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DemocratsWho is Kyrsten Sinema? Friends and foes ponder an Arizona Senate enigma Democrat’s commitment to bipartisanship and reluctance to explain position on Biden spending plans contribute to mounting frustrations – and a possible primary challengeLauren Gambino in Washington@ More
Janet YellenUS treasury secretary Yellen: global minimum corporate tax will pass Minimum global corporate rate of 15% agreed by 136 countries as Yellen also says US will raise debt ceiling on 3 December R More
BooksInterview‘A xenophobic autocrat’: Adam Schiff on Trump’s threat to democracyCharles Kaiser The California Democrat’s new memoir, Midnight in Washington, examines his life before politics as well as his leading roles in impeachment and other dramas on Capitol HillSun 10 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTGreat crises in American political life often produce a new hero, someone whose courage and charisma capture the imagination of the decent half of the country.Supreme court, Facebook, Fed: three horsemen of democracy’s apocalypseRead moreIn the 1950s, when Joe McCarthy terrorized America with wild claims of communists lurking in every army barracks and state department corridor, it was an attorney, Joseph Walsh, who demanded of the Wisconsin senator: “At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency?”Twenty years later, when the country was transfixed by the Watergate hearings, it was a folksy senator from North Carolina, a first world war veteran named Sam Ervin, who won hearts with sayings like: “There is nothing in the constitution that authorizes or makes it the official duty of a president to have anything to do with criminal activities.”Forty years on, after Donald Trump entered the White House mining what Adam Schiff calls “a dangerous vein of autocratic thought” in the Republican party, the then little-known California Democrat did more than anyone else to unravel and excoriate the high crimes of a charlatan destined to be the only president twice impeached.During the pandemic, Schiff used his confinement to write a memoir which offers a beguiling mix of the personal and political. The book, Midnight in Washington, is full of new details about investigations of the president’s treason and how the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Democratic caucus decided impeachment was necessary.But the human side of the story is the most compelling part: the history of Schiff’s Jewish-immigrant ancestors, the sustenance he received from a brilliant wife and a devoted son and daughter, a career path that made him the perfect person to meet his moment in history.“I enjoyed writing the first part of the book the most,” Schiff said. “In so many ways I feel like the life I had before Trump prepared me for the national trial that was to come.“The prosecution of an FBI agent for spying for the Russians. Living in eastern Europe and watching the rise of an autocrat in Czechoslovakia literally tear the country apart. And my own family’s history in eastern Europe. All of these things seemed to prepare me without knowing it for the rise of a xenophobic autocrat in our own country.”In choppy political waters, a brilliant spouse is a great advantage – especially one who sometimes knows you better than you know yourself. When the Democratic establishment recruited him to run for Congress, after he was elected to the California senate, Schiff thought he was undecided. His wife, Eve, knew otherwise.“You’re going to do it,” she said, after he came back from meetings in Washington.“I don’t know,” he replied.“Yes, you do,” said Eve. “You’re going to do it.”She was right.Schiff’s love of bipartisanship, which ended with the Trump presidency, was inherited from his father, a “yellow dog Democrat” (a person who would vote for a yellow dog before he would vote Republican) and his Republican mother.His father offered him advice that has served him all his life: “As long as you are good at what you do, there will always be a demand for you.”“This was a very liberating idea,” Schiff writes, “that all I needed to do was focus on being good at my chosen profession and the rest would take care of itself.”Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreHis work as a federal prosecutor who got the conviction of the first FBI agent accused of spying for Russia was crucial to his understanding of how thoroughly Trump was manipulated by the Russians. He understood that Michael Cohen’s efforts during the campaign to close a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow would make Trump vulnerable to blackmail if his lawyer’s calls had been recorded. And he was astonished when he realized that that kind of kompromat wouldn’t even be necessary.When Trump “did become president, there would be no need for the Kremlin to blackmail him into betraying America’s interests,” Schiff writes. “To a remarkable degree, he would prove more than willing to do that on his own.”There’s lots more in the book, from Schiff’s unsuccessful effort to convince New York Times editors to remind readers the emails they were publishing to undermine Hillary Clinton had been stolen by the Russians for that very purpose, to Schiff’s revelation that if he had known how poorly Robert Mueller would perform as a witness after he completed his stint as special counsel, he would not have demanded his testimony.“I haven’t said this before this book,” he told the Guardian. “That was one of the difficult sections of the book to write because I have such reverence for Mueller. I wanted to be respectful but accurate.”Schiff is still at the center of political events. He sits on the House select committee investigating the deadly Capitol attack – and dealing with Trump’s obstruction.On the page, he also recalls a hearing in 2017 when he asked representatives of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube if their “algorithms were having the effect of balkanizing the public and deepening the divisions in our society”.Facebook’s general counsel pretended: “The data on this is actually quite mixed.”“Maybe that was so,” Schiff writes, “but it didn’t seem very mixed to me.”Asked if he thought this week’s testimony from the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen would create enough pressure to pass new laws regulating social media platforms, Schiff said: “The answer is yes.“I think we need regulation to protect people’s private data. I think we need to narrow the scope of the safe harbor these companies enjoy if they don’t moderate their contents and continue to amplify anger and hate. I think we need to insist on a vehicle for more transparency so we understand the data better.”But then he cautioned: “If you bet against Congress, you win 90% of the time.”‘Eureka moment’On the page, Schiff records an airport exchange with a Republican stranger, who said: “You can tell me – there’s nothing to this ‘collusion stuff’, is there?”It is a conversation which should put that question permanently to rest.The silence of Donald Trump: how Twitter’s ban is cramping his styleRead moreSchiff said: “What if I was to tell you that we had evidence in black and white that the Russians approached the Clinton campaign and offered dirt on Donald Trump, then met secretly with Chelsea Clinton, John Podesta and Robby Mook in the Brooklyn headquarters of the campaign … then Hillary lied about it to cover it up. Would you call that collusion?“Now what If I also told you that after the election, former national security adviser Susan Rice secretly talked with the Russian ambassador in an effort to undermine US sanctions on Russia after they interfered to help Hillary win. Would you call that collusion?”The Republican was convinced: “You know, I probably would.”For Schiff, it was a “eureka moment”.“Now,” he thought, “if I can only speak to a couple hundred million people.”Schiff’s book should convince a few million more that everything he said about Trump was true – and that the country was exceptionally lucky to have him ready and willing to defend the tattered concept of “truth”.
Midnight in Washington is published by Random House
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DemocratsProgressive Democrats draw strength from muscle-flexing in Congress The left of the party is celebrating holding firm on insisting on both parts of Biden’s domestic agenda over centrist objectionsJoan E Greve in Washington@ More
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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US newsTenant organizers poised to secure significant protections for US rentersPandemic housing crisis brought new attention to need for eviction protection and affordable housing Amanda Holpuch in New York@ More
