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      Preventable review: Andy Slavitt indicts Trump over Covid – but scolds us all too

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      Andy Slavitt’s Preventable is a 336-page indictment of Donald Trump, Trumpworld, America’s lack of social cohesion, greed and big pharma. He laments needless deaths, hyper-partisanship and populist disdain of experts and expertise. The word “evil” appears. So does “privilege”.Slavitt, recently departed as a senior adviser to Joe Biden on Covid response, is himself a product of the Ivy League: the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard business school. He also did stints in the Obama administration and at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and United Healthcare.His book reads like Covid-porn for blue America. Unfortunately, he does not reflect on how the US reached this place.The saga of Albion’s Seed – English Protestants who slaughtered each other in the old country, overthrew the crown in a new land then waged a second civil war – does not figure in Slavitt’s calculus. Said differently, if kin can repeatedly raise arms against kin, the social fabric can never be taken for granted – especially not as demographics convulse. E pluribus unum has limitations.Slavitt sees Trump’s cruelty at the southern border but fails to acknowledge the grievances of those in flyover country. Brexit and Trump were not one-offs. They were inextricably related. Displacement exacts a price.Slavitt’s book is subtitled “The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the US Coronavirus Response”. He lauds pandemic responses in Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand and criticizes Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, governors of Texas and Florida.But he ignores the fact that cases and mortality rates in those two states were lower than in New York and New Jersey – states called home by coastal elites.To his credit, Slavitt does take to task Bill de Blasio, that hapless and tin-eared mayor, for urging New Yorkers to “go out and enjoy themselves at restaurants” as the pandemic took root.“The impact of New York’s delay was significant,” Slavitt writes.Similarly, Kristi Noem, South Dakota’s performative Republican governor, is derided for her “freedom-first” strategy. But unlike De Blasio she remains popular in her state and her party. A DeSantis-Noem Republican ticket in 2024 is not out of the question. In the eyes of voters, Noem did something right – much like Andrew Cuomo in New York, now beset by allegations of sexual misconduct but apparently on the verge of dodging a political bullet.On the other hand, the New York Times reports that even in east Asia and the south Pacific, supposed world leaders in containing the coronavirus, the fight is not yet won. Variants and their dangers loom. Vaccinations lag.To quote the Times, “people are fed up” and asking: “Why are we behind and when, for the love of all things good and great, will the pandemic routine finally come to an end?”Patience is never in limitless supply. Not in the US, not elsewhere. Slavitt makes insufficient allowance for this very human quirk.Trump was callous and mendacious but he grasped what made folks tick. Despite Slavitt’s vilification of big pharma, in those countries that possessed sufficient capital and foresight, vaccine manufacturers came through. Markets can work, even if they result in asymmetries.As expected, Preventable catalogs Trump’s failings in granular detail: his false promises of Covid quickly disappearing, his embrace of medical quackery, his rejection of testing as a crucial weapon. Slavitt also reminds readers that Trump chucked his predecessor’s pandemic response playbook and gutted the supply of personal protective equipment, just for the sake of blotting out the past.Politicians are self-centered. Trump more so than others. According to Slavitt, he saw himself as the smartest person in the room and expected to be flattered accordingly. One way to win his attention was to compliment his parenting skills. But being the owner of a debt-laden company forced to pay for golf course upkeep with no one on the greens may have injected additional anxiety. The public was expected to feel Trump’s pain.Slavitt also describes Trump’s difficulty in coming to grips with the possibility of the pandemic costing him the election, and his decision to offload to the states the mission of combating Covid. The White House became the backdrop for a reality show while the Confederate flag emerged as a symbol of pro-Trump, “liberate the state” sentiment.Jared Kushner told Slavitt: “We’re going to put testing back to the states.” The White House “can’t be responsible”, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser explained. “Some [governors] don’t want to succeed. Bad incentives to keep blaming us.”As an administration insider told the Guardian in April 2020, Trump was “killing his own supporters”.And yet, not surprisingly, Slavitt struggles with the reality that Democratic nay-saying almost lost Biden the White House and Nancy Pelosi the speaker’s gavel. Voters yearned for hope and wanted to know their sacrifice mattered.Being told “we are in this together” when “we” are manifestly not is more than a problem with messaging. For example, Slavitt omits mention of Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, and his infamous dinner at a Napa Valley restaurant in November as Covid cases mounted. On being found out, Newsom acknowledged: “We’re all human. We all fall short sometimes.” Whatever.Slavitt does upbraid the Fox News host Tucker Carlson for downplaying the dangers of Covid and recounts the inane pronouncements of Richard Epstein, a libertarian-minded New York University law school professor, to a similar end. Slavitt calls Epstein “disconnected from reality and remarkably self-assured”.This week, the US death toll passed 600,000. The vaccine works only on the living. The world has experienced more deaths halfway through 2021 than in all of 2020.Slavitt ends his book wondering whether “the lessons of the past year might be forgotten”. Don’t rule that out. More

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      ‘We dodged a mortar round’: George Packer on America in crisis

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      When the pandemic struck, George Packer moved his family out of the city and upstate into the countryside.The move forced one America’s most celebrated and decorated non-fiction writers, famous for his reporting, to sit still for once – and to contemplate what was happening to his country.The result is an extended essay, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, a meditation on the crippling division of the nation into irreconcilable political tribes, on to which Packer has added some reflections on the way out of the mire.“I felt immobilised as a reporter,” Packer said. “It seemed like an essay was the thing to do – just put down a bunch of thoughts that get stirred up when you’re sitting in one place for a long time, looking hard at yourself and your country. So it was a Covid book for sure, making the best of a bad situation.”In some ways it is a long epilogue to a previous work, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, for which Packer won the National Book Award in 2013. That was a deeply reported account of the shredding of the social fabric. Last Best Hope is a stock-taking two presidential terms later, after the rise and fall of Donald Trump, who the author sees as the inevitable symptom of the national unraveling.Instead of getting in his car and driving across the country, Packer ordered a small pile of essays which did what he was trying to achieve, a diagnosis of a nation in crisis. One was a pamphlet by Walt Whitman called Democratic Vistas, “a passionate, wonderful book”; another was Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, by the journalist Walter Lippmann in 1914.Packer also looked abroad, rereading George Orwell’s essay on wartime Britain, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, as well as Strange Defeat, a contemplation by French historian Marc Bloch of the chronic failings that gifted Hitler his easy conquest in 1940, published after its author was executed by the Nazis. Packer sees a parallel between France’s shock at being routed with the humbling of America in the face of Covid-19.Sitting alongside these shorter works in Packer’s rural retreat was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, an observation of the country and what made it different written by a French observer just over a half-century after its founding. Packer describes it as “a masterpiece of sociology and observation and political analysis”.He finished writing Last Best Hope at a point when the democracy de Tocqueville had described had barely survived a direct onslaught, the 6 January insurrection at the Capitol aimed at reversing the election result.“I think we dodged more than a bullet – a mortar round,” Packer said, noting that if Republican election officials in Georgia and Republican-appointed judges around the country had done the bidding of their president and party, and overturned the election, the battle would have spilled bloodily into the streets. And if Trump had not been so staggeringly inept in his handling of the pandemic, Packer believes he would have won easily.The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient“I’ve seen the foreshadowing of something I never expected to see, never imagined, which is the end of our democracy,” he said. “I lived through a lot of bad political periods, but that never seemed to be on the horizon.”On closer examination, American democracy might not have dodged the bullet, or the mortar round, after all. It may have been badly wounded.Packer says he sees the courts, and state election machinery, and all the institutions that just about held the line in 2020, as “a patient getting out of bed after a really long illness and having just the strength to walk across the room”. The analogy raises the question of whether the patient will have the will and the vitality to do the same in 2022 or 2024.“The Republicans are administering poison to the bedridden patient at the moment,” Packer said. “They’re sneaking into the room and injecting toxins in the form of voter suppression laws and conspiracy theories and lies. So yeah, it’s a real question whether a democracy can survive if nearly half the country has embraced an anti-democratic worldview. That’s kind of the question we’re facing right now.”Real America, Just America … and moreOne of the side effects of Packer’s Covid-led move out of the city was that it brought him into proximity with people who saw the nation through a very different prism. He describes the night when he first sees Trump lawn signs in the yard of polite and friendly neighbours.“Five white letters stretched across a sign,” he writes. “The blaring shade of that red instantly told me what the five letters said.”His visceral reaction to Trumpists led to some introspection about the roots of those emotions and what they implied on a national scale.“My attitude had something to do with my good luck,” he writes. “My life savings were doing pretty well. I was comfortable and was afraid, and this fearful security shut down my imaginative sympathy. No wonder they resented me as much as I despised them.”One of the central propositions in Last Best Hope is that the American political firmament has shattered into four rival narratives, crossing across the old red-blue divide. There is the Free America of small-government conservatives, who put the liberty of the individual above all; the Smart America of a smug, comfortable intellectual elite; the Real America of white Christian nationalism, the driving force behind populism; and there is Just America, built increasingly around identity politics and critical theory.His disdain for the latter, which he sees as both elitist and a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, is the main point of contention over his book on the left.“Just America embraces an ideology of rigid identity groups that keeps the professional class in its superior place, divides workers, and has little to do with the reality of an increasingly multiracial, intermarrying society,” Packer writes.His description of Black Lives Matter protesters in New York in the summer of 2020 as “disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees making more than $100,000 a year” has raised hackles, to say the least.Critics accuse Packer of underestimating the fury of Black Americans at having to live in constant fear of lethal police brutality, and their agency in driving the BLM movement and the Biden campaign, helping it succeed where Hillary Clinton failed. Packer argues that presents a distorted view of the underpinnings of Biden’s victory.“I take issue with the notion that – let’s call it – the ‘identity left’ carried Biden over the line,” he said. “I think a coalition of groups carried Biden over the line, including suburbanites, including Never-Trump Republicans, including working class, black and Latino voters who voted for Biden in the primaries, who got him the nomination, when they could have gone for someone more closely identified with the left.”Biden really does have a feel for workers and for labourHe sees Biden as occupying space outside his Four Americas grid, a throwback to an age of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, and of powerful, respected labour unions. Packer approves.“He really does have a feel for workers and for labour. And I think he understands that you don’t advance the cause of equality by speaking to Americans as if they are members of monolithic identity groups that are somehow in perpetual conflict with each other.”To the extent that Packer has a remedy for America’s ills it lies in the reaffirmation of that trait De Tocqueville identified in the 1830s: a commitment to equality. And that, he argues, can only be achieved by the unification of the working class.It all sounds a bit un-American. For decades, the overwhelming majority of the population identified as middle class, the class to which almost every aspiring politician still appeals. But that aspirational self-image has been ground down over decades by the rapacity of the global economy and the elites who are its beneficiaries.“They don’t have the dignity that society once conferred on them,” Packer said. “They’re just struggling, drowning, paid abysmal wages, with no union to represent them. And now they’ve disappeared altogether because we have one-click shopping. So the working class is something we never have to think about because we don’t see them.”The pandemic, however, brought the working class back into the spotlight, albeit temporarily. The “knowledge workers” and the opinion-forming elites stranded at home were suddenly reliant on the essential workers who kept virtually the whole economy going with services and deliveries.Just maybe, Packer says, this moment of renewed appreciation can be leveraged under Biden into a real improvement in living standards of this virtually invisible majority, from all four Americas.‘Pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas’Some of the prescriptions in the tail end of the book, for restoring equality and the “art of self-government”, come across as somewhat fanciful, like calling on Americans to turn off Twitter and Facebook and do a year of national service, so followers of the four narratives have to spend some time in each other’s company.“The last pages are full of pipe dreams, long shots, far-fetched ideas,” Packer admitted, bluntly. “I’m not a political operative so I don’t think it’s my job to figure out how to get it passed through Congress. But I did feel the need to lay down a direction – here’s the way we need to go.”The key word in the book’s title is “hope” and it recalls a much earlier book on the American condition by the bard of the working classes, Stud Terkel. Terkel’s book was Hope Dies Last. For Packer, it is a necessity as much as a conviction.“For one thing I have kids, and it’s just almost psychologically impossible not to hold out hope,” he said.He believes Biden’s administration has a window in which it can address some national divisions indirectly, by demonstrating the power of government to change people’s lives for the better.“It won’t happen with a speech or with an open hand or with a plea, because the divisions are so deep and corrosive. It almost has to happen unconsciously,” Packer concluded. “I think we’re actually be getting to go in that direction, very slowly, with a lot of dangerous obstacles ahead.” More

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      Burrito economics: Republican claims about price rises are so much hot air | Robert Reich

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      House Republicans are blaming Democrats for the rise in Chipotle burrito prices.You heard me right. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) issued a statement on Wednesday claiming that Chipotle’s recent decision to raise prices on their burritos and other menu products by about 4% was caused by Democrats.“Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill,” said an NRCC spokesman, Mike Berg.It seems Republicans have finally found an issue to run on in the 2022 midterm elections. Apparently Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head weren’t gaining enough traction.The GOP’s tortured logic is that the unemployment benefits in the American Rescue Plan have caused workers to stay home rather than seek employment, resulting in labor shortages that have forced employers like Chipotle to increase wages, which has required them to raise their prices.Hence, Chipotle’s more expensive burrito.This isn’t just loony economics. It’s dangerously loony economics because it might be believed, leading to all sorts of stupid public policies.Start with the notion that $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits is keeping Americans from working.Since fewer than 30% of jobless workers qualify for state unemployment benefits, the claim is that legions of workers have chosen to become couch potatoes and collect $15,000 a year rather than get a job.Republicans have found an issue to run on. Apparently Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head weren’t gaining enough tractionI challenge one Republican lawmaker to live on $15,000 a year.In fact, evidence suggests that workers who are holding back from re-entering the job market don’t have childcare or are still concerned about their health during the pandemic.Besides, if employers want additional workers, they can do what they necessarily do for anything they want more of but can’t obtain at its current price – pay more.It’s called capitalism. Republicans should bone up on it.When Chipotle wanted to attract more workers, it raised its average wage to $15 an hour. That comes to around $30,000 a year per worker – still too little to live on but double the federal unemployment benefit.Oh, and there’s no reason to suppose this wage hike forced Chipotle to raise the prices of its burrito. The company had other options.Chipotle’s executives are among the best paid in America. Its chief executive, Brian Niccol, raked in $38m last year – which happens to be 2,898 times more than the typical Chipotle employee. All Chipotle’s top executives got whopping pay increases.So it would have been possible for Chipotle to avoid raising its burrito prices by – dare I say? – paying its executives less. But Chipotle decided otherwise.I’m not going to second-guess Chipotle’s business decision – nor should the NRCC.By the way, I keep hearing Republican lawmakers say the GOP is the “party of the working class”. If that’s so, it ought to celebrate when hourly workers get a raise instead of howling about it.Everyone ought to celebrate when those at the bottom get higher wages.The typical American worker hasn’t had a real raise in four decades. Income inequality is out of control. Wealth inequality is into the stratosphere (where Jeff Bezos is heading, apparently).If wages at the bottom rise because employers need to pay more to get the workers they need, that’s not a problem. It’s a victory.Instead of complaining about a so-called “labor shortage”, Republicans ought to be complaining about the shortage of jobs paying a living wage.Don’t hold your breath, or your burrito. More

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      Joe Biden’s reforming agenda at risk of dying a slow death in Congress

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      Joe Biden’s first hundred days surpassed progressive expectations with the scope of their ambition. His second hundred days are being mugged by reality: the one that says Washington DC is a place where dreams go to die.A once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure and the climate crisis has hit a wall. Reforms on gun safety, immigration and police brutality are in limbo. Legislation to expand voting rights and reduce the influence of money in politics appears doomed.The stalled agenda reflects Republican obstruction, Democratic disunity and the inherent messiness of “sausage-making” on Capitol Hill. But it also shines a light on taken-for-granted structures of American government and democracy that many argue are no longer fit for purpose because they favor gridlock and militate against sweeping change.“The American system of government is a beta form of democracy,” said Ezra Levin, a former congressional staffer who is co-executive director of the grassroots movement Indivisible. “We have a presidential system that hasn’t really substantially been updated since the 19th century.“Nobody designing a democracy today would create as many veto points as we have and nobody, including the original founders, would have developed a system like the Senate filibuster where theoretically senators representing 11% of the population can veto legislation that is wildly popular.”Much has been written about Biden’s prospects of emulating Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) and Lyndon B Johnson (LBJ) with a transformational presidency and eclipse Barack Obama by throwing caution to the winds. The excitement only grew with the passage of a $1.9tn coronavirus relief package in March.But that, it transpires, was the exception not the rule. The Democrats’ progressive wing is becoming increasingly frustrated as other promises go unrealised, fearing an all-too-familiar pattern of hopes dashed and dreams deferred that will only feed anti-Washington resentment.Ro Khanna, a congressman from California who was a co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, told the Associated Press: “There’s a lot of anxiety. It’s a question really for President Biden: what kind of president does he want to be?”Joe Biden won a fairly significant personal victory but the 2020 elections were hardly a victory for the Democratic party as a wholeThe first problem is that Biden does not have a Roosevelt-like majority in Congress. Democrats have only a wafer-thin advantage in the House of Representatives. The Senate is evenly divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, giving Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaker vote. It is hardly a recipe for revolution.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “There was always the brute fact that the Democrats had the slimmest margin in the House of Representatives they’ve enjoyed since the 1940s and you can’t get any closer in the Senate than a tie broken by the vice-president.“So the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden won a fairly significant personal victory but the 2020 elections were hardly a victory for the Democratic party as a whole. Anything but. So I really had to shake my head and chuckle when I read all of those early comparisons to FDR and LBJ.”The balance of power leaves Biden’s entire legislative agenda subject to the whims of any individual senator. He got a taste of this last weekend when Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, declared his opposition to the For the People Act, a voting rights bill that many activists regard as crucial to protecting democracy and a direct response to restrictive new voting laws being passed in Republican-led states.In a newspaper column, Manchin described the bill as the “wrong piece of legislation to bring our country together” and a barrier to Senate bipartisanship. This was despite polls showing clear support for it in his home state. His stand provoked anger among progressives and prompted civil rights leaders to meet Manchin on Tuesday.Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, a member of the Just Democracy coalition, said: “There is nothing partisan about this. What’s partisan is what’s happened since 2020 where you have Republican state legislatures proposing bills and enacting laws that will restrict Black and brown people all over this country from being able to participate in our democracy.“That’s sad to me. especially because some of the Black men that we talk to voted for the first time in 2020 in ways that are no longer legal in some of the states in this country, simply because Republicans saw that if they allow people to vote by mail or use drop boxes, which are some of the most secure ways to vote, they lose elections.”Manchin has also joined the Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona in publicly refusing to end the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, meaning that at least 10 Republicans would need to cross party lines to help Democrats achieve their priorities. Some senators propose reducing the voting threshold to 51.Activists increasingly regard blowing up the filibuster as essential and fundamental. Robinson added: “The fact that Joe Biden has been more progressive than I thought is a testament to him understanding the moment and I feel like some other elected officials aren’t reading the tea leaves. Roosevelt had a majority that Joe Biden can only dream for and we don’t have those majorities right now.What our lawmaking process does is make it all but impossible to enact sweeping, comprehensive change“So what it all leads back to is a need to eliminate the filibuster. We need to continue to make it clear to Senator Manchin he has a choice to do something or do nothing, and then someone has to press upon him that history will remember those choices.”America’s founding fathers constructed a government of checks and balances that guarded against rash action: a chief executive, a bicameral Congress with veto power, an independent judiciary. Washington mythology held that they invented the filibuster to guard against the tyranny of the majority but this has repeatedly been debunked by scholars who say it was created by mistake and first used in 1837.William Howell, a political scientist at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, said: “The framers didn’t create the filibuster. It’s excessive even by their standards.“What our lawmaking process does generally, and what the filibuster does in particular, is make it all but impossible to enact sweeping, comprehensive change. It leaves in its wake pervasive gridlock and sporadic opportunity to make incremental changes and that’s about it.”Every major piece of legislation successfully enacted over the past decade has circumvented the filibuster through a process called budget reconciliation, Howell noted. This tool may allow Democrats to go it alone with the American Jobs Plan, which would invest heavily in bridges, railways and roads, “soft” infrastructure such as caregiving and clean energy.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator for Rhode Island, tweeted that he is “nervous” about Congress doing too little to address the climate crisis. “We must get Senate Dems unified on climate on a real reconciliation bill, lest we get sucked into ‘bipartisanship’ mud where we fail on climate,” he wrote.The filibuster is hardly the only design fault. It comes on top of a Senate that is deeply unrepresentative because each state gets two seats, no matter the size of its population. That means small, predominantly white states carry as much heft as huge, racially diverse states such as California. An effort to make the District of Columbia the 51st state would begin to redress the balance but Manchin has again vowed opposition.Levin, the Indivisible organiser, said: “The 50 Democratic senators represent 41 million more Americans than the 50 Republican senators. I think anybody objectively looking at how legislation is passed in this country has to come away with the conclusion that we are not set up to tackle 21st-century problems with a 19th-century democracy.”I don’t think it’s fair to say that an op-ed from a single senator dictates the future of that legislationDespite these headwinds, Levin is not giving up on Biden’s progressive project, pointing out that Democratic presidents have been here before. In 1964, under Johnson, the Civil Rights Act passed the Senate after overcoming a 54-day filibuster, and the following year the Voting Rights Act took more than a month of full Senate debate to escape the threat.“Neither of those things were passed with the snap of a finger,” he said. “It is fair to say the For the People Act is a tough fight. I don’t think it’s fair to say that an op-ed from a single senator dictates the future of that legislation. It’s always easy to be cynical about these things but there’s reason to hope. There are very real pathways forward to get this done.”Groups supporting the legislation intend to press ahead with a $30m campaign pressing Democratic senators to rewrite filibuster rules and pass the bill. Manchin has talked about supporting another voting bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but activists insist that both pieces of legislation are needed.LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “What we are seeing is that, as America becomes younger and more diverse, the reality is we currently do not have a political infrastructure that can support the kind of democracy that is laid out in the constitution where people have free and fair access to the ballot.“We need the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act as a step closer to strengthening our democracy and protecting those elements that have literally been fought and won through protest, through giving of lives.” More

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      Joe Manchin opposes For the People Act in blow to Democrats’ voting rights push

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      In a huge blow to Democrats’ hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party’s flagship bill – because of Republican opposition to it.The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim CrowManchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.” More

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      ‘Real compromise’ possible on Biden infrastructure plan, key Republican says

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      Negotiations with Joe Biden over a potentially massive infrastructure investment package are inching forward even though disagreements remain over the size and scope of such legislation, Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito said on Sunday.“I think we can get to real compromise, absolutely, because we’re both still in the game,” Capito told Fox News Sunday.Capito leads a group of six Republicans in regular contact with Biden and White House aides over a bill the administration wants to move through Congress promptly.The Republicans have proposed $928bn to improve roads, bridges and other traditional infrastructure projects. Much of the funding would come from money already enacted into law for other purposes.The administration’s latest offer in negotiations is for $1.7tn and would include spending on projects that go beyond traditional infrastructure, such as homecare for the elderly.The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, told ABC’s This Week: “There’s movement in the right direction, but a lot of concern … We need to make investments over and above what would have happened anyway.” He also highlighted the need for using the infrastructure bill to address climate change and indicated opposition to shifting Covid-19 relief money to infrastructure accounts.Capito said that following a White House meeting which Republicans viewed as productive, Biden aides stepped away from some ideas Republicans pushed.“We have had some back and forth with the staff that sort of pulled back a little bit but I think we’re smoothing out those edges,” said the West Virginia senator, whose state stands to benefit significantly from infrastructure investment.Republicans continued to balk at raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations to help finance the projects.“I’m not going to vote to overturn those,” Capito said when asked about rolling back some tax cuts enacted during the Trump administration.She also held the line against including new funding for projects that go beyond physical infrastructure, saying those could be considered in other measures.Talks are expected to continue this week even though Congress is on a break, with the Senate returning on 7 June. When lawmakers return to Washington, Biden will be under pressure from Democrats to sidestep Republicans if talks do not show signs of significant progress.Buttigieg told CNN’s State of the Union there needed to be a clear direction on the infrastructure bill. “The president keeps saying ‘Inaction is not an option’ and time is not unlimited here,” he said.The New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand told CNN: “I think waiting any longer for Republicans to do the right thing is a misstep … I would go forward.”The Senate could use the “reconciliation” process that requires only a simple majority to advance legislation, instead of the usual 60-vote threshold. The Senate is split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris having the power to break deadlocks.It is not clear if all Democrats would go along with such a process. More

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      Joe Biden stakes out position against discriminatory abortion rule

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      For the first time in nearly 30 years, a US president has released a budget that doesn’t ban federal funding for abortion.On Friday Joe Biden released his full budget proposal for fiscal year 2022, and in keeping with his campaign promise on abortion access, Biden did not include the Hyde amendment, an annual budget rider that bans federal Medicaid money from being used for almost all abortions. (There are exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or that would threaten the pregnant person’s life.)Hyde dramatically limits abortion coverage for millions of people with low incomes enrolled in the federal health insurance program, creating a two-tiered system of access. Advocates and lawmakers have called Hyde discriminatory, harmful and racist. But for years, Democratic and Republican administrations upheld the ban because of voter support and anti-abortion stigma.“We are thrilled that President Biden kept his campaign promise and submitted a budget without the Hyde amendment,” said Destiny Lopez, the co-president of All* Above All, a reproductive justice organization that has led the effort to repeal abortion coverage bans. “The Hyde amendment has, for more than 40 years, denied insurance coverage of abortion for people working to make ends meet and today will mark the first time in literal decades that our president has submitted a budget without the Hyde amendment.”Reproductive rights and justice advocates have long noted that a right to abortion without access is a right in name only, and restrictions like Hyde can place often insurmountable barriers to access abortion, while perpetuating racial and economic inequality – two issues Biden campaigned on. Black, Latino and LGBTQ people are disproportionately likely to have low incomes and get insurance through Medicaid, thereby facing the coverage ban.Abortion at 10 weeks of pregnancy costs an average of $550, and costs increase as the pregnancy progresses. People face other costs including taking unpaid time off work, childcare as most people seeking abortions are already parents, and travel costs. People with low incomes may need time to gather funds because their insurance doesn’t cover abortion and they can get caught in a cruel cycle as the procedure just gets more expensive, or even approach the gestational limit in their state.Taken together, Hyde functions as a de facto abortion ban for many. A 2009 literature review estimated that one in four women with restricted Medicaid would have an abortion if their insurance covered it but instead are forced to carry the pregnancy to term. A 2019 study in Louisiana came to a similar conclusion. Women denied a wanted abortion are more likely to experience poverty both six months and four years later than are those who receive an abortion, per a 2018 study.A 2019 poll commissioned by All* Above All found that six in 10 registered voters believe Medicaid should cover abortion services just like it covers other pregnancy-related care. And Lopez said ending Hyde fits squarely within Biden’s stated priorities of racial equity and economic security. “The president and the administration understand that the same folks who are bearing the brunt of this pandemic, and the brunt of this national reckoning on racial justice, are the ones who have been harmed by Hyde,” she said.Friday’s budget is historic, said Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, a membership organization for mutual aid groups that help people pay for abortion expenses and coordinate travel. “For years, Black, Indigenous and people of color have organized to highlight abortion injustices that have disproportionately weighed on their shoulders, and today they have finally been heard,” Hernandez.While 16 states use their own funds to cover abortion for Medicaid enrollees, in 2019, 7.7 million reproductive-age women with Medicaid lived in the 34 states and Washington DC that ban abortion coverage. Of the women subject to the bans, 51% are women of color. The move will have less effect in the 12 states that still have not expanded Medicaid because without higher income thresholds, it’s harder for low-income adults without children to qualify for the program.Biden’s budget also removes a ban on abortion coverage for low-income residents of Washington DC. It was not clear at press time if the budget included other restrictions similar to Hyde that limit coverage for people with disabilities insured through Medicare, as well as for federal employees, military personnel, Native Americans using the Indian Health Service (IHS), Peace Corps volunteers, people incarcerated in federal prisons, and. In fiscal year 2015, federal funds covered just 160 abortions.Hyde has been passed every year since 1976 and not since 1993 has a president released a budget without Hyde, though that effort from President Bill Clinton failed in the House. Repealing Hyde was in the Democratic party platform for the first time in 2016 and in the 2020 cycle, Biden was the last Democratic presidential candidate to support its repeal. Following criticism in June 2019, Biden reversed his long-held support and said, “I can’t justify leaving millions of women without access to the care they need and the ability to … exercise their constitutionally protected right.”Proponents of repealing Hyde were worried that Biden might not follow through with his campaign promise, especially since he has yet to even say the word “abortion”. Advocates say it is an important show of support at a critical time: Last week, the supreme court agreed to hear a case regarding a Mississippi 15-week ban that directly challenges Roe v Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion.Biden’s move may be largely symbolic, though an important act to advocates. The president’s budget proposal is non-binding, and it’s up to Congress to write and pass the final version that gets sent to his desk. The House appropriations committee chair, Rosa DeLauro, has vowed not to include Hyde in future House spending bills, a move that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, supports. If the budget passes the House, it will face a 50-50 Senate, with several centrist Democratic senators who support Hyde. Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Tim Kaine of Virginia all voted to include Hyde in the Covid-19 relief bill passed in March, but the effort ultimately failed.“As with many progressive issues, the Senate is more challenging,” Lopez said, adding: “We will get there. It’s important to put down these markers of support, for the leader of our party to put down a marker that he supports abortion justice, that he supports lifting of abortion coverage bans.”Separately, the House has introduced legislation known as the Each Act that would permanently repeal the Hyde amendment, removing it from the annual budget process. Vice-President Kamala Harris co-sponsored the bill when it was first introduced in 2019. More

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      Workers matter and government works: eight lessons from the Covid pandemic

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      Maybe it’s wishful thinking to declare the pandemic over in the US, and presumptuous to conclude what lessons we’ve learned. So consider this a first draft.1. Workers are always essentialWe couldn’t have survived without millions of warehouse, delivery, grocery and hospital workers literally risking their lives. Yet most of these workers are paid squat. Amazon touts its $15 minimum wage but it totals only about $30,000 a year. Most essential workers don’t have health insurance or paid leave. Many of their employers (including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to take but two examples) didn’t give them the personal protective equipment they needed.Lesson: Essential workers deserve far better.2. Healthcare is a basic rightYou know how you got your vaccine without paying a dime? That’s how all healthcare could be. Yet too many Americans who contracted Covid-19 got walloped with humongous hospital bills. By mid-2020, about 3.3 million people had lost employer-sponsored coverage and the number of uninsured had increased by 1.9 million. Research by the Urban Institute found that people with chronic disease, Black Americans and low-income children were most likely to have delayed or foregone care during the pandemic.Lesson: America must insure everyone.3. Conspiracy theories can be deadlyLast June, about one in four Americans believed the pandemic was “definitely” or “probably” created intentionally, according to the Pew Research Center. Other conspiracy theories have caused some people to avoid wearing masks or getting vaccinated, resulting in unnecessary illness or death.Lesson: An informed public is essential. Some of the responsibility falls on all of us. Some of it on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that allowed misinformation to flourish.4. The stock market isn’t the economyThe stock market rose throughout the pandemic, lifting the wealth of the richest 1% who own half of all stock owned by Americans. Meanwhile, from March 2020 to February 2021 80 million in the US lost their jobs. Between June and November 2020, nearly 8 million fell into poverty. Black and Latino adults were more than twice as likely as white adults to report not having enough to eat: 16% each for Black and Latino adults, compared to 6% of white adults.Lesson: Stop using the stock market as a measure of economic wellbeing. Look instead at the percentage of Americans who are working, and their median pay.5. Wages are too low to get by onMost Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So once the pandemic hit, many didn’t have any savings to fall back on. Conservative lawmakers complain that the extra $300 a week unemployment benefit Congress enacted in March discourages people from working. What’s really discouraging them is lack of childcare and lousy wages.Lesson: Raise the minimum wage, strengthen labor unions and push companies to share profits with their workers.6. Remote work is now baked into the economyThe percentage of workers punching in from home hit a high of 70% in April 2020. A majority still work remotely. Some 40% want to continue working from home.Two lessons: Companies will have to adjust. And much commercial real estate will remain vacant. Why not convert it into affordable housing?7. Billionaires aren’t the answerThe combined wealth of America’s 657 billionaires grew by $1.3tn – or 44.6% – during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, with $183.9bn, became the richest man in the world. Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, added $11.8bn to his $94.3bn fortune. Sergey Brin, Google’s other co-founder, added $11.4bn. Yet billionaires’ taxes are lower than ever. Wealthy Americans today pay one-sixth the rate of taxes their counterparts paid in 1953.Lesson: To afford everything the nation needs, raise taxes at the top.8. Government can be the solutionRonald Reagan’s famous quip – “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” – can now officially be retired. Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” succeeded in readying vaccines faster than most experts thought possible. Biden got them into more arms more quickly than any vaccination program in history.Furthermore, the $900bn in aid Congress passed in late December prevented millions from losing unemployment benefits and helped sustain the recovery when it was faltering. The $1.9tn Democrats pushed through in March will help the US achieve something it failed to achieve after the 2008-09 recession: a robust recovery.Lesson: The federal government did not just help beat the pandemic. It also did more to keep the nation afloat than in any previous recession. It must be prepared to do so again. More