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US SenateSchumer ‘poisoned well’ over debt limit, McConnell says in insult-laden letter
Republican leader lashes out in letter and call to Biden
Senate GOP sows disinformation after debt ceiling deal
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US CongressSenate Republicans sow disinformation after $480bn US debt ceiling dealRepublicans claim cap must be lifted to pay for Biden’s economic agenda – a sign of party’s approach to once non-partisan issues Hugo Lowell in WashingtonFri 8 Oct 2021 07.49 EDTLast modified on Fri 8 Oct 2021 15.56 EDTTop Republicans in the Senate are advancing a campaign of disinformation over the debt ceiling as they seek to distort the reasons for needing to raise the nation’s borrowing cap, after they dropped their blockade on averting a US debt default in a bipartisan manner.Senate report details Trump’s attempt to use DoJ to overturn election defeatRead moreThe Senate on Thursday passed a bill to allow the debt ceiling to be raised by $480bn through early December, which the treasury department estimates will be enough to allow the government to temporarily avert an unprecedented default on $28tn of debt obligations.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, announced the morning before its passage that he had reached a deal with the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to clear the way for the vote on a short-term extension with GOP support.The movement came after McConnell made a tactical retreat to back down from weeks of refusal to allow Democrats to raise the debt ceiling by any measure other than through a complicated procedure known as reconciliation that would have required a party-line vote.The Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz said on the floor: “Unfortunately, Republicans blinked.”And some Republicans railed against what they saw as an unnecessarily triumphalist victory speech by Schumer after the deal, while the West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin put his head in his hands during the address and later called it “inappropriate”.Manchin Buries His Head in His Hands During Schumer Speech on Debt Ceiling, Says Remarks Were Not ‘Appropriate’ https://t.co/T32nLEJVkA— Carl Howard (@litlgrey) October 8, 2021
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and majority leader, Steny Hoyer, will set up a vote on Tuesday on the bill passed on Thursday evening, bringing the House back from recess a week early.But even as McConnell struck the accord to stave off the threat of a first-ever default, the resolution to punt the issue until December did nothing to address the crux of the partisan stalemate and Republicans’ mischaracterization of the issue.The argument at the heart of the GOP’s insistence – which is likely to resume in two months’ time – is that Democrats should raise the debt ceiling on a party-line basis, in part because they claim the borrowing cap needs to be lifted to pay for Biden’s economic agenda.“McConnell told them they are going to have to – if they are determined to spend at least $3.5tn more in borrowed money – lift the debt ceiling to accommodate that debt by themselves,” the Republican senator John Cornyn said of McConnell at a recent news conference, referring to Democrats’ social spending plan.The treasury department acknowledges that raising the debt ceiling would allow the US to continue borrowing in order to finance projects, such as Democrats’ social spending and infrastructure package that is expected to now cost between $1.9tn and $2.2tn.But economists at the department also say that attempts to portray the need to tackle the debt ceiling as an effort to pay for Democrats’ budget resolutions that are yet to pass Congress amount to disinformation, according to sources familiar with the mechanism.The criticism comes primarily because the overriding reason for raising the debt ceiling stems from the fact that the US needs to borrow new money to pay the principal and interest on about $8tn of debt incurred over the course of the Trump administration.In recent years, the majority of the increase in the national debt has come at the hands of Republicans, and lifting the debt ceiling merely allows the treasury department to pay existing debts by taking on new debts, the sources said.The mischaracterization by top Senate Republicans is emblematic of the party leadership’s approach to once non-partisan issues as it seeks to shield its members from being punished at the ballot box in 2022 by red state voters for lifting the debt ceiling.McConnell had insisted for weeks before caving on Wednesday that Democrats should have to tackle the debt ceiling on a party-line basis through reconciliation, repeatedly blocking measures that would have required at least 10 Republicans to vote for a debt limit hike.The Republicans’ minority leader first mounted a filibuster against a stopgap funding measure that both prevented a government shutdown and a default, as well as against a standalone bill to raise the debt ceiling as he sought to insulate Republicans from a tough vote.But Democrats ruled out using reconciliation, concerned about the scheduling difficulty and potential for abuse of the two so-called vote-a-ramas – where Republicans could offer unlimited amendments and poison pill bills – before the fiscal deadline of 18 October.The prospect of a default this October carried calamitous consequences: economists forecast an immediate recession, a meltdown in financial markets, with trillions wiped off US household wealth and sent unemployment rates surging.The weeks-long Republican intransigence to block any measure that raised the debt ceiling on a bipartisan basis also reflected the hypocrisy of the Republican position, Democrats said, noting they helped Republicans to tackle the debt without drama during the Trump era.And on Wednesday, it was only when Democrats started to call for Schumer to explore carving out an exception to the filibuster to pass a standalone debt bill that would have cut Republican power in the Senate that McConnell agreed on a bipartisan proposal.“The argument made yesterday was that this may be more pressure than two Democrat senators can stand regarding changing the filibuster rules,” the Republican senator Lindsey Graham said of McConnell’s deal to defuse moves to even partially abolish the Senate rule.Joanna Walters contributed reportingTopicsUS CongressRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More
OpinionUS politicsJoe Biden’s Build Back Better bill is about freedom. Why doesn’t he say so?Jan-Werner MüllerThe Build Back Better agenda creates more options for working people. Conservatives calling such measures antithetical to freedom have things the wrong way around Fri 8 Oct 2021 06.17 EDTLast modified on Fri 8 Oct 2021 15.12 EDTPolitics is not just talk, but no major political project can do without someone crafting persuasive language. Democrats have done a singularly bad job at making the case for what is still only known as “the $3.5tn bill”. They have advanced neither symbols nor even comprehensible concepts for what this supposed monster piece of legislation is really about. As a consequence, it has become all too easy to discredit the bill as an incoherent progressive wishlist from which items can be arbitrarily subtracted. What’s worse, the right has been able to portray the bill as inherently un-American, since it supposedly erects a – God forbid – European-style “cradle-to-grave” nanny state. It might sound counterintuitive, but the Democrats should ground their plans in the very value conservatives love to claim for themselves: freedom.The fact that the bill is so large and combines what is now commonly described as strengthening the social safety net and tackling the climate emergency is not just due to Democrat’s strategic failures: it is partly dictated by the constraints of the reconciliation process. But putting together two seemingly disjointed agendas has also made it easy to portray the legislation as incoherent; it has provided self-described “centrists” (mostly self-centered, rather than offering any principled notion of a “center”) with a politically costless way of calling for cuts to what they characterize as a bloated bill. Similarly, the hefty price tag is a chance for what lazy journalists still keep describing as “moderates” to prove their fiscal rectitude and adherence to a zombie ethos of bipartisan “responsibility”.The crucial question, though, is not about numbers, but about what’s perceived as legitimate. We do not put figures to the horrendously large defense bills (and we’d probably be shocked if we did); we also stopped long ago debating the Affordable Care Act in terms of costs. True, many of the individual initiatives in Biden’s central bill are popular (even in West Virginia, as no leftwing pundit will fail to mention). But it is naive to assume that consent to particular policies will amount to legislative success overall. Absent powerful symbols and a moral language that resonates with citizens, the whole will not just seem like less than the parts – the whole might be tossed away altogether.In recent decades the right has been generally better at what is sometimes dismissed as “symbolic politics”. Plenty of people thought the financial crisis would usher in a golden age of social democracy; instead, the Tea Party ended up making the most of the crisis and paved the way for Trump. Today, there are again plenty of people – including distinguished academics – warning that things like better access to childcare and community college are somehow un-American – and, more particularly, that US citizens will end up working fewer hours and hence be poorer, just like those benighted, lazy Europeans.Plenty of empirical comparisons with Europe are cherry-picked and ignore the fact that so many Americans lead more stressful and significantly shorter lives in a society that has for decades failed to invest not just in roads and bridges, but also in a civic infrastructure of shared goods such as affordable care for dependants. So many parts of the Build Back Better agenda actually aim to create more options for working people: they would have a choice about how they rear their children and take care of elderly relatives, with obvious implications for their ability to enter the labor market; they would also have more resources to use as they see fit, if drug prices came down. To describe such measures as antithetical to freedom has things exactly the wrong way around; rather than the state dictating to citizens what they have to do, it generates more choices for them.The rejoinder by the right is predictable enough: to call tax increases freedom, they will say, is positively Orwellian; coercing citizens into handing over more of their income to the state and calling it liberty is a perfidious sleight of hand. Here a further Democratic weakness becomes obvious: had they really tried to make the owners of concentrated wealth pay their fair share, they would have forced their opponents to go out there and make a very different kind of case: namely that the essence of being American consists in buying one’s fifth vacation home with money simply not available for folks who can’t afford the services of what the social scientist Jeffrey Winters has called the wealth defense industry – pricey accountants and lawyers who can set up that tax shelter in the Cayman Islands which lesser mortals will never even understand in its complexity. Going after income instead of wealth is already a victory for the kinds of people exposed in the Pandora Papers, as is the fact that there is no serious effort to strengthen the IRS’s arsenal in its battle with the wealth defense industry’s nuclear weapons.And climate? That is about freedom, too. If we fail to act now, future freedoms of how to live – and, not least, where to live – will be drastically curtailed. But, again, the case would be easier if the owners of concentrated wealth were made to pay for a livable future world – after all, they will have to live in it, too, unless they can go to Mars or make that luxury retreat in New Zealand climate-apocalypse-proof.Even if they made the philosophical case for how their proposals would set many Americans free in their daily lives, Democrats would still lack a powerful symbol of what their plan is about. Perhaps Trump’s speechwriters only put down “Build the Wall” to remind him that he must always mention immigration (and, not to forget, add some racist dog whistles). But, as a political symbol, it was brilliant: even if no one really knew any details of Trump’s plans (of course, often there weren’t any), people understood what he was about – and that he meant business. Yet even Bernie Sanders, with all his fulminations about the “billionaire class”, has never come up with anything as effective as Trump’s image. The task remains to link the fight against inequality with a symbol for freedom.
Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton University. His book Democracy Rules was published in July by Allen Lane
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Donald TrumpSenate report details Trump’s attempt to use DoJ to overturn election defeatSenate report details Trump bid to pressure justice departmentJeffrey Clark more open to pursuing baseless claims of fraud David Smith in Washington@ More
Fight to voteUS newsRepublicans’ 2020 recount farce steams ahead despite lack of evidenceEfforts in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Texas to review last year’s results are ‘delegitimizing democracy’, critics say The fight to vote is supported byAbout this contentSam Levine in New YorkThu 7 Oct 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 7 Oct 2021 11.51 EDTRepublicans in several states are advancing partisan reviews of the 2020 election results, underscoring how deeply the GOP has embraced the myth of a stolen election since 2020.The investigations in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Texas are advancing even after an extensive similar effort in Arizona, championed by Donald Trump and allies, failed to produce evidence of fraud. All three inquiries come as Trump has called out top Republicans in each state and pressured them to review the 2020 race. He is also backing several candidates who have embraced the myth in their races for statewide offices in which they would oversee elections.Republicans leading the efforts in all three states have said little about the scope and details of their unusual post-election investigations. But experts worry they signal a dangerous new normal in American politics in which the losers of elections refuse to accept the outcome and continue to undermine the results of electoral contests months after they have been decided.“They have slight differences tactically, but they all share the same strategic goals, which are primarily to continue to sow doubt about the integrity of American elections overall,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, and an election administration expert who has denounced the reviews. “I don’t know that there’s a word to describe how concerning it is.”In Wisconsin, a state where Joe Biden narrowly defeated Trump by 20,000 votes, there are three different efforts to review the election results. In February, Republicans in the state legislature authorized the non-partisan legislative audit bureau to review the election. Representative Janel Brandtjen, a Republican who chairs the elections committee in the state assembly and travelled to Phoenix to observe the Arizona investigation, unsuccessfully sought to subpoena voting equipment and ballots earlier this summer.Wisconsin Republicans also hired Michael Gabelman, a retired state supreme court justice to serve as a special counsel to investigate the election, which will be funded by $680,000 in taxpayer money. Gabelman took his most significant step on Friday when he issued subpoenas to at least five cities in the state and the administrator of the statewide body that oversees elections. The subpoenas request a large range of documents related to the 2020 election. Gabelman requested that the election officials appear at a 15 October hearing that will focus in part on “potential irregularities and/or illegalities related to the Election”, according a subpoena seen by the Guardian.Republicans are about to lose Texas – so they’re changing the rules | The fight to voteRead moreThere is no evidence of fraud or any other kind of wrongdoing in Wisconsin. Even though Trump’s campaign had an opportunity to request a recount of the entire state, it did so only in Milwaukee and Dane counties last year, two of the state’s most populous and liberal counties. Both recounts affirmed Biden’s win.Gabelman has said little publicly about the details of his effort, but released a video last month pledging it would be fair and that it was not designed to overturn the 2020 vote. “This is not an election contest. We are not challenging the results of the 2020 election; rather we are holding government officials accountable to the public for their actions surrounding the elections,” he said in the video.But Gabelman has already expressed support for the idea that the election was stolen, telling a pro-Trump crowd last November: “Our elected leaders – your elected leaders – have allowed unelected bureaucrats at the Wisconsin Elections Commission to steal our vote.” Gabelman has since defended those comments, saying in a July interview: “I didn’t say it was a stolen election. I cannot – and I defy you to – think of anything more unjust than a corrupt or unlawful election in a democracy. Whether that occurred here is very much a question to be examined.”On Tuesday, Gabelman said he was not an expert in elections. “Most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. In August, he traveled to a forum on election irregularities hosted by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally and MyPillow CEO, who has voiced some of the most baseless conspiracy theories about the election. Gabelman also reportedly consulted with Shiva Ayyadurai, a failed US Senate candidate who has spread false information about the 2020 election and the Covid-19 vaccine, including a wildly misleading and inaccurate report about ballots in Maricopa county.Gabelman’s effort has already been hobbled by a series of errors. One subpoena on Friday was sent to the city clerk in Milwaukee, who does not oversee elections, according to the Washington Post. A cover letter for a subpoena sent to Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee election commission, requested documents about Green Bay. Gabelman’s review also sent out an email to local election officials from a Gmail account under the name “John Delta”. The message landed in the spam folders of several county clerks. And it included a document asking the local clerks to preserve records related to the 2020 election that was written by Andrew Kloster, a former Trump administration official. Kloster published a blogpost in April that said “the 2020 presidential election was stolen, fair and square,” according to the Associated Press.Kathy Bernier, a Republican who chairs the elections committee in the Wisconsin state senate, has resisted efforts to spread election misinformation, even holding a training last month to educate lawmakers on how elections work. But in an interview, she said she was supportive of the review in her state, and said the idea it would undermine confidence in the election was “pish-posh”.She said Democrats were to blame for uncertainty around the election because some refused to accept Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, claiming Russian interference. (Trump was seated in 2016 without serious objections in Congress, and there were no similar partisan post-election reviews.)“If there are things called into question, and there is not full confidence in the electoral process, providing audits and research and evidence that in fact these processes and procedures and the election results you can have confidence in, only supports that position where you can have confidence and here is why,” she said.Bernier added that she was concerned that undermining elections could hurt Republicans in the future.“At some point we have to accept the election results and move on,” she said. “If the middle thinks the left is bonkers and the right is bonkers, they will stay home. I’m concerned about the middle.”The details of the review in Pennsylvania, where Biden defeated Trump by more than 80,000 votes, are still murky. Last month, senate Republicans voted to subpoena information on every registered voter in the state, including sensitive details such as the last four digits of their social security number. Cris Dush, the Republican senator overseeing the effort, said last month the legislative committee overseeing the investigation said “there have been questions regarding the validity of people … who have voted, whether or not they exist,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. He added the committee was seeking to determine whether the allegations were factual. Dush also traveled to Arizona to observe the Maricopa review. (A spokesman for senate Republicans said Dush was unavailable for an interview.)Democrats in the Pennsylvania state senate as well as the attorney general, Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, are suing to block the subpoenas. Senate Democrats argue the request amounts to an effort to contest the election and Shapiro has said it would violate voters’ rights.Perhaps the most perplexing post-election review is happening in Texas. Hours after Trump requested an audit of the 2020 election results, state officials announced they had already begun one in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin counties, respectively the two largest Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning counties.When the secretary of state’s office released details of the review days after the announcement, its first phase included several measures counties were already required to perform after the election, the Texas Tribune reported. The second phase of the review, set for spring 2022, includes an examination of several election records, including voter registration lists, chain of custody logs and rejected provisional ballots.Texas Republicans are also advancing a separate piece of legislation that would allow partisan county officials to request an audit of the 2020 election in their county as well as of future election results.Becker, the elections administration expert, said those who backed the audit were making an “outrageous insinuation” that elections don’t matter.“It is delegitimizing democracy as a form of government,” he said. “The election was not close by any historical measure. And these grifters are continuing to sell the story to Trump supporters that you cannot trust elections, that you cannot trust democracy.”TopicsUS newsFight to voteUS voting rightsUS elections 2020RepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More
