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      Republican Ted Cruz introduces bill to block US supreme court expansion

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      The Republican senator Ted Cruz, whose party defied convention to delay then rush conservatives on to the supreme court, has introduced a constitutional amendment to stop Democrats expanding the court in response.“The Democrats’ answer to a supreme court that is dedicated to upholding the rule of law and the constitution is to pack it with liberals who will rule the way they want,” Cruz said.“The supreme court should be independent, not inflated by every new administration. That’s why I’ve introduced a constitutional amendment to permanently keep the number of justices at nine.”There is no constitutional provision for how many justices sit on the court.Democrats say the current court is not independent of the Republican party.In 2016, when the conservative Antonin Scalia died Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, held the seat open until a Republican president, Donald Trump, could replace a Democrat, Barack Obama, and nominate Scalia’s replacement. Neil Gorsuch filled that seat.In 2020, Democrats were helpless again when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal lion, died shortly before the presidential election and McConnell changed course, rushing Amy Coney Barrett on to the court before Trump lost to Joe Biden.Those changes and the replacement of the retiring Anthony Kennedy with Brett Kavanaugh produced a court dominated, 6-3, by conservatives.Conservative justices including Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas have claimed not to be influenced by political considerations.Coney Barrett notably did so, saying the court “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”, while standing next to McConnell at a political studies centre named for the Republican leader.Among conservative rulings passed down by the new super-majority, a May 2022 decision saw the court side with Cruz in a case concerning personal loans to campaigns. The three liberal justices said the ruling paved the way for corruption.But the Dobbs decision of last year, removing the right to abortion, most enraged Democrats and progressives.On the left, plans have been floated to increase the size of the court and thereby redress its ideological balance.Writing for the Guardian last year, David Daley, author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, said: “The court’s hard-right majority has neither popular support for its agenda nor institutional legitimacy.“It is the product of a hostile takeover of the courts 50 years in the planning by conservatives who have long understood that unpopular policies … can be thrust upon Americans by an unaccountable and unelected judiciary.“The court must be expanded and reformed to counter a rightwing power play that threatens to remake American democracy and life itself.”Biden ordered a commission to study options for reform. It found bipartisan support for term limits for justices but reported “profound disagreement” on whether the court should be expanded. Biden has said he is “not a fan” of expanding the court.Cruz’s amendment has little chance of passing a Democratic-held Senate but 10 Republican senators supported it nonetheless.Josh Hawley of Missouri said: “For years the left has been desperate to pack the court to promote their radical agenda. We must ensure that we stay true to the court’s founding principles, maintain the precedent of nine justices, and keep the Democrats from their brazen attempts to rig our democracy.” More

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      Mitch McConnell released from hospital after treatment for concussion

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      Mitch McConnell was released from the hospital on Monday after the Republican leader of the Senate received treatment for a concussion, and he will continue to recover in an inpatient rehabilitation facility, a spokesman said.McConnell’s office said his doctors discovered over the weekend that he had also suffered a “minor rib fracture” after he tripped and fell at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington on Wednesday evening.“Leader McConnell’s concussion recovery is proceeding well and the leader was discharged from the hospital today,” said McConnell’s spokesman, David Popp, in a statement. “At the advice of his physician, the next step will be a period of physical therapy at an inpatient rehabilitation facility before he returns home.”The office did not give any additional detail on McConnell’s condition or say how long he will be out. Concussions can be serious injuries and take time for recovery, and even a single incident of concussion can limit a person’s abilities as they recover.It is unclear how his extended absence will affect Senate proceedings. The Senate returns to Washington on Tuesday evening after the weekend off and is scheduled to be in session for the rest of March.The Kentucky senator, 81, was at a Wednesday evening dinner after a reception for the Senate Leadership Fund, a campaign committee aligned with him, when he tripped and fell.McConnell’s head injury comes almost four years after he tripped and fell at his home in Kentucky, suffering a shoulder fracture that required surgery. The Senate had just started a summer recess, and he worked from home for some weeks as he recovered.At the start of the Covid-19 crisis, McConnell opened up about his early childhood experience fighting polio. He described how his mother insisted that he stay off his feet as a toddler and worked with him through a determined physical therapy regime. He has acknowledged some difficulty in adulthood climbing stairs.First elected in 1984, McConnell in January became the longest-serving Senate leader when the new Congress convened, breaking the previous record of 16 years.McConnell is one of several senators who have been absent lately due to illness or hospitalization. The 53-year-old Democratic senator John Fetterman, who suffered a stroke during his campaign last year, was expected to remain out for some weeks as he received care for clinical depression. And Senator Dianne Feinstein, 89, said earlier this month that she had been hospitalized to be treated for shingles. More

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      It’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism review: Bernie Sanders, by the book

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      ReviewIt’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism review: Bernie Sanders, by the bookThe Vermont senator and former presidential candidate offers a clarion call against the American oligarchsThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has a predictably unsparing view of the effects of “unfettered capitalism”: it “destroys anything that gets in its way in the pursuit of profits. It destroys the environment. It destroys our democracy. It discards human beings without a second thought. It will never provide workers with the fulfillment that Americans have a right to expect from their careers. [And it is] propelled by uncontrollable greed and contempt for human decency.”Has Bernie Sanders really helped Joe Biden move further left?Read moreThe two-time presidential candidate makes his case with the usual horrifying numbers about the acceleration of inequality in America: 90% of our wealth is owned by one-tenth of 1% of the population; the wealth of 725 US billionaires increased 70% during the pandemic to more than $5tn; BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street now control assets of $20tn and are major shareholders in 96% of S&P 500 companies.Sanders recites these statistics with religious fervor, and poses fundamental questions for our time: “Do we believe in the Golden Rule? [or] do we accept … that gold rules – and that lying, cheating, and stealing are OK if you’re powerful enough to get away with it?”Bernie believes (and I strongly agree) that it’s long past the time when we should be paying at least as much attention to American oligarchs as we do to those surrounding Vladimir Putin. Our homegrown plutocrats “own” our democracy.“They spend tens of billions … on campaign contributions … to buy politicians who will do their bidding. They spend billions more on lobbying firms to influence governmental decisions” at every level. And “to a significant degree”, the oligarchs “own” the media. That is why our prominent pundits “rarely raise issues that will undermine the privileged positions of their employers” and “there is little public discussion about the power of corporate America and how oligarchs wield that power to benefit their interests at the expense of working families”.We were reminded this week of how this system works. Joe Biden released a budget with perfectly modest proposals for tax increases, like a 25% minimum tax on the wealthiest Americans and a seven-percentage-point raise in the corporate tax rate to 28%, which would still leave it seven points lower than it was before Donald Trump gutted it with his gigantic tax giveaways.Instantly, experts owned and operated by the billionaires started spewing their familiar bilge, like these moving words from the Cato Institute: “Higher tax rates on the wages of a narrow segment of the United States’ most productive executives and business leaders will have strong disincentives against their continued work and other negative behavioral effects that translate into a less dynamic, slower growing economy.“Higher taxes on investment income target the financial rewards to successful entrepreneurs who undertake risks and persevere through failure to build high return businesses that provide welfare enhancing goods and services to people around the world.”Sanders quotes one of the most prescient Americans of the mid-20th century, from 1944: “As our industrial economy expanded [our] political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”The name of that dangerous revolutionary: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Several decades before that, Theodore Roosevelt similarly bemoaned the “absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting” which “has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power”.There is something extremely refreshing about an author who assumes it should be obvious that billionaires should not be allowed to exist – and has perfectly reasonable proposals about how they should be eliminated. At the height of the pandemic, Sanders proposed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, which would have imposed a 60% tax on all the wealth gained by 467 billionaires between 18 March 2020 and January 2021.“But why stop at one year?” he now asks. After all, the 1950s were economic boom times in America – and under a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, “the top tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was around 92%. America thrived. Unions were strong. Working-class Americans could afford to support themselves and buy homes on a single income.” And the richest 20% controlled a measly (by current standards) 42.8% of the wealth.Bernie Sanders: ‘Oligarchs run Russia. But guess what? They run the US as well’Read moreSanders’ 99.5 Percent Act would only touch the top 0.5% of Americans. “But the families of billionaires in America, who have a combined net worth of over $5tn, would owe up to $3tn in estate taxes.” He would accomplish this with a 45% tax rate on estates worth $3.5m and a 65% rate on those worth more than $1bn.There is much more here, including a convincing case for Medicare for All and an excoriation of a for-profit healthcare system which spends twice as much per citizen as France or Germany and still manages to leaves tens of millions of Americans un- or underinsured, all while nourishing an obscene pharmaceuticals business in which profits jumped by 90% in 2021.I first toured the castles of the Loire Valley as a teenager in the company of the family of my uncle, Jerry Kaiser, a 60s radical and a very early opponent of the war in Vietnam. As we absorbed the opulence of one chateau after another, Jerry had only one question: “What took them so long to have a revolution?”The noble purpose of Bernie Sander’s powerful new book is to get millions of Americans to ask that question of themselves – right now.
      It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism is published in the US by Crown
      TopicsBooksBernie SandersUS politicsDemocratsUS SenateUS CongressUS economyreviewsReuse this content More

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      Norfolk Southern’s call to burn derailed train cars ‘jaw-dropping’, Senate hears

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      Norfolk Southern’s call to burn derailed train cars ‘jaw-dropping’, Senate hearsLocal official tells panel of chaotic response Ohio derailment and operator’s CEO makes first appearance before CongressNorfolk Southern’s decision to call for the burning of five derailed train cars in East Palestine, Ohio, was “jaw-dropping” and a consequence of poor communication by the railroad, a local emergency management official told a Senate panel on Thursday.Eric Brewer, director and chief of hazardous materials response for the emergency services department in Beaver county, Pennsylvania, just over the state line from East Palestine, described to the chamber’s environment and public works committee an initially chaotic response to the 3 February derailment.‘No one is coming to save us’: residents of towns near toxic train derailment feel forgottenRead more“The boots on the ground crews were great to work with. It seems as bosses or management gets there, that’s where the communication failures start,” Brewer said.The derailment of the train carrying vinyl chloride – used to produce PVC plastic – in the small town has left its more than 4,700 residents complaining of health effects like headaches, and fearing long-term pollution of the area. An interim report released last month by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) noted the train’s crew received an alert about an overheating wheel bearing and tried to slow the train before it came off the tracks.Brewer, whose agency was among those responding to the accident, described how Norfolk Southern initially raised concerns that one of the derailed tank cars was “starting to heat up” and could explode, leading to local officials creating an evacuation zone around the site of the accident. The railroad then suggested destroying that tank car in a controlled detonation, he said.“We were assured this was the safest way to mitigate the problem,” he said. Then, Norfolk Southern asked to burn five cars, rather than just one.“This changed the entire plan, as it would now impact a much larger area. I think this confusion was probably a result of the lack of communication from Norfolk Southern and the fact that they they weren’t present during these planning meetings,” Brewer said.He later added: “The decision to go from the one tank car to the five was jaw-dropping,” and “that’s probably why we’re here today”.His critique was echoed by Anne Vogel, director of Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency, who said: “I do believe there were quite a few gaps in communication and missteps in the very eye hours following the derailment … things could have been handled better in the beginning hours.”However, both Brewer and Vogel agreed that the communication issues had been ironed out since then. “I do believe that those gaps in communications have been addressed. I believe that teams are working well together on the ground today.”The Democratic-led committee’s hearing featured the first appearance before Congress by Norfolk Southern’s CEO, Alan Shaw, who was pressed by lawmakers on how far his company would go to take care of Ohio and Pennsylvania residents affected by the derailment.“I’m terribly sorry for the impact this derailment has had on the folks of that community. And yes, it’s my personal commitment and Norfolk Southern’s commitment that we’re going to be there for as long as it takes to help East Palestine thrive and recover,” Shaw said.He also said that though the NTSB report found that the train’s crew was operating in a safe manner, “it is clear the safety mechanisms in place were not enough.”Shaw was more taciturn about whether he would support the Railway Safety Act of 2023, proposed by Democratic and Republican lawmakers from Ohio and Pennsylvania, which would levy financial and regulatory consequences on railroads involved in accidents.“We are committed to the legislative intent to make rail safer. Norfolk Southern runs a safe railroad and it’s my commitment to improve that safety and make our safety culture the best in the industry,” Shaw said.Another topic of concern for senators was the extent of pollution in East Palestine and the surrounding communities. Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator Debra Shore said indoor air monitoring had not yet turned up any sign of widespread vinyl chloride contamination.“As of March 4 approximately 600 homes have been screened through this program and no detections of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride have been identified,” Shore said, adding that air monitors haven’t detected any organic compounds “above levels of health concerns” since the derailed cars were extinguished.Despite the EPA’s assurances, senators said they’d heard from residents who didn’t trust the agency’s messaging, and worried their concerns would go unheard.“These communities have been abandoned too many times before,” said Ohio’s Democratic senator Sherrod Brown. “My job, our job, is to hear their voice and to demand corporate accountability to bring this town back to the vibrant community we know that it can be again.”TopicsOhio train derailmentUS SenateUS politicsnewsReuse this content More