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      Sanders' minimum-wage effort looks doomed as Covid bill hits roadblocks

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      A fiery speech and last-ditch effort by Bernie Sanders to secure a place for a federal minimum wage hike in the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package appeared as good as doomed on Friday, following a day that saw the flagship legislation hit grinding delays in the Senate.Senate leaders and moderate Democratic senator Joe Manchin struck a deal late on Friday over emergency jobless benefits, breaking a nine-hour logjam that had stalled the bill.The compromise, announced by the West Virginia lawmaker and a Democratic aide, seemed to clear the way for the Senate to begin a climactic, marathon series of votes and, eventually, approval of the sweeping legislation.The Senate next faced votes on a pile of amendments that were likely to last overnight, mostly on Republican proposals that are virtually certain to fail.More significantly, the jobless benefits agreement suggested it was just a matter of time until the Senate passes the bill. That would send it back to the House, which was expected to give it final congressional approval before whisking it to Biden for his signature.Progress on the bill slowed to a crawl on Friday afternoon, signaling that the legislation might not pass until the weekend, with Republicans still expected to introduce many amendments, all of which must see votes.Despite delays, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said the chamber would finish its work.“The Senate is going to take a lot of votes. But we are going to power through and finish this bill, however long it takes,” Schumer said. “The American people are counting on us and our nation depends on it.”A job in the United States of America should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in itIf, as expected, the Senate passes the bill, it will then have to return to the Democratic-controlled House for final approval before being forwarded to Biden.Earlier on Friday, Sanders had, almost certainly in vain, implored Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour within this piece of legislation, calling it “disgraceful” that lawmakers have allowed tens of millions of American workers to live on “starvation wages”.“Nobody in America can survive on $7.25 an hour, $9 an hour or $12 an hour,” he said. “We need an economy in which all of our workers earn at least a living wage … A job in the United States of America should lift you out of poverty, not keep you in it.”Last week, the Senate parliamentarian determined that a provision raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour was inadmissible under the rules of a special budgetary procedure Democrats are using to pass the $1.9tn coronavirus relief bill on a party-line vote.Sanders, backed by many progressives in the House, has called on Democrats to “ignore” the decision.During his remarks, Sanders also made a forceful case for enacting the relief bill, which is expected to pass with only Democratic support.“This is a bill which will answer a profound question: are we living in a democratic society where the US Congress will respond to the needs of working families rather than just the wealthy and large corporations and their lobbyists?” he said.Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gives forceful speech on his proposed amendment to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/hour:“This is a bill which will answer a profound question: Are we living in a democratic society … ?” pic.twitter.com/qrz4LjQFWq— The Recount (@therecount) March 5, 2021
      Debate, voting on amendments, and backroom horse-trading began in earnest on Friday, a day after the vice-president, Kamala Harris, broke a Senate tie to allow the chamber to take up the bill.Following Sanders’ speech, eight Democrats joined all Republicans to vote against the minimum wage proposal, suggesting that progressives vowing to continue the effort in coming months will face a difficult fight.The 8 senators:• Joe Manchin (West Va. )• Jon Tester (Mt.)• Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.)• Angus King (Maine)• Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.)• Tom Carper (Del.)• Chris Coons (Del.)• Maggie Hassan (N.H.) https://t.co/uEd1famnIv— Axios (@axios) March 5, 2021
      Though Sanders’ amendment was poised for defeat, the vote remained open as Democrats scrambled to hammer out a deal on unemployment benefits.The version of the relief bill passed by the House provides $400 weekly emergency unemployment benefits – on top of regular state payments – through August.But in a compromise with moderates revealed earlier on Friday, Senate Democrats said that would be reduced to $300 weekly but extended until early October. The plan, sponsored by Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, would also reduce taxes on unemployment benefits by making $10,200 of individuals’ benefits tax exempt. The White House also said it supported the amendment.But by midday, lawmakers said Manchin was ready to support a less generous Republican version. That led to hours of talks involving White House aides, top Senate Democrats and Manchin as the party tried finding a way to salvage its unemployment aid package.The compromise announced Friday night would provide $300 weekly, with the final check paid on 6 September, and includes the tax break on benefits.The day’s lengthy standoff underscored the headaches confronting party leaders over the next two years and the tensions between progressives and centrists as they try moving their agenda through the Congress with their slender majorities.With power in the Senate split 50-50 between the two parties, just one Democratic defection is needed to block legislation or stall voting along the way if no Republicans cross the aisle.“I feel bad for Joe Manchin. I hope the Geneva Convention applies to him,” said the No 2 Senate Republican, John Thune of South Dakota, to reporters.The overall bill, aimed at battling the killer virus and nursing the staggered economy back to health, will provide direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans.There is also money for Covid-19 vaccines and testing, aid to state and local governments, help for schools and the airline industry, tax breaks for lower-earners and families with children, and subsidies for health insurance.Despite deep political polarization and staunch Republican opposition, the legislation has garnered broad public appeal.Apoll by Monmouth University found that 62% of Americans approve of the stimulus package, including more than three in 10 Republicans.That is something Republicans hope to erode, by portraying the bill as too big and representing wasteful public spending for a pandemic that’s almost over. Biden and federal health experts this week, however, told states rushing to ditch mask mandates and reopen businesses completely that the move was premature and they risked creating a fourth deadly surge of disease. More

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      US House passes George Floyd Justice in Policing Act – video

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      The US House of Representatives passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the most ambitious police reform effort in decades. The legislation changes would ban chokeholds and ‘qualified immunity’ for law enforcement and create national standards for policing in a bid to bolster accountability. California congresswoman Karen Bass, who authored the bill, cited the beating of Rodney King in 1991 and Floyd’s death as the catalyst for the ambitious reform while House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said the bill was ‘legislation which will fundamentally transform the culture’
      US House passes most ambitious police reform effort in decades More

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      US House passes most ambitious police reform effort in decades

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      [embedded content]
      The US House of Representatives passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, the most ambitious police reform effort in decades, for the second time on Wednesday.
      The sweeping legislation would ban chokeholds and “qualified immunity” for law enforcement and create national standards for policing in a bid to bolster accountability. Nine months after Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed by Minneapolis police, lawmakers voted to approve the reform measure named after him 220-212, along party lines. However, the only Republican who voted in favor said he did so in error, and has changed the official record to reflect his opposition.
      The House had passed a version of the bill last year, but the Republican-controlled Senate never took it up. This time around, Democrats have the support of the White House and a slight edge in the Senate. But they will have to win over at least 10 Republican senators to overcome a filibuster and pass the measure – which is unlikely to happen.
      The bill includes prohibitions on so-called qualified immunity, which shields law enforcement from certain lawsuits, and is one of the main provisions that will likely need to be negotiated in any compromise with Republican senators.
      Police unions and other law enforcement groups have argued that, without such legal protections, fears of lawsuits will stop people from becoming police officers – even though the measure permits such suits only against law enforcement agencies, rather than all public employees.
      The California congresswoman Karen Bass, who authored the bill, called provisions limiting qualified immunity and easing standards for prosecution “the only measures that hold police accountable, that will actually decrease the number of times we have to see people killed on videotape.”
      She also acknowledged the challenges Democrats faced last November, and may likely see again, when former Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and other leading Republicans crowded the airwaves with images of cities around the country burning.
      But Bass said those attacks, like much of the opposition to the bill, are built on racism, promoting fears about how, “the scary Black people are going to attack you if you try to rein in the police”.
      “That’s as old as apple pie in our history,” she said. “So do you not act because of that?”
      Still, she conceded that changes are likely to come if the measure is to win the minimum 60 votes it will need to advance in the Senate, which is now split 50-50. Bass said she had been in contact with the South Carolina senator Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the chamber, and was confident he would help deliver some GOP support.
      Scott said this week that the legislation’s sticking points were qualified immunity and prosecutorial standards and that in both areas, “We have to protect individual officers.”
      “That’s a red line for me,” Scott said, adding “hopefully we’ll come up with something that actually works.” More

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      US warned of possible militia plot to attack Capitol on Thursday

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      Federal authorities on Wednesday warned that people associated with identified militia groups have been discussing plans for another attack on the US Capitol with the aim of removing Democratic politicians on or about 4 March.
      The FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the US Capitol police department has obtained intelligence pointing to a possible plot to “breach the Capitol by an identified militia group” on Thursday, the agency said on Wednesday.
      The Capitol police statement added that it is working with local, state and federal agencies “to stop any threats to the Capitol” in Washington, almost two months after the deadly insurrection at the seat of the US Congress by supporters of Donald Trump on 6 January.
      The police further stated: “We are taking the intelligence seriously.”
      Thursday marks the date when some rightwing conspiracy theorists have claimed that the former president, Donald Trump, will be sworn in for a second term in office despite the fact that he lost the November presidential election and left the White House on 20 January just before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th US president.

      Julia E. Ainsley
      (@JuliaEAinsley)
      Breaking: Joint FBI/ DHS intel bulletin warns some domestic violent extremists have “discussed plans to take control of the U.S. Capitol and remove democratic lawmakers on or about 4 March.”

      March 3, 2021

      Officials at all levels have described the US election as the most secure in the nation’s history.
      The attack on 6 January left five people dead on the day, including a police officer, hundreds injured and saw members of congress running for their lives. Two more police officers took their own lives just days after the insurrection.
      Trump was impeached for a historic second time for inciting the attack with an incendiary speech outside the White House on the day, where he encouraged supporters to march on the Capitol, where the House and Senate were set to certify Biden’s victory.
      The Capitol police statement noted that it had already made “significant security upgrades” at the Capitol.
      It was unclear if these upgrades were done in response to this latest threat or whether they included measures already in place following the 6 January insurrection.
      The FBI has warned of extremist online “chatter” about attacking the Capitol on 4 or 6 March.
      Law enforcement officials at the Capitol were on Wednesday sending out notices to members of Congress notifying them of the detected threat.
      Testifying in the Senate about the insurrection, Melissa Smislova, a senior official in intelligence and analysis at the DHS said that the department issued a joint warning with the FBI about midnight on Tuesday about the raised level of online plotting around a potential new attack.
      However, the House internal security chief, the acting sergeant at arms issued a bulletin saying that the significance of 4 March as the “true” inauguration date for Trump among some groups had declined.
      The theory has been boosted by the conspiracy group QAnon, which had previously predicted that Trump, not Biden, would be inaugurated on 20 January.
      House security are no longer anticipating protests or violence from groups traveling to Washington on Thursday, the sergeant, Timothy Blodgen, reported.

      Rebecca Kaplan
      (@RebeccaRKaplan)
      The House Sergeant at Arms issues a bulletin saying that the significance of 3/4 as the “true” inauguration date for Trump among some groups has declined and they are no longer anticipating protests or violence from groups traveling to DC that day — > pic.twitter.com/NJBT26FDkk

      March 2, 2021

      Meanwhile, William Walker, the commanding general of the District of Columbia national guard, testifying at the same Senate committee hearing as Smislova, said it took army leaders more than three hours to approve a request for guard troops to be deployed to the Capitol on 6 January.
      Walker accused the Pentagon of restricting the deployment of troop support to back up the police.
      And former vice-president Mike Pence further fueled conspiracy theories in an opinion article that questioned “the integrity of the 2020 election”, citing “significant” and “troubling” voting irregularities, published by the conservative Daily Signal. More

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      Scramble on to replace Neera Tanden after nomination met perfect storm

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterNeera Tanden’s decision to withdraw from consideration to serve as Joe Biden’s budget director marks the first major loss for the still young Biden administration, and sets off a scramble between various political factions to push through a new nominee.Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress thinktank, decided to withdraw her candidacy on Tuesday, in the face of a lack of support among senators needed to advance her through the confirmation process.“Unfortunately, it now seems clear that there is no path forward to gain confirmation, and I do not want continued consideration of my nomination to be a distraction from your other priorities,” Tanden wrote in a letter to Biden released by the White House. Tanden added that she appreciated “how hard you and your team at the White House has worked to win my confirmation”.Tanden was the first of Biden’s cabinet nominees to fail to make it through the confirmation process. New presidents don’t usually see all of their cabinet picks confirmed.But Tanden’s path was always more precarious than the rest. She is well known throughout the Democratic party as a combative figure who often engaged in Twitter fights and criticized both Republicans and Democrats. After her nomination she deleted over 1,000 tweets and in her hearings she said she regretted those criticisms, which included calling Senator Susan Collins of Maine “the worst” and tweeting that “vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz”, the Republican senator from Texas.But Tanden, a staunch Hillary Clinton ally, had also warred with prominent members of the progressive wing of the Democratic party and once allegedly punched Faiz Shakir, who would eventually become Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign manager. Tanden has said she “pushed” him.Sanders, the chairman of one of the committees charged with handling Tanden’s nomination, also questioned large corporate and foreign donations to the Center for American Progress.But the lion’s share of critical questioning by senators was about Tanden’s various attacks.“Of course, your attacks were not just made against Republicans. There were vicious attacks against progressives, people who I have worked with, me personally,” Sanders said during the hearings.Tanden did have her fair share of support. Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, said the White House was “fighting our guts out” to get Tanden confirmed and the US Chamber of Commerce backed her as well. Behind the scenes, Democratic officials continued to lobby senators to support her, even after Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, announced his opposition to Tanden, citing her tweets and past conduct.Manchin has emerged during the Biden administration as, at times, the deciding figure on matters before the Senate. Other conservative Democrats, like Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, held back from announcing how she would vote. That decision did not inspire confidence in Tanden’s chances and illustrated the influence any senator – especially a conservative one – has in a Senate split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker.Republicans at moments seemed to revel in highlighting Tanden’s past tweets. Tanden’s allies argued that they were motivated by a mix of extreme hypocritical partisanship (where were they, Tanden’s allies grumbled, when Trump was tweeting?) and racism. Tanden was born to immigrant parents from India.But those senators also expressed eagerness to support one of the potential replacements – Shalanda Young, a veteran Hill staffer who is Black.“You know I’m going to vote for you,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the ranking Republican on the Senate budget committee, said on Tuesday during Young’s hearing to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. “You’re highly qualified and I’m going to support you,” Graham added before pressing her on immigration policy.Similarly John Kennedy of Louisiana, one of the Senate’s more bombastic members, said at one point “you may be more than deputy. You may be the sheriff. I don’t expect you to comment on that.”Democratic senators stuck to their support of Tanden during Young’s hearing but after her nomination was pulled lawmakers began lobbying for Young.“We have worked closely with her for several years and highly recommend her for her intellect, her deep expertise on the federal budget and her determination to ensure that our budget reflects our values as a nation,” the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, majority whip, Jim Clyburn, and majority leader, Steny Hoyer, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Her leadership at the OMB would be historic and would send a strong message that this administration is eager to work in close coordination with members of Congress to craft budgets that meet the challenges of our time and can secure broad, bipartisan support.”Other names have been floated as possible OMB nominees and the Senate budget committee is now waiting for the White House to pick someone else. The names floated include Sarah Bianchi, a former director of policy for Biden; Gene Sperling, a former director of the council of economic advisers; Ann O’Leary, the former chief of staff to Governor Gavin Newsom of California.Whoever the White House nominates is poised to have an easier confirmation process than Tanden. More

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      Raising the US minimum wage: what just happened and what comes next?

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      It was a major plank of the Democratic plan to “build back better” – raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour as a way of boosting the economy during the pandemic and tackling poverty and income inequality. But on Thursday the much-vaunted plan hit a roadblock in the US Senate, which has knocked the proposal sideways.So what happened, and is this game over for the $15 minimum wage?What happened?The idea of pushing up the minimum wage in stages to $15 in 2025 was included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn stimulus package that seeks to support vaccine distribution and an extension of unemployment benefit among other pandemic provisions.The minimum wage element of the bill was a very big deal. It would increase the incomes of 27 million Americans, with almost 1 million people lifted out of poverty, according to the Congressional Budget Office.The Democrats have decided to fast-track the bill as a way of avoiding Republican opposition through a channel known as “budget resolution”. That would provide for a simple majority vote in the Senate, avoiding the dreaded filibuster where 60 votes have to be attained – an impossible task given Republican intransigence within the new evenly split 50-50 Senate.The snag is that budget resolution is subject to strict limits on how it is applied, designed to prevent political leaders packing the bill with all sorts of goodies entirely unrelated to federal revenue or spending. The unelected keeper of those restrictions is Elizabeth MacDonough, the grandly titled Senate parliamentarian, who announced on Thursday that in her reading of the rules the $15 minimum wage was extraneous to budget legislation and thus had to be removed.How did that go down?Advocates of raising the minimum wage were incensed. Bernie Sanders, a longtime champion, said he strongly disagreed with the decision, which he blamed on “archaic and undemocratic rules”. Elizabeth Warren and many others said it was time to end the filibuster so that the provision could pass the Senate regardless, while the idea of firing MacDonough was also floated.By contrast, the top Republican on the Senate budget committee, Lindsey Graham, said he was “very pleased” by MacDonough’s intervention.Would it have passed in any case?There were some doubts that the stimulus bill would have passed with the minimum wage increase contained in it. Two Democratic senators on the right of the party, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, had both put up resistance, and even Biden himself openly expressed skepticism that the provision would “survive”.The irony is that a $15 minimum wage is hugely popular among Americans of all political persuasions, with two-thirds supporting it, according to a 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center. Take Florida – the state voted for Trump in November, but it also backed by 60% a ballot initiative raising the minimum wage to $15 over the next five years.So what’s next?There are several directions in which the tussle could now go. Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate and the final arbiter on the chamber’s rules, has the authority to overrule the parliamentarian. But such a power has not been wielded since Nelson Rockefeller in 1975, and, besides, the White House has indicated that the vice-president will not take that route.An alternative “plan B” is emerging whereby the Democrats would replace the minimum wage provision in the stimulus bill with a tax penalty on large corporations paying workers less than $15 an hour. Democratic leaders think that such a tax mechanism might be more resilient in meeting the requirements of budget resolution.Working against that will be the desire of the White House to pass the stimulus bill quickly and not experience any further delays. A crunch deadline is fast approaching – on 14 March the existing jobless benefits start to expire and the Biden administration is keen to prevent unemployed workers falling into even greater hardship.Amid the plethora of possible next steps, one thing is certain: the fight for $15 is not over. In the past eight years the push for a decent minimum wage has snowballed across the US and around the world into a formidable movement, and no number of objections from unelected rules-keepers will hold it back for long. More