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      NRA’s grassroots clout still formidable with Republicans despite legal setbacks

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      The once all-powerful National Rifle Association is mired in legal and financial woes but its 5 million members still exert hefty grassroots influence with most Republicans as a fresh gun control debate in Congress heats up, say gun experts and NRA veterans.The NRA’s grassroots clout – via the Internet, letters, phone and other tools – coupled with the influence wielded by millions of other gun owners, keep many Republican allies fighting almost reflexively against gun curbs, notwithstanding recent NRA problems including electoral setbacks, staff cuts, drops in member dues revenue and legal threats, according to analysts.Which means that even after two mass shootings in March in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado spurred the House to pass bills to ban assault weapons and require mandatory background checks on gun purchases, the outlook in the evenly divided Senate to pass these bills seems very slim – unless filibuster rules are changed, say analysts.Still, NRA and Republican sources say if a weaker background check bill than the House passed one is introduced it may have enough Republican support in the Senate to pass as a compromise measure.To be sure, the NRA’s political strength by some key measures is markedly less than in recent years.After giving Donald Trump a huge boost in 2016 with over $30m in ad spending to help him win the White House, the NRA had a much smaller presence in 2020 to Trump’s and the Republican party’s dismay. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA’s spending in 2020 fell to $29.4m from $54.4m in 2016.What’s more in 2018, gun control advocates were credited with helping the Democrats take back control of the House in 2018 as their spending for the first time edged the NRA’s spending. And in 2019, the NRA’s revenue from its members dues declined from 2018 when it was $170m to $113m.Nonetheless, the NRA’s grassroots muscle remains formidable and is working to block the House passed measures.“The NRA is in a weakened condition, and their very future is at stake,” said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at SUNY Cortland and author of several books on guns, in an interview. “But the gun rights movement is deeply embedded in the GOP. Even though the NRA as an organization is seriously weakened, grassroots supporters are still out there, and are willing to act on the issue.”“For the GOP, support for gun rights from its gun base is pretty much on autopilot,” Spitzer added.Moreover, Spitzer noted that the Senate prospects for the two bills that passed the House seem dim. “The divisions between the two parties are sharper than in the past. Democrats are clearly behind strong gun laws, and Republicans are mostly opposed.”“The filibuster is the real stumbling block,” he added. “ We’ve seen this movie before.”Similarly, a former senior NRA official touted the group’s grassroots strength.“The grassroots of gun owners are still a political force with or without the NRA. Even though the NRA has had significant problems and continues too, they will raise more money” to fend off new gun curbs, if past experience holds.But the ex-official cautioned that “if they changed the filibuster rule, all bets are off”.Further, the NRA veteran noted that he thought a weaker background checks bill like one sponsored in previous sessions by Senators Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Pat Toomey, a Republican, had a decent chance of getting enough Republican votes to pass the Senate if Democrats accepted it as a fallback option.Republican operative and lobbyist Charlie Black agreed that the less onerous bill like that previously backed by Manchin and Toomey has a good shot of getting through the Senate if Democratic leaders embraced it.But Black noted that the odds of the House’s mandatory checks bill passing the Senate are slim. “You’re not going to get the House bill through the Senate,” Black said in an interview.President Joe Biden has called on the Senate to pass the House measures which he called “common sense”, but at his first press conference last week gave mixed signals about how hard he will push for them.Just 10 days before the Boulder shooter killed 10 people, the NRA weighed in on Twitter and applauded a Colorado court ruling blocking a Boulder assault weapons ban enacted in 2018 which it had sought to overturn.However, the NRA and its leadership remain mired in legal and political battles to defeat the New York attorney general’s lawsuit that accused the nonprofit NRA, which has been chartered in the state for 150 years, of mismanagement and corruption.The lawsuit that attorney general Letitia James filed charges last summer that the NRA’s veteran chief executive Wayne LaPierre and a few other top NRA leaders looted the group costing it about $64m in just the three prior years.LaPierre was accused of self dealing by letting the NRA pay for millions of dollars of junkets with his wife and other family members to Europe, the Bahamas and other scenic spots.LaPierre and NRA lawyer William Brewer III have denounced the lawsuit as fueled by “political animus”, noting that James is a Democrat. And Brewer has said the NRA has taken steps to correct its financial problems including replacing some senior staffers. The NRA’s long-time top lobbyist Chris Cox, who had become a critic of LaPierre, was forced out in 2019.But the NRA’s 76 member board was mostly in the dark this January, when NRA leaders announced it was filing for bankruptcy in Texas where it hoped to incorporate, steps that two NRA veterans say were aimed at thwarting James’s probe.James has filed a motion seeking to halt the NRA’s bankruptcy move, and a bankruptcy judge in Texas is slated to hold a hearing on 5 April on the matter.On Sunday the NRA held an emergency board meeting in Dallas specifically to get the board to “retroactively” ratify the bankruptcy action before the 5 April hearing , say two NRA sources.Despite all the NRA’s legal and political maneuvering, Black sounds bullish that the House bills won’t get through the Senate.“The NRA’s grassroots is still active and powerful and influential with members of Congress,” he said. More

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      Just how severe will America's minority rule become? | David Sirota

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      As everyone from President Joe Biden to the conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin to liberal groups now push to reform the Senate’s rules, the defense of the filibuster goes something like this: by design, our nation is a republic, not a direct democracy, and therefore we must create institutional obstacles to empower a minority of Americans to prevent the whims of the majority from being too hastily enshrined in legislation. By this logic, we must keep the Senate’s cloture rule, which requires 60 of the Senate’s 100 members to end a filibuster and move a bill to a vote.Those who make this case seem to love sounding like erudite constitutional scholars steeped in the grandeur of American history, and they purport to be pluralists worrying about minority rights.“Letting the majority do everything it wants to is not what the founders had in mind,” said the Senate Republican whip, John Thune, in a floor speech defending the filibuster this week. “The founders recognized that it wasn’t just kings who could be tyrants. They knew majorities could be tyrants, too, and that a majority if unchecked could trample the rights of the minority … so the founders created the Senate as a check on the House of Representatives.”But an inconvenient fact undermines Thune’s argument and should set pluralists at ease: even if the filibuster were eliminated and bills could advance on a simple majority vote, the Senate would still be giving a minority of the American population enough Senate representation to block legislation supported by the majority of the country.In the debate over the filibuster, then, the question is not whether you believe the majority should rule. Instead, the question is this: how small a minority should be given legislative veto power over the rest of the country?Back in 2010, the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was not wrong when he said the founders were “quoted as saying at the constitutional convention the Senate was going to be like the saucer under the teacup, and the tea was going to slosh out and cool off”.To that end, the founders created a Senate giving large and small states equal representation. The idea was for the upper chamber to act as a stately bulwark against the more uncouth ideas that could bubble up from the rabble and its representatives in the lower chamber. In the words of James Madison, the Senate’s undemocratic structure was designed as a “necessary fence” against “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the people.In the modern era, the structure of the Senate has often turned the upper chamber into a place that does not merely respect minority rights – it has actually allowed the minority to rule, regardless of the status of the filibuster. As CNN’s Ronald Brownstein recounted last year, “While the [Republican party] has controlled the Senate for about 22 of the past 40 years, Republican senators have represented a majority of the nation’s population for only a single session over that period: from 1997 to 1998.”Maybe you like this undemocratic dynamic, because you believe it represents the founders’ ideals. Maybe you hate this dynamic, because you believe it makes a mockery of democracy. Whichever side you are on, here’s the point that is germane to the renewed debate over Senate rules: even if the filibuster is eliminated, a minority of the American population will still retain disproportionate, outsized power in Congress’s upper chamber, just as the founders desired.That is because under simple-majority voting rules, the majority of the country’s population does not necessarily rule the Senate. Even without the filibuster, the Senate is still a place where the 265,000 South Dakotans who elected Thune get as much representation as the 2.2 million Georgia voters who elected Raphael Warnock. Consequently, a filibuster-free Democratic Senate would still allow a minority of the population’s senators to rule, if they so choose – because the Senate still provides far less than half the country with the 51 votes necessary to stop any legislation in its tracks.To understand how, let’s do some math.Right now, the 50 Senate Democrats represent roughly 61% of the country’s population, according to census data. The 50 Senate Republicans represent just 49% of the population. All of the Republicans plus Manchin (the Democrat most likely to oppose progressive legislation) represent less than half the country’s population. And yet in a filibuster-free Senate, they could still use a simple-majority vote to stop anything pushed by 49 Senate Democrats who represent 61% of the country. (Note: the percentages don’t add up to 100 because six states have one Democratic and one Republican senator.)If you happen to be one of those constitutional originalists worried about preserving the power of small states, don’t fret. The power imbalance becomes more pronounced when you take party out of the equation and just look at states with the least population. A whopping 52 senators from the least populated states currently represent just 17% of America’s total population – but they would still be able to stop all legislation in a filibuster-free Senate under simple-majority rules.A different way to consider the situation is to think of each American being represented by two Senate votes. Right now, 49 Democrats represent 56% of all those votes. The Republican-Manchin caucus represents just 43% of all of those Senate votes. But again, even without the filibuster, conservatives would have 51 Senate votes to stop anything.These numbers actually understate the situation. That’s because while senators technically represent their entire states, they only need half the voter turnout in their states to actually get into the Senate.Filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% of the population to gridlock the governmentThe point here is simple: no matter what is done with the filibuster, the much-worshiped “cooling saucer” is preserved, and every armchair constitutional scholar with a high self-regard will still get to smugly tell others we are a republic, not a democracy.But these figures underscore not just that the filibuster can be safely discarded without trampling minority rights. They also spotlight how insane the filibuster actually is.Using the same aforementioned math, the filibuster rules allowing 41 senators to halt legislation effectively empower a group of Republican senators representing just 22% percent of the population to gridlock the government. Again, considering that it only takes 50% of the vote to get elected, the filibuster means that about 11% of the voting-age population has successfully elected Republican senators who can theoretically block anything that polls show the overwhelming majority of the country might want.Part of what makes the filibuster discourse so confusing is the differing definitions of “minority”.When the founders created the Senate, they aimed to guarantee that the minority of the population still had rights – they didn’t care about the rights of political parties or factions (which many of them hated).By contrast, when Republicans like Thune depict the filibuster as a noble bulwark protecting “minority rights”, he is not talking about protecting a minority of the population. He is talking about fortifying the power of the chamber’s minority political factions, regardless of how small a segment of the population those factions actually represent.That’s a huge difference – and it helps explain the filibuster’s practical application.Remember, the filibuster is not known as the instrument preventing the majority of the population from trampling the rights of racial or ethnic minorities. Quite the opposite: it has in practice empowered an ideologically conservative political faction to both deprive certain minority groups of their rights and block what the majority of the population wants.When it comes to racial equality, Martin Luther King III noted in an op-ed this week: “The filibuster has historically been used as a tool to try to keep segregationist policies in place. In the 1920s, it was employed to stop anti-lynching legislation from moving forward. In the 1950s, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina famously held the longest filibuster on record to delay, unsuccessfully, civil rights measures. And in a failed effort to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964, southern segregationists filibustered the bill for 60 working days.”Similarly, think about the debate over firearm policy in the wake of yet more mass shootings. The Nation’s Ari Berman notes that after the Sandy Hook massacre, “bipartisan legislation requiring background checks for gun sales was supported by 86% of Americans and 54 senators but blocked by 46 senators representing just 38% of the country.”In both cases, we see that Madison’s desire to restrict democracy in order to limit “the impulse of sudden and violent passions” of the public wrongly presumes that the only way those impulses are expressed is through the passage of new legislation. In practice, blocking legislation has been an equally pernicious expression of such volatile impulses and passions by a motivated but tiny segment of the population. The filibuster allows those impulses and passions to not just influence legislation but to wholly dominate public policy through that minority’s political factions.In light of this history and the math of the Senate, proposals to merely reform the rules with half measures like a “talking filibuster” seem at best unnecessarily cautious, especially since the filibuster is now so routinely invoked to halt legislation.Fully eliminating the filibuster would still allow a minority of the population to wield disproportionate power, because the chamber’s structure has baked-in rights for the minority of the population even in straight up-or-down vote situations.Put another way: even without the filibuster, there can be a Senate majority party whose senators represent less than half the country. There can also be a transpartisan coalition of 51 senators who represent less than half the country and who can stop essentially anything.The filibuster just makes this undemocratic system more undemocratic, in ways that cannot be justified. In the name of preventing a tyranny of the majority, it creates what I have called a tyranny of the tiny minority. It takes a House of Lords-style institution that has been rationalized by glib “we’re a republic, not a democracy” logic and transforms it into a cartoonishly undemocratic weapon of reactionary power.The rationale for that transformation has amounted to vapid paeans to the founders. Everybody seems to have forgotten that Alexander Hamilton admitted: “To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.”Even without the filibuster, the lesser number of the country will have more than enough Senate representation to express many of its political desires. Keeping the filibuster simply lets that lesser number completely rule everything.
      David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor-at-large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Daily Poster. He served as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign speechwriter More

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      The McConnell filibuster is not the same as the Jim Crow filibuster – it's much worse | David Litt

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      President Obama chooses his words carefully. So last July, when he punctuated his eulogy to the civil rights legend John Lewis by calling the Senate filibuster “another relic of Jim Crow”, he wasn’t messing around.Many others (myself included) had written about the historical link between the Senate rule allowing a minority of lawmakers to kill a bill and the preservation of white supremacy. But Obama’s speech sparked a wholesale rebranding. Today, among progressive politicians and activists alike, “End the filibuster” is out. “End the Jim Crow filibuster” is in.Yet those who so bluntly tie Senate obstruction to southern segregation are missing an important piece of historical context. It’s not fair to suggest that the filibuster championed by defenders of Jim Crow decades ago is identical to the filibuster championed by Mitch McConnell today. Because today’s filibuster – McConnell’s filibuster – is actually much worse.To understand how the filibuster became essential, first to southern Democrats and then later to nearly all Republicans, we have to start a little more than 100 years ago. Until 1917, the filibuster allowed any group of legislators, no matter how small, to pass speaking privileges among themselves, holding the Senate floor and indefinitely delaying any bill. But when Senate obstruction threatened to derail America’s military buildup ahead of the first world war, lawmakers changed the rules, allowing a supermajority of senators to break a filibuster and force a vote.Overnight, the Senate’s balance of power shifted. Tiny handfuls of legislators were now powerless. But blocs of legislators – a few dozen senators willing to grind the body to a halt – could still derail nearly any piece of legislation by denying it an up-or-down vote. One cause in particular lacked majority support, yet consistently rallied a sizeable and passionate coalition: opposition to civil rights.Thus, and largely by accident, 1917 was the start of what can rightfully be called the Jim Crow filibuster. For decades, not a single civil rights bill survived southern Democratic obstruction. Occasionally, Senate leaders would introduce such a bill, fail to overcome segregationist obstruction and then withdraw it. More often, though, senators wouldn’t seriously consider civil rights at all. Rather than encourage “the world’s greatest deliberative body” to debate the issue, the filibuster functioned as a kind of gag rule. Since ending segregation was dead on arrival, why even bring it up?The Jim Crow filibuster had one obvious effect on the country – protecting white supremacy – but it also had two more subtle effects on the Senate itself. First, by forcing senators to ignore the country’s single most contentious issue, the gag rule created a cherished, albeit disingenuous, sense of decorum. With America’s fiercest battleground off limits, senators felt free to focus on common ground instead. Second, because the majority of senators didn’t want to legitimize Jim Crow’s most effective delaying tactic, they almost never used it. Precisely because civil rights bills were always filibustered, other bills were almost always not.For much of the 20th century, then, the filibuster forced a corrupt bargain. In exchange for preserving one-party segregationist rule in the south, Americans could enjoy a functional democracy everywhere else. In the Senate, civil rights bills were doomed – but most bills could pass with a simple majority.But as attitudes and politics changed, the detente became untenable. In 1964 and 1965, liberals overcame fierce obstruction to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act – and in the process broke the filibuster free from its Jim Crow associations. With obstruction no longer linked to segregation, senators became more comfortable obstructing all sorts of legislation. The number of filibusters shot up.Among those present at the dawn of the filibuster’s new era was a young Senate intern named Mitch McConnell – and more than 40 years later, as Senate minority leader, McConnell would usher in a filibuster era all his own. Obstruction, from both parties, was on the rise before Barack Obama took office in 2009. But McConnell’s scorched-earth strategy, filibustering nearly anything that could be filibustered, was so different in degree as to be different in kind. In a body that runs by precedent rather than formal bylaws, McConnell essentially rewrote the rulebook. Under the new filibuster – the McConnell filibuster – it takes 60 votes to get almost any piece of legislation through Congress.What is supposed to be the world’s most august lawmaking body has rendered itself able to pass major legislation either once a year or not at allWhich brings us to the essential difference between the obstructionists who defended white supremacy and the obstructionists of today. First, a similarity: just as was the case 75 years ago, the filibuster makes it impossible to pass meaningful civil rights laws. But unlike the Jim Crow filibuster, the McConnell filibuster makes it impossible to pass nearly all other meaningful laws as well.There are a few exceptions, such as the once-a-year reconciliation process which allowed Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and Biden’s 2021 Covid relief to pass via up-or-down vote. But these outliers only underscore the way in which the McConnell filibuster is an act of legislative self-immolation. What is supposed to be the world’s most august lawmaking body has rendered itself able to pass major legislation either once a year or not at all. The Jim Crow filibuster’s great shame was that it divided America into two separate and unequal nations – one a functional democracy, the other a racist apartheid regime. The McConnell filibuster’s great shame is that it does away with functional democracy nationwide.And while the Jim Crow filibuster was more morally reprehensible, McConnell’s is a far greater threat to our republic. The institutions essential to our democracy – from our courts to our voting systems to the peaceful transition of power – are under unprecedented assault. As long as the 60-vote threshold remains in place, the Senate provides no meaningful way to protect those institutions. Instead, senators will find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle: it takes a supermajority of senators to defend democracy, yet those attacks make a supermajority of pro-democracy senators ever harder to obtain.Which is why, while Americans have debated Senate rules for centuries, the stakes are higher than ever. The threat to our democracy is greater. And the solution ought to be bolder. Unlike the pro-democracy activists of the civil rights era, we don’t have time on our side. If we don’t end the McConnell filibuster now, we may never get another chance. More

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      Senate filibuster reform would produce 'nuclear winter', says Mitch McConnell

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      Mitch McConnell, who was accused of laying waste to bipartisan co-operation in the Senate when he blocked a supreme court pick by Barack Obama then changed the rules to hurry through three picks for Donald Trump, has said that if Democrats do away with the filibuster, they will “turn the Senate into a sort of nuclear winter”.The Republican minority leader, who himself invoked the “nuclear option” to change the rule for supreme court justices in 2017, was speaking to the Ruthless podcast in an episode released on Tuesday.Eyeing major legislation on voting rights, gun control, infrastructure and more, Democrats who control the White House and Congress are pressuring leaders to reform or abolish the Senate filibuster rule, by which a minority of just 41 out of 100 senators is able to block most legislation.Joe Biden saw his $1.9tn coronavirus relief package pass earlier this month by budget reconciliation, a narrowly applied process that sidesteps the filibuster rule and allows for passage by a simple majority. He is reportedly considering further major steps by that route, although key priorities such as voting rights could not advance through reconciliation.But Biden has indicated he may be open to some change to the filibuster.McConnell is not.“I think if they destroy the essence of the Senate, the legislative filibuster, they will find a Senate that will not function,” said the Kentucky Republican, who took his own nuclear option six years after then Democratic majority leader Harry Reid made such a move on lower-court appointments and executive branch nominees, to bypass Republican obstruction.“It takes unanimous consent to turn the lights on here,” McConnell said. “And I think they would leave an angry 50 senators not interested in being cooperative on even the simplest things.”In 2010, McConnell famously said his chief aim was to ensure Obama was a one-term president. Under Trump, he resisted White House calls to scrap the filibuster.Democrats in the 50-50 Senate, which is controlled by the vote of Vice-President Kamala Harris, might well retort to McConnell that Republicans have shown precious little interest in co-operation on anything for many years. The Covid relief bill did not attract a single Republican vote.On Tuesday, in the immediate aftermath of a shooting in a Colorado supermarket that killed 10 and a week after shootings at spas near Atlanta killed eight, the Senate will hold a hearing on “Constitutional and Common Sense Steps to Reduce Gun Violence”. The House has passed gun control measures but without filibuster reform, any such steps seem impossible in the Senate.Republicans – and some Democrats, including the conservative Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has indicated he is open to some sort of reform – insist the filibuster protects the rights of the minority.McConnell said filibuster reform “may not be the panacea that they anticipate it would be. It could turn the Senate into sort of a nuclear winter, nor the aftermath of the so-called nuclear option is not a sustainable place”. More

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      Senate confirms Boston mayor Marty Walsh as Biden's labor secretary

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      Marty Walsh has been confirmed as the next US labor secretary, bringing Joe Biden’s cabinet a step nearer to completion.
      The Senate voted 68-29 to confirm the Democrat, currently the mayor of Boston.
      Aside from Walsh, there are a few finishing touches left for Biden’s cabinet-level appointees. The Senate has yet to confirm Eric Lander as Biden’s top science adviser, and the White House still hasn’t named anyone to head his budget office, after Neera Tanden withdrew her nomination amid controversy. The White House is facing pressure from lawmakers on Capitol Hill to name Shalanda Young, the current nominee for deputy budget director, to the top role. Biden’s cabinet may be nearly complete but the work of building his administration is just beginning, as the president still has hundreds of key presidential appointments to make to fill out the federal government.
      Biden has about 1,250 federal positions that require Senate confirmation, ranging from the head of the obscure Railroad Retirement Board to more urgent department positions such as assistant and deputy secretaries. Of the 790 being tracked by the Partnership for Public Service, a non-partisan good-government group, 23 appointees have been confirmed by the Senate, 39 are being considered by the Senate, and 466 positions have no named nominee.

      Recent crimes against Asian Americans have sparked fresh debate over the nation’s gun laws, but Biden has yet to nominate anyone to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And the wave of migrants at the border is underscoring major challenges in enforcing immigration and asylum laws. Biden hasn’t nominated anyone to head the three key agencies in charge of much of their implementation: Customs and Border Protection; US Citizenship and Immigration Services; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
      Asked last week about those vacancies, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said they were “all important agencies” but offered no timeline for naming nominees.
      There are also key vacancies at the Department of Health and Human Services that will play a significant role in addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Biden has named Chiquita Brooks-LaSure to be the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but it is unclear whom he will choose to head the Food and Drug Administration, which plays an important role in approving vaccines and treatments for the pandemic.
      The pace of filling the positions has been hamstrung from the start because of what Biden’s team say was a lack of cooperation from Trump administration officials throughout the transition. Democrats privately acknowledge that Trump’s second impeachment trial also slowed down the process.
      Biden’s cabinet picks have included several historic firsts, including Deb Haaland, who was confirmed last week as the first Native American interior secretary, Lloyd Austin, the first African American to lead the Pentagon, and Pete Buttigieg, who became the first openly LGBTQ+ cabinet secretary when he was confirmed as transportation secretary. More

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      'Everything is on the table': Senate prepares for showdown over filibuster

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterThe US Senate is rapidly hurtling towards a high stakes showdown over the filibuster, a once arcane procedural maneuver that stands in the way of Democratic efforts to pass sweeping voting rights legislation, among other measures.A fight over the filibuster, which sets a 60-vote threshold to move legislation forward, seemed inevitable after Democrats narrowly took control of the senate in January. But urgency has escalated in recent weeks as Republicans in state legislatures across the country aggressively push new voting restrictions.The Senate last week introduced S1, a vast voting rights bill that already passed the US House. With the filibuster fully in place, it doesn’t stand a chance of passing.And the problem for Democrats is that there is no consensus in the Senate caucus about what, exactly, they should do about the filibuster. Some Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona the most prominent among them, are staunchly opposed to getting rid of the procedure entirely, saying it guarantees the minority has input into lawmaking. That means Senate Democrats will probably have to find some way of moderating the rule to allow them to pass legislation.“The filibuster as is, the status quo, is not sustainable and it will not be like this in 12 months,” said Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor who served as Barack Obama’s chief of staff. “The thing we don’t know is what changes are palpable to the senators.”There are a range of ideas floating around. One that seems to be gathering support is the so-called talking filibuster. It would require senators who want to filibuster a bill to actually speak on the floor for the entire time they want to hold up the legislation. Other ideas include exempting voting rights legislation from the filibuster or lowering the 60-vote threshold to move forward.“Everything is on the table,” Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, said on Wednesday.Joe Biden has long opposed getting rid of the filibuster. But this week he energized advocates by endorsing the talking filibuster.“It’s getting to the point where, you know, democracy is having a hard time functioning,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.Manchin said on Thursday that he welcomed Biden’s stance on the issue.“I think it’s encouraging that President Biden understands this process and wants it to work so at least he’s taking a stance. We’ll see what comes out,” he said. “It’s important to have the minority participation in the Senate because without it you’ve got nothing.”Privately, Schumer reiterated what he has said publicly to advocates this week, saying the caucus was united and the bill would be brought to the Senate floor, according to a person familiar with the meeting. He did not say what the Democratic strategy on the filibuster would be.Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat and another strong defender of the maneuver, said the talking filibuster was “worth exploring but there are a lot of consequences”.Democrats are raising the temperature on the need for reform. Last summer, Barack Obama called for getting rid of the filibuster, describing it as a “Jim Crow relic”. Elizabeth Warren this week said the filibuster “has deep roots in racism”. Senator Raphael Warnock, who became Georgia’s first Black senator in January, gave a stirring speech on the Senate floor this week on the need to protect voting rights.“This issue is bigger than the filibuster,” he said. “It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in the society.”Asked whether he could persuade some of his colleagues to come around on changing the filibuster, Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said he was optimistic.“The most fundamental aspect of the Republic is access to the ballot box. We have a responsibility to defend it. If we don’t do that we’re not honoring our oath – so let’s figure out how to do it. We’ll figure out that specific path through our conversation,” he said.But Republicans are digging in their heels, too. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, said this week he would use the filibuster to block voting rights and LGBTQ+ legislation, vowing he would “talk until I fell over” if needed.And Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, warned earlier this week of a “scorched earth” senate if Democrats got rid of the filibuster. He vowed he would use every procedural maneuver available to block the senate from moving forward.“Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like,” McConnell said. “Even the most basic aspects of our colleagues’ agenda, the most mundane tasks of the Biden presidency, would be harder, not easier, for Democrats in a post-‘nuclear’ Senate that’s 50-50.”McConnell sent that warning even though it was he who eliminated the filibuster for supreme court nominees in 2017 to get Neil Gorsuch confirmed.Despite those warnings, Stephen Spaulding, senior counsel for public policy and government affairs at Common Cause, a government watchdog group, said that Democrats needed to keep every option on the table.“Senate Democrats have the majority and they need to have the ability to govern,” he said. “This idea that it can be costless to filibuster, that you can essentially raise your hands behind closed doors and grind everything to a halt, is unacceptable.” More

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      Mayorkas blames Trump for border woes as Republicans attack Biden

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      The Biden administration is facing mounting pressure over a surge of unaccompanied migrant children crossing into the US, with the numbers seeking asylum at a 20-year high that is placing federal facilities and shelters under immense strain.The homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, took to the political talk show circuit on Sunday to press the administration’s case that it is doing all it can. He continued to refer to the problem as a “challenge” not a “crisis”, attempting to put blame squarely on the previous incumbent of the White House, Donald Trump.“It is taking time and it is difficult because the entire system was dismantled by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told CNN’s State of the Union. “There was a system in place that was torn down by the Trump administration.”On ABC’s This Week, Mayorkas highlighted the tougher aspects of Joe Biden’s border policy, stressing that the administration was still expelling families and single adults under a regulation known as Title 42. He insisted largely Central American migrants arriving in increasing numbers were being given a clear message: “Do not come. The border is closed. The border is secure.”But prominent Republicans have seized on the border difficulties as an opportunity to attack Biden for being soft on immigration.There was a system in place that was torn down by the Trump administration“This is a crisis,” Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, has said. “I don’t care what the administration wants to call it – it is a crisis.”Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas and ardent Trump loyalist, lambasted the secretary’s position as “nonsense”.In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Cotton characterized the Biden administration’s stance as “basically saying the United States will not secure the border, and that’s a big welcome sign to migrants from across the world [saying] the border is wide open”.He went on to make lurid allegations, backed up with no evidence, that the focus on unaccompanied children at the border was allowing criminals smuggling fentanyl and other drugs as well as people on “terrorist watch lists” to slip into the US undetected.Political steam over border affairs has been building for two months. In one of his first acts as president, Biden scrapped Trump’s hardline policy of sending unaccompanied children seeking asylum back to Mexico.Under Biden’s guidelines, unaccompanied minors were exempted from the Title 42 rules and shielded from expulsion. That was deemed in line with the president’s pledge to achieve a “fair, safe and orderly” immigration system.On Sunday, Mayorkas said the new approach addressed the humanitarian needs of migrant children “in a way that reflects our values and principles as a country”. But in the past few weeks, the numbers of minors seeking asylum has grown so rapidly that it has outpaced capacity to process the children in line with immigration laws.He is basically saying the United States will not secure the borderMore than 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children are being detained in Custom and Border Protection (CBP) facilities in Texas and Arizona. As a backlog of cases has built up, more than 500 have been kept in custody for more than 10 days, well beyond the 72 hours allowed under immigration law.There have been reports of overcrowding and harsh conditions in federal facilities in Texas. The Associated Press reported that some children were said by immigration lawyers to be sleeping on the floor after bedding ran out.The government has tried to move as many children as possible into shelters run by the US Refugee Office, but they in turn have become stressed. There are now more than 9,500 children in shelters and short-term housing along the border. Non-governmental groups working with migrants and refugees have been forced to scramble to deal with the sudden demand for shelter.As the administration struggles to keep a grip on events, it is also coming under criticism from Republicans and media outlets for refusing to allow reporters inside the beleaguered CBP facilities where children are being held. On Friday, Mayorkas visited El Paso in Texas with a bipartisan congressional delegation. Reporters were not allowed to follow them.The Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz, called the move “outrageous and unacceptable”. In a tweet, he said: “No press. No cameras. What is Biden hiding?”Quizzed by Fox News Sunday about the apparent lack of accountability, despite Biden’s promise to bring “trust and transparency” back to public affairs, Mayorkas said the administration was “working on providing access” to border patrol stations.But he added: “First things first – we are focused on operations and executing our plans.”While the political heat is rising at the border, moves are under way in Washington to try and find a longer-term fix to the age-old immigration conundrum. Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would give “Dreamers”, undocumented migrants brought to the US as children, a pathway to citizenship.The legislation has an uncertain future in the Senate, given its 50-50 split and the need to reach 60 votes to pass most major legislation.Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois who has introduced a similar Dream Act to the Senate five times in the past 20 years, told CNN that he thought he was close to securing the necessary 60 votes. He also decried the current debate about whether there was a “crisis” or “challenge” at the border.“We need to address our immigration laws in this country that are broken,” he said. “What you see at the border is one piece of evidence of that, but there’s much more.” More

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      How Democrats can use Biden's $1.9tn Covid relief to win the midterms

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      Just days after signing the $1.9tn coronavirus relief package into law, Joe Biden was on the road selling the benefits of the bill to the American people – and also to his own party’s political prospects.The president kicked off his “Help is Here” tour last Tuesday, visiting a Black-owned flooring business in Chester, Pennsylvania. “We’re in a position where it’s going to bring immediate relief – $1,400 – to 85% of the American public,” Biden said as he toured Smith Flooring. “And I think you should be aware: more help is on the way, for real.”Democrats have been eager to trumpet the message that Biden has followed through on his campaign promise to deliver another round of stimulus checks and an extension of federal unemployment benefits to Americans who have financially struggled because of the coronavirus pandemic.But the passage of the relief bill may also be the Democratic party’s best chance of keeping control of both chambers of Congress after next year’s midterm elections. Democrats are hoping that the aid it brings can help them avoid the historical trend of the president’s party losing congressional seats in the midterms following his election.There is little room for error too, given Democrats’ narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress. Republicans need to flip just five seats to take control of the House, and a loss of a single Senate seat would cost Democrats their majority in the upper chamber. Such losses would seriously hobble Biden’s ability to enact his agenda.With those high stakes in mind, the president and Vice-President Kamala Harris have been traveling across the country to advertise the relief bill in swing states that will hold key Senate races next year. Biden told House Democrats earlier this month that he was determined to learn from 2009, when Barack Obama was hesitant to take a “victory lap” after the passage of the stimulus bill.“We didn’t adequately explain what we had done,” Biden told lawmakers. “And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.”Democratic groups are helping with Biden’s victory tour, flooding the airwaves to remind voters in battleground states where those $1,400 direct payments came from. American Bridge 21st Century, a progressive political action committee, has announced a six-figure ad buy focusing on the impact of the relief package. The first ad, which featured a special education teacher talking about how the legislation would help schools reopen, started airing in Pennsylvania as Biden visited the state on Tuesday.“This is a law that is going to help people’s lives across the board, and something that is this holistically comprehensive on the policy side is also going to be holistically popular for the midterms,” said Jessica Floyd, the president of American Bridge. Echoing many Democratic lawmakers and strategists in recent weeks, Floyd made a point to cite polling showing the relief bill enjoyed the support of a broad majority of Americans.But Republicans, who unanimously voted against the relief bill in Congress, are not sitting on the sidelines as Democrats make their marketing pitch. Republican party leaders have been busy attacking the legislation as a liberal “wishlist” that does nothing to confront the crises facing the nation.“Americans deserve targeted legislation that will accelerate vaccine distribution, get Americans back to work, and safely reopen our schools – not hyperpartisan and wasteful pork spending,” Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said in a statement after the passage of the bill.The National Republican Senatorial Committee has already launched its own digital ads against two vulnerable Democratic incumbents, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, accusing them of “bailing out” New York and California by approving the state aid in the relief package.“Packed in the bill are provisions that will really hurt vulnerable senators in tough states,” a Republican operative focused on Senate races said. The operative predicted that Republicans’ criticism of “bailout” money to Democratic-controlled states and stimulus payments to undocumented immigrants would linger longer in voters’ memories than the $1,400 checks they received.There is still time for both parties to shape how Americans view the relief package. Despite the positive polling about the bill, a recent survey from the progressive firm Navigator Research showed a majority of voters say they know little to nothing about the legislation.So the challenge for Democrats and Republicans will be to both convince voters of the merit – or lack thereof – of the relief bill and then keep that issue at the forefront of voters’ minds as they start to consider which candidates to support next November.In that sense, these competing messaging campaigns from the two parties represent the start of a months-long competition to define the beginning of Biden’s presidency in the court of public opinion. The winner of that competition will probably walk away with control of Congress.“Part of our job is not to let people forget that Democrats put together a bill that is hugely popular now,” Floyd said. “Our job is to keep it popular and also point out for the coming months that every single Republican in Congress voted against it. I think keeping both of those facts top of mind starts today.” More