, would you ever bet on elections? How about your clients’ elections? How about betting your clients would lose? For Sean McElwee, the wunderkind behind the liberal polling group Data for Progress, the answer was all the above.McElwee had clients including the 2022 Senate campaign of John Fetterman, in Pennsylvania. McElwee placed multiple bets on the midterms, including that Fetterman would lose. Fetterman’s organization became displeased. Following its victory, it severed ties with McElwee. It was just the beginning of a dramatic downfall heightened by the pollster’s connections to the pandemic-prevention advocate Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose billionaire brother Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire collapsed in scandal around election day.The rise and fall of Sean McElwee is one of many storylines in a new book The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses its Mind. For the author, the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, the individuals he profiles tell a collective story about DC processing the fallout from the Trump years.“Nobody knew what the world was going to be like post-Trump,” Terris says, adding: “If there is a post-Trump.”To explore that world, he turned to Democratic and Republican circles: Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heiress turned funder of progressive causes, whose conservative grandfather HL Hunt was reportedly the world’s wealthiest man; Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, a Republican power couple whose fortunes crested after Matt decided to stick with Trump in 2016; Ian Walters, Matt’s protege until political and personal differences ruptured the friendship; Robert Stryk, a cowboy-hatted lobbyist who parlayed Trump connections into a lucrative career representing sometimes questionable clients; and Jamarcus Purley, a Black staffer for the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein who lamented the impact of George Floyd’s murder and the pandemic on Black Americans including his own father, who died. Disenchanted with his boss, Purley lost his job in disputed circumstances and launched an unconventional protest in Feinstein’s Capitol office, after hours.Terris is a reporter for the Post’s Style section, which he characterizes as strong on features and profiles. He can turn a phrase, likening Fetterman to “a Tolkien character in Carhartt”, and has an ear for the telling quote. Once, while Terris was covering the Democratic senator Jon Tester, from Montana, in, of all places, an organic pea field, nature called. A staffer asked: “Can the senator’s penis please be off the record?” Terris quips that he’s saving this for a title if he ever writes a memoir.His current book is “sort of a travelog, not a memoir”, Terris says. “I tried to keep myself out of the book as much as I could. I wanted the reader to feel like they knew Washington, knew the weirdos, the odd scenes … the backrooms, poker games, parties.”Hunt-Hendrix’s Christmas party is among the opening scenes. Attendees include her aunt Swanee Hunt, a former ambassador to Austria. Hunt-Hendrix aimed to make her own mark, through her organization Way to Win.“She’s very progressive,” Terris says, “trying to unwind a lot of projects, in a way, that her grandfather was all about. To me, it was fascinating, the family dynamics at play.”Just as fascinating was her “figuring out how to push the [Democratic] party in the direction she believed it should go in – a more progressive direction than some Democrats pushed for. It told the story of Democratic party tensions – money and politics, the idea of being idealistic and also super-wealthy … All of these things made for a very heady brew.”On the Republican side, Stryk went from running a vineyard to savoring fine wine in a foreign embassy, thanks to his connection to Trump. Stryk joined the campaign in 2016. When Trump won, Stryk celebrated on a patio of the Four Seasons hotel in DC. A dog sniffed his crotch. When its owner apologized, Stryk found she worked for the New Zealand embassy, which was having difficulty reaching Trump. It was Stryk’s lucky break.“He was in a position to connect New Zealand to Trump,” Terris says. “He got a phone number and was off to the races, a sideshow guy making major deals … $5m with the Saudis, that kind of thing.”When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last year, Stryk was in Belarus, exploring a potential relationship with that country’s government. He had to make his way home via the Baltics.“One of the themes of the book is that the Donald Trump era allowed a bunch of sideshow characters to get out on the main stage,” Terris says. “Stryk is a great example of that.”Others distanced themselves – eventually. Terris sees the rupture between Matt Schlapp and Ian Walters as illustrative. As head of the American Conservative Union, Schlapp presided over CPAC, the annual conservative conference, with Walters his communications director. As Schlapp welcomed fringe elements to CPAC – from Trump to Matt Gaetz to Marjorie Taylor Greene – Walters felt increasingly repelled.“It’s an interesting tale of a broken friendship,” Terris says. “It also helps the reader understand how did the Republican party get to where it is now – where are the fault lines, why one way over another.”The 2020 election was the point of no return. Schlapp stayed all-in on Trump, supporting his claim of a stolen election even in a graveside speech at the funeral of Walters’s father, the legendary conservative journalist Ralph Hallow.“We have to take confidence that he would want us, more than anything else, to get beyond this period of mourning and to fight,” Schlapp is quoted as saying. Walters and his wife, Carin, resigned from the ACU. Ian remained a Republican but marveled at the bravery of the whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson in the January 6 hearings.As for Schlapp, he faced scandal late last year. Assisting with the Senate campaign of the ex-football star Herschel Walker, when Schlapp arrived in Georgia, he allegedly groped a male campaign staffer.“I had to go back into my reporting and ask, were there signs of this?” recalls Terris. “Could I run through all of this [with] the alleged victim over the phone? I did. I ran a bunch of questions by Matt – he never answered.”There was another last-minute controversy. McElwee’s polls proved inaccurate. Another red flag was his ties to Gabe Bankman-Fried, whose brother was arrested in December. Reports of McElwee’s gambling made clients wonder where their money was going. Senior staff threatened to resign. McElwee stepped down.“All of a sudden, it was national news in a way I was not prepared for,” Terris says.Can anyone be prepared for what comes next in Washington?“Donald Trump proved you can win by acting like Donald Trump,” Terris says. “There are a lot of people that learned from him – mostly in the Republican party, but [also] the Democratic party – how to comport yourself in Washington, what you can get away with. People’s confidence is broken, politics is broken, relationships.”Can it all be restored?“Nobody knows yet how to do it. It’s not the same thing as normal. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe normal led to Donald Trump.”
      The Big Break is published in the US by Twelve More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      President centers ‘Bidenomics’ as 2024 re-election campaign gathers pace

      by

      As Joe Biden launches his 2024 re-election campaign, the White House is hoping to revamp the messaging on the president’s economic performance with a series of speeches, memos and the term “Bidenomics”.On Wednesday, Biden delivered what was billed as a major speech focused on the economy as he told an audience in Chicago that the Republican policy of “trickle-down economics” had “failed America”. In its place, Biden vowed to create policies that would prioritize growing the middle class, touted post-pandemic economic recovery and announced “Bidenomics is working” – one of 15 times he used the word over the course of his speech.Earlier in the week, a White House memo from two of Biden’s top advisers was sent to reporters and laid out a range of talking points. It touted the president’s various accomplishments on post-Covid economic recovery and job creation, while reiterating the theme that “Bidenomics is working.”“In the weeks and months ahead, the president, members of his cabinet, and senior administration officials will continue fanning out across the country to take the case for Bidenomics and the President’s Investing in America agenda directly to the American people,” the memo announced.The administration’s campaign appears to take aim at one of the president’s key vulnerabilities for the election, with polling showing voters have a dim assessment of how he has handled the economy. A Pew Research Center survey from this month found that inflation is the top concern among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters, while support for Democratic economic policies lags 12 points behind support for GOP policies. An AP/NORC poll from last month showed that only 33% of Americans supported Biden’s handling of the economy.The perceptions of Biden’s handling of the economy are at odds with a range of positive economic indicators that the White House is eager to highlight. Inflation has gone down to the lowest levels since 2021, while the administration has repeatedly touted months of consistent job growth and low unemployment. The US economy has generally outperformed economic experts’ forecasts, and for now has staved off a recession that seemed inevitable.But these gains have not appeared to resonate with voters, who have repeatedly given Biden poor marks on the economy as workers have struggled with rising prices that often outpaced growth in wages. Republicans have meanwhile been eager to capitalize on issues of inflation, labeling the spike “Bidenflation” and making it a frequent point of attack.Biden’s team attempted to defend the president’s economic achievements in the past, including dedicating a significant portion of his State of the Union address in February to highlight his record on job growth and unemployment. The White House even passed out small “palm cards” to Democratic lawmakers with a list of talking points about the economy. But as the presidential election begins to take shape it appears these efforts are intensifying, attempting to go on the offensive with a positive message about the administration’s economic agenda.Some Democratic politicians have embraced the talking points, earning them favorable positions as surrogates for the president. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, reportedly won praise from administration officials this month after an appearance on the Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show, in which Newsom forcefully challenged assertions that Biden’s economic plans were struggling and touted the president’s job creation.The “Bidenomics” memo sent to reporters earlier this week was the work of two longtime Biden advisers, Anita Dunn and Mike Donilon. Dunn is Biden’s most senior communications adviser and played a key role in turning around his 2020 presidential election bid. Donilon has worked with Biden for decades, and as his chief strategist during the 2020 election was key in shaping the campaign’s messaging.Biden initially joked about the “Bidenomics” term at a rally on 17 June hosted by union members in Philadelphia, where he said it was “time to end the trickle-down economics theory” that was commonly associated with former President Ronald Reagan’s plan of ‘Reaganomics’.“We decided to replace this theory with what the press has now called ‘Bidenomics’,” the president said. “I don’t know what the hell that is. But it’s working.” More

    • 213 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden says supreme court ‘misinterpreted the constitution’ as he announces new student debt relief plan – live

      by

      From 2h agoJoe Biden said he will announce a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.“I’m announcing today a new path consistent with today’s ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow (education secretary Miguel Cardona) … to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances,” the president said.Speaking from the White House briefing room, secretary of education Miguel Cardona said he “strongly disagreed” with the supreme court’s decision and vowed to “open up an alternative path to debt relief for as many borrowers as possible, as quickly as possible”.In ruling against the Biden administration’s landmark student debt forgiveness plan, the court had “ruled against more than 40 million working families”, Cardona said.
      We’re not talking about the millionaires who benefited from the billions in tax giveaway a few years ago. We’re talking about low and middle income families recovering from the worst pandemic in a century.
      He said it was “outrageous” that Republican members of Congress had “fought so hard against the program that would have helped millions of their own constituents”.Cardona added:
      Today, I want to assure our students, our borrowers and families across America – our fight is not over.
      Vice-president Kamala Harris has spoken out against the supreme court’s ruling today striking down a Colorado civil rights law which compels businesses and organizations to treat same-sex couples equally.The court’s decision “departs from decades of jurisprudence by creating an exception to protections against discrimination in public accommodations”, a statement from Harris reads.
      On the last day of Pride Month, the Supreme Court has paved the way for businesses across our nation to discriminate in the name of “free expression”—against the LGBTQI+ community, racial and religious minorities, the disability community, and women.
      At a time when we celebrate hard-won advancements in LGBTQI+ rights, this decision threatens future progress.
      She added that she and President Joe Biden would “continue to rigorously enforce federal anti-discrimination protections and fight for the right of all people to participate equally in our society”.We have a clip from Joe Biden’s speech where he announced a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today said his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.Once a person loses their right to vote in Mississippi it is essentially impossible to get it back.To do so, a disenfranchised person must get the legislature to approve an individualized bill on their behalf by a supermajority in both chambers and then have the governor approve the bill. There are no online instructions or applications and lawmakers can reject or deny an application for any reason.Hardly anyone successfully makes it through the process. Between 1997 and 2022, an average of seven people successfully made it through the process each year, according to Blake Feldman, a criminal justice researcher in Mississippi.The supreme court did not say on Friday why it was rejecting the case (it takes four votes on the court to grant review) and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor were the only two justices who noted their dissent from the denial. Jackson wrote an opinion saying the fifth circuit had committed “two egregious analytical errors that ought to be corrected”.First, she wrote, even though Mississippi voters removed a crime in 1950 and added two more in 1968, the substance of many of the original crimes from 1890 remained intact. That means that the list is still discriminatory, she wrote in a dissent that was joined by Sotomayor.“The “remaining crimes” from [the list of crimes] pernicious origin still work the very harm the 1890 Convention intended – denying Black Mississippians the vote,” she wrote.The US supreme court turned away a case on Friday challenging Mississippi’s rules around voting rights for people with felony convictions, leaving intact a policy implemented more than a century ago with the explicit goal of preventing Black people from voting.Those convicted of any one of 23 specific felonies in Mississippi permanently lose the right to vote. The list is rooted in the state’s 1890 constitutional convention, where delegates chose disenfranchising crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit.“We came here to exclude the negro. Nothing short of this will answer,” the president of the convention said at the time. The crimes, which include bribery, theft, carjacking, bigamy and timber larceny, have remained largely the same since then; Mississippi voters amended it remove burglary in 1950 and added murder and rape in 1968.It continued to have a staggering effect in Mississippi. Sixteen percent of the Black voting-age population remains blocked from casting a ballot, as well as 10% of the overall voting age population, according to an estimate by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. The state is about 38% Black, but Black people make up more than half of Mississippi’s disenfranchised population.Read the full story by my colleague Sam Levine here.In his speech at the White House, Joe Biden repeated his criticism of the Republicans who led the successful effort to block his plan to cancel some federal student loan debt.Biden called out those Republican members who received “hundreds of thousands for themselves” in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans that were later forgiven, but who had strongly opposed his student debt plan.
      The hypocrisy is stunning.
      The new student debt relief plan will be implemented under the federal government’s rulemaking process, the White House said, and it seems like it will take months to get the program up and running.The education department today issued a notice announcing the plan, will hold a virtual public hearing on 18 July and “finalize the issues to be addressed through rulemaking and begin the negotiated rulemaking sessions this fall. The Department will complete this rulemaking as quickly as possible,” according to the White House.In addition, the White House said the education department will institute “a 12-month ‘on-ramp’ to repayment, running from 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024, so that financially vulnerable borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent, reported to credit bureaus, placed in default, or referred to debt collection agencies.”Federal student loan payments have been paused since Covid-19 broke out in March 2020, and were set to restart this October. The Biden administration said the “on-ramp” is intended to provide relief to financially struggling borrowers who can’t afford to start making payments again right away.The Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong is taking the blog over now to keep you posted on this developing story.Joe Biden directed blame for the apparent demise of his student debt relief program both at the Republicans who sued over the plan, and at the supreme court justices who ruled against it.“I think the court misinterpreted the constitution,” Biden said. Asked whether he gave Americans “false hope” by promising $430bn in total debt relief only for it to be blocked in court, he replied, “I didn’t give any false hope. The question was whether or not I would do even more than was requested. What I did I felt was appropriate and was able to be done and would get done.”“But the Republican snatched away the hope that they were given,” Biden said.“This new path is legally sound,” Biden said in announcing his new attempt at student loan relief.“It’s going to take longer, but in my view it’s the best path that remains to providing for as many borrowers as possible. I’m directing my team to move as quickly as possible on law,” the president said.Joe Biden said he will announce a “new path” on student loan relief that will rely on a different law than the one that the supreme court today his administration could not use to relieve some $430bn in federal student debt.“I’m announcing today a new path consistent with today’s ruling to provide student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible. We will ground this new approach in a different law than my original plan, the so-called Higher Education Act. That will allow (education secretary Miguel Cardona) … to compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances,” the president said.Joe Biden has started his speech by criticizing the Republicans who successfully sued to block his student loan forgiveness program.“The money was literally about to go out the door, and then Republican elected officials and special interests stepped in. They said no, no, literally snatching from the hands of millions of Americans thousands of dollars of student debt relief that was about to change their lives,” the president said.“You know, these Republican officials just couldn’t bear the thought of providing relief for working-class, middle-class Americans. Republican state officials sued my administration, attempting to block relief, including to millions of their own constituents.” More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden condemns ruling against race-conscious admissions: ‘This is not a normal court’ – live

      by

      From 5h agoSpeaking at the White House, Joe Biden condemned the supreme court’s conservative justices for their decision released today against race-based admissions.“In case after case, including recently, just a few years ago in 2016, the court has affirmed and reaffirmed this view that colleges could use race, not as a determining factor for admission, but as one of the factors among many in deciding who to admit,” the president said, adding that “the court once again walked away from decades of precedent.”“The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” he said.There are “still a lot of really good Republicans” in the Senate, Joe Biden said during his interview on MSNBC.Biden said that six Republican senators have come to him since he was elected “to tell me, ‘Joe, I agree with you but if I’m seen doing it, I’ll lose a primary’”. He added:
      I’m an eternal optimist. I still think there’s going to come a moment when they’re going to be able to break.
      During his interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden admitted he knew his polling numbers “are not good” but argued that “they were the same way when I ran and won”.Biden said he had “great faith” in the American people and that it was “important that they know that my value set is very different than the new Maga Republican party”.He added:
      Everybody thought I was gonna get clobbered in the primary. I got 80 million votes in the last election.
      Here’s the clip:Joe Biden refused to say whether he knew ahead of time about Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans to march on Moscow.“Every president is amazed that America is the lead in the world”, he told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.He said he had focused on holding Nato together and on expanding the alliance to make sure that “the most significant invasion since world war two does not succeed”.In an interview on MSNBC, Joe Biden was asked about a report that said senior officials at the justice department resisted investigating the possible involvement of Donald Trump and his associates in the January 6 Capitol attack.Biden said he had made a commitment that he would “not in any way interfere” with the justice department, adding that he had “not spoken one single time with the attorney general on any specific case”.He said he had “faith that the justice department will move in a direction that is consistent with the law”.Joe Biden has said the supreme court has “gone out of its way” to “unravel basic rights” following its ruling on Thursday to strike down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard.In an interview on MSNBC, Biden was asked what he meant at a press conference earlier today when he said the supreme court was “not a normal court”. He said:
      What I meant by that is it has done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.
      He said he found this court “so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.
      Across the board, the vast majority of American people don’t agree with a lot of the decisions this court has made.
      Biden said that although he believes the conservative majority on the court “may do too much harm”, he opposes expanding the court because it will “politicize the court forever in a way that is not healthy”.Biden says he knows his polling numbers “are not good”, but argues that “they were the same way when I ran”.
      Everybody thought I was going to get clobbered in a primary.
      Biden says he’s “not spoken one single time” with the attorney general “on any specific case”.Biden says he thinks if we start the process of trying to expand the court “we’re going to politicize it in a way that’s not healthy”.Biden says he thinks it’s a “mistake” to expand the court. He says:
      What I’ve done is I have appointed 136 judges, and … I picked people who are from various backgrounds.
      We’ve appointed more women to the appellate courts, Black women to the appellate courts, than every other president in American history.
      Biden says the vast majority of American people don’t agree with the supreme court’s ruling.He says it “finds it so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people”.Biden is asked what he meant when he said earlier today that the supreme court is “not a normal court”.Biden says the court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court”, pointing to its ruling last year to overturn Roe v Wade.Joe Biden will in a few minutes appear from MSNBC’s New York City studios for a live interview with anchor Nicolle Wallace.While Biden often responds to questions from reporters as he comes and goes from the White House or at the tail end of his speeches, he has done few press conferences compared with his recent predecessors, according to the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Follow along here as the Guardian’s Léonie Chao-Fong covers the interview live. More

    • 238 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden has reminded us yet again that he’s a weak and lukewarm ally of abortion rights | Moira Donegan

      by

      A closed-door fundraiser for the very wealthy is a place where a lot of politicians really shine. Among their fellow elites, surrounded by people like them who like them – and are giving them money – Democrats and Republicans alike often become their truest selves. They drop the flesh-pressing affectations, the focused-group soundbites, the stiff smiles. They become something they’re usually not: honest.Honest is what Biden was at a similar fundraiser in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, this past Tuesday, when he told a crowd of his wealthy supporters that he was personally ambivalent about abortion rights. “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” the president said. Nevertheless, he claimed that the compromise Roe v Wade decision on abortion “got it right”.Biden’s reassertion of his own discomfort with abortion came just three days after the first anniversary of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which eliminated the abortion right. In the year since women lost the constitutional right that the president says he is not “big on”, the bans that snapped into effect have had life-changing – life-ruining – effects for thousands.Women have been forced to carry for months babies that cannot live outside the womb, which they have had to watch die after agonizing moments or hours of life. Women and girls have been forced to flee their home states to get abortions after being impregnated through rape. Women have lost their organs to abortion bans, needing emergency hysterectomies to save their lives after incomplete miscarriages or cesarean scar pregnancies. Others have been drafted into exercises in morbid futility, forced to carry fetuses that lack major organs, such as heads, in a new reality that has been likened to torture. Other women have been forced to become sicker and sicker – suffering, risking their lives, and incurring permanent damage to their bodies in order to be made ill enough that abortion might become legally permissible.Many more women have been stripped of control over their lives – denied healthcare, denied the ability to plan their families, denied the freedom to choose the course of their own lives, for the sake of retrograde, bigoted and punitive conceptions of gender and sexuality held by others. And all American women, along with many trans people, have been degraded and humiliated by abortion bans, relegated to a lesser class of adult citizenship, informed that they are not permitted to control their own fates.The abortion data project WeCount suggests that there were 25,640 fewer legal abortions in America in the year following Dobbs. That number does not account for the number of women – the unlucky ones – who received care only after their pregnancies sickened them to the brink of death. And it doesn’t account for the women – the lucky ones, as these things go – who were able to flee their home states and subject themselves to the indignity and burden of traveling for care. So the number is conservative. But still, it represents a staggering injustice: 25,640 violations of human rights; 25,640 people who deserved better.Throughout the past year, members of the Biden administration, and President Biden in particular, have been largely absent from this unfolding catastrophe. They have not taken on an expansive view of executive authority in attempts to restore abortion rights; they have not pressed allies in Congress to advance pro-choice legislation; they have not been willing to challenge, even tentatively, an anti-choice federal judiciary that is wildly expanding its interpretations of its own power.They are not even willing to do the one thing that the president has the unquestioned authority to do: use the bully pulpit to express solidarity with American women, to grieve for their lost health, futures and dignity, and to rally Americans to the increasingly popular pro-choice cause. Joe Biden has abdicated leadership on abortion, the loss of which is causing untold suffering, and which will define life prospects for a generation of women. Because he finds it distasteful. Because he’s not “big on” it.Lest this seem like an ungenerous reading of a well-intended gaffe, it should be noted that an unwillingness to advocate for abortion rights has been a recurring theme of his career. Abortion is a test that Joe Biden has failed every single time that history has called him to it. His paeans to his Catholic faith as cover for his unwillingness to champion abortion also ring false: most American Catholics support abortion rights. And as Jamie Manson, the president of Catholics for Choice, pointed out, the church also fiercely opposes marriage equality, which the president has long championed. It is not Catholicism that makes Joe Biden unwilling to issue a full-throated support of abortion rights. It is sexism.Until it became a political liability for him in the 2020 midterm cycle, Biden was among one of the last leading Democrats to support the Hyde Amendment, a 1976 provision that forbade federal funding for abortions, and which, because of its ban on Medicaid coverage of the procedure, made Roe’s protection of the abortion right largely moot for poor women almost as soon as it was achieved. Biden’s assertion that “Roe got it right,” is both disingenuous to this long-held position, which curtailed Roe’s protections, and also a sign of how indifferent and uninterested he has been in the insights of pro-choice activists, who have long argued that Roe was insufficient in its protections for abortion, inadequate in its argument for the right on privacy, rather than liberty and equality, grounds, and too diminished by subsequent attacks on abortion access that were pursued by rabidly anti-choice Republicans and allowed by cowardly “pro-choice” Democrats who never had the courage of their campaign promises.But an indifference to abortion rights activists from Biden is no surprise: after the Dobbs decision, while his administration fumbled and tried to change the subject from their own incompetence and lack of preparation, it was not those who had conspired and schemed for decades against Roe who the Biden administration blamed, and it was not those who had snatched women’s rights away that they demonized. It was pro-choice activists.“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have consistently been out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party,” his then-communications director, Kate Bedingfield, sneered.Mission accomplished: pro-choice activists are not satisfied with Joe Biden. But abortion is a salient issue, one that is only growing more popular, and more electorally persuasive, every day. In light of the post-Dobbs political reality, Joe Biden’s unwillingness to give unqualified support to abortion rights is not just morally cowardly; it’s also politically irresponsible. Republicans are running from the issue, and the Biden campaign is declining to attack them on it. Voters are rallying around abortion rights, and the Biden campaign is declining to lead them.The time for apologetic, defensive, partial non-defenses of abortion rights is over, and America’s newly mobilized pro-choice majority knows it. It’s not the activists who are out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party. It’s Joe Biden.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 188 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      Top Georgia official to meet special counsel investigators over Trump’s 2020 election plot – live

      by

      From 2h agoDonald Trump has now been indicted twice, first by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for allegedly falsifying business documents, and the second time by special prosecutor Jack Smith over the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. While the former president has said he will not relent from his latest campaign for the White House even if convicted, a guilty verdict on any of those charges would nonetheless be a huge development.Yet it’s possible neither trial is resolved before the November 2024 general election, where Trump could appear on ballots nationwide, assuming he wins the Republican nominating contest.The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that his trial in federal court over the Mar-a-Lago documents may be delayed until next spring:
      Federal prosecutors in the classified documents case against Donald Trump have asked for a tentative trial date in December, but the complex nature of the US government’s own rules for using such secrets in court, and expected legal challenges, could delay the trial until at least the spring of 2024.
      Trump was charged with retaining national defense information, including US nuclear secrets and plans for US retaliation in the event of an attack, which means his case will be tried under the rules laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.
      The statute was passed in the 1980s to protect the government against the “graymail” problem in national security cases, a tactic where the defense threatens to reveal classified information at trial, betting that the government would prefer to drop the charges rather than risk disclosure.
      That Joe Biden makes gaffes and misstatements when speaking in public is nothing new. But as he stands for a second term in office, Republicans are seizing on every mistake to press their case that the 80-year-old president is in no position to serve another four years.GOP-aligned Twitter accounts were quick to jump on Biden this morning after he incorrectly said Iraq when referring to Ukraine in remarks to reporters. So, too, were some Republican lawmakers, like Missouri’s senator Josh Hawley:Bloomberg News reports this isn’t the first time he’s made that particular mistake:As he left the White House for Chicago, Joe Biden shared his views on how the weekend rebellion against President Vladimir Putin in Russia has affected his grip on the country – and also made yet another gaffe:So just what is “Bidenomics”?According to the White House, “It’s an economic vision centered around three key pillars”, specifically “Making smart public investments in America, empowering and educating workers to grow the middle class [and] promoting competition to lower costs and help entrepreneurs and small businesses thrive.”“While our work isn’t finished, Bidenomics is already delivering for the American people. Our economy has added more than 13 million jobs – including nearly 800,000 manufacturing jobs – and we’ve unleashed a manufacturing and clean energy boom,” the White House said in a fact sheet distributed today, also noting the drop in inflation and rise in small business activity.The president is scheduled to make a speech outlining these accomplishments at 1pm Eastern Time in Chicago, setting the stage for them to be a key part of his re-election campaign.Despite all that, Biden struck a curious tone when taking questions from reporters at the White House this morning when asked about the term – which isn’t all that different from the “Reaganomics” moniker used to refer to former Republican president Ronald Reagan’s policies.Here’s the exchange, as captured by the Hill:Joe Biden may be planning to campaign on his economic record, but polls indicate that argument may not work for many Americans.Biden’s approval rating has been underwater for almost two years, but Americans are particularly distrustful of his handling of the economy. Consider this survey from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released last month.Its data shows the president’s approval at a typically low 40% – but when it comes to his handling of the economy, it’s even worse, with only 33% of American adults approving of what he’s done so far.Joe Biden is on his way to Chicago right now from Washington DC to make what his administration is billing as a major speech on his economic accomplishments, but as he left the White House, the president took time to call out a conservative Republican senator.The target was Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, who tweeted this morning about how happy he was that his state would receive money to expand broadband access from a $42bn federal government program:But that program is paid for by the national infrastructure overhaul Congress approved with a bipartisan vote in 2021 – which Tuberville did not vote for.That fact clearly did not escape Biden’s social media team, who invited the lawmaker to attend a public event with the president:While Donald Trump could still face charges over the January 6 attack, Reuters reported yesterday on a newly released report that shows US security agencies failed to see the insurrection coming:A new report detailing intelligence failures leading up to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol said government agencies responsible for anticipating trouble downplayed the threat even as the building was being stormed, in an attempt to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.The 105-page report, issued by Democrats on the Senate homeland security committee, said intelligence personnel at the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other agencies ignored warnings of violence in December 2020.Such officials then blamed each other for failing to prevent the attack that ensued, which left more than 140 police officers injured and led to several deaths.Donald Trump has now been indicted twice, first by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for allegedly falsifying business documents, and the second time by special prosecutor Jack Smith over the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. While the former president has said he will not relent from his latest campaign for the White House even if convicted, a guilty verdict on any of those charges would nonetheless be a huge development.Yet it’s possible neither trial is resolved before the November 2024 general election, where Trump could appear on ballots nationwide, assuming he wins the Republican nominating contest.The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that his trial in federal court over the Mar-a-Lago documents may be delayed until next spring:
      Federal prosecutors in the classified documents case against Donald Trump have asked for a tentative trial date in December, but the complex nature of the US government’s own rules for using such secrets in court, and expected legal challenges, could delay the trial until at least the spring of 2024.
      Trump was charged with retaining national defense information, including US nuclear secrets and plans for US retaliation in the event of an attack, which means his case will be tried under the rules laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, or Cipa.
      The statute was passed in the 1980s to protect the government against the “graymail” problem in national security cases, a tactic where the defense threatens to reveal classified information at trial, betting that the government would prefer to drop the charges rather than risk disclosure.
      Good morning, US politics blog readers. Special counsel Jack Smith has already brought federal charges against Donald Trump over his involvement in hiding documents at Mar-a-Lago, but his investigation of the former president is far from over. Smith was tasked by attorney general Merrick Garland to also look into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection and the wider effort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and new details have emerged of the direction of those inquiries.Smith’s investigators will be interviewing Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger today in Atlanta, the Washington Post reports, while Rudy Giuliani has already spoken to them, according to the Associated Press. The two men played starkly different roles in the legal maneuvers Trump attempted in the weeks after his election loss, with Raffensperger resisting entreaties from the president to stop the certification of Biden’s victory in Georgia, and Giuliani acting as a proxy for the president in his pressure campaign. We’ll be keeping our eyes open to see if more details of the investigation emerged today.Here’s what else is going on:
      Biden is heading to Chicago for a speech at 1pm Eastern Time on “Bidenomics” – the accomplishments in employment and wages he intends to campaign on as he seeks another term in the White House.
      A judge appeared disinclined to move to federal court the case brought against Trump by the Manhattan district attorney for allegedly falsifying business records, denying the former president another opportunity to have the charges dismissed.
      White House spokeswoman Olivia Dalton will take questions from reporters sometime after 9.30am. More