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      Liz Cheney regrets vote for Trump but won’t say she’ll leave Republican party

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      Liz Cheney has become the figurehead of the Never Trumpers, Republicans seeking to loosen the former president’s grip on their party, but the Wyoming congresswoman was for him in the last election.Newly removed from Republican House leadership, Cheney spoke to ABC’s This Week in an interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday.Asked if she voted for Trump in 2020, she replied: “I did.”Asked if she regretted it, she said: “I was never going to support Joe Biden and I do regret the vote. I think that it was based on policy, based on sort of substance and what I know in terms of the kinds of policies [Trump] put forward that were good for the country. But that I think it is fair to say I regret the vote.”Cheney came out against Trump after the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, by supporters he told to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his conclusive defeat by Joe Biden was the result of mass electoral fraud.Most of the congressional GOP has stayed behind Trump but Cheney was one of 10 Republicans in the House to vote for his impeachment, on a charge of inciting an insurrection. Trump was acquitted at trial after only seven Republican senators could be persuaded to follow suit.Cheney also told ABC that Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, should either voluntarily testify before any 6 January commission about his conversation with Trump as the attack happened, or be compelled to do so.Cheney is a staunch conservative and a daughter of Dick Cheney, a former congressman, secretary of defense and vice-president. As such she is a member of a party establishment either beaten into near-silence by Trump’s harangues, like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell; vilified by Trump’s supporters, like Utah senator and 2012 nominee Mitt Romney; or simply acquiescent.Trump remains excluded from social media over his role in the Capitol riot but on Saturday he issued statements replete with rants about supposed electoral fraud and “crooked, disgusting, and very dishonest media outlets”. In one, he called McConnell a “weak and pathetic leader”.On ABC, interviewer Jonathan Karl also asked if Cheney would stay in her party should Trump decide to run for president again – as he has hinted he might – and then win the nomination in 2024.“I will do everything that I can to make sure he’s not the nominee,” Cheney said. “And, you know everything necessary to make sure that that he never gets anywhere close to the Oval Office again.”But, Karl repeated, would she remain in the party if Trump were the nominee?“I will not support him,” said Cheney. “And we’ll do everything I can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”Some Republicans outside Congress have mooted the formation of a new conservative party. Most observers think such a move unlikely to succeed.Nonetheless the brewing civil war in Republican ranks was set to dominate the US political talk shows on Sunday.Cheney was also due to be interviewed on Fox News Sunday. Another anti-Trump House Republican, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, was booked by NBC’s Meet the Press. NBC also booked the Texas representative Dan Crenshaw, a Trump loyalist.CBS’s Face the Nation was due to feature Joni Ernst of Iowa, the only woman in Republican Senate leadership, who this week criticised the House GOP for “cancelling” Cheney. CNN’s State of the Union booked Fred Upton, a Michigan representative and moderate who has been close to Biden.Cheney’s replacement as the No 3 Republican in the House, Elise Stefanik, was due to speak to Fox Business. The New Yorker is a former moderate who swiftly moved to the hard right and gained Trump’s support.Stefanik backed a formal objection to electoral college results in Pennsylvania, one of two states Republicans challenged on the day of the Capitol riot. She indicated a willingness to challenge other states but no senator followed suit.Cheney told ABC: “I think the issue really is Donald Trump and it really is the party and whether we’re going to be a party that’s based on the truth.“I think we’ve seen consistently since the election, certainly since 6 January and in ways it has increased since 6 January, the former president’s willingness to be very aggressive in his attacks on democracy and on our electoral process.” More

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      Divided Republicans reunite to mount defense of filibuster

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      While congressional Democrats hope to make dramatic changes to a controversial legislative tool that has stalled bills in the Senate and could be used to frustrate Joe Biden’s ambitious agenda, Republicans are mounting an all-out defense to protect it.Conservative outside groups have been organizing overtly and covertly to counter Democratic pressure to gut the filibuster – a Senate device that in effect allows the minority party to halt proposed legislation.While Democrats have been struggling to unite members of their Senate caucus, especially the more centrist holdouts, to get rid of the filibuster, their Republican counterparts have been lockstep in opposing changes.Meanwhile, Republican outside groups have churned out polling, aired ads, organized gatherings and released statements warning of the long-term consequences of changing the rule. It is a concerted program that Republicans see as vital to preserving their power in the Biden era, while Democrats see it as a potential threat to their attempts to bring in meaningful legislation.The cause has reunited Republicans after the divisiveness of the Trump era – bringing together business interests, Trumpist politicians and their anti-Trump opponents in the party, as well traditional big donors to conservative causes.For Republicans involved in the fight, the campaign to preserve the filibuster is a historically important one. “The filibuster really serves as that backstop against heat-of-the-moment politics,” said Garrett Bess, vice-president for government relations for Heritage Action for America, a non-profit group aligned with the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank.Bess said his group sought to ensure “that people understand what is on the other side of changing the filibuster. So when we’re talking to a conservative audience or a right-of-center audience, on the other side of the filibuster is higher taxes and gun control and taxpayer-funded abortion. Those kinds of things.”In front of a more moderate audience, Bess said, the argument is to warn about statehood for Washington DC or Democrats’ voting rights package. Bess said Heritage Action had focused on talking with “constituencies of Democratic senators in which we have a very large footprint – Arizona, Georgia, West Virginia” and was expanding into New Hampshire, Bess said.In late April, One Nation, an outside group aligned with Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican Senate minority leader, released polling from Arizona and New Hampshire, Nevada and West Virginia to argue against filibuster reform. Arizona and West Virginia are the two states with the most conservative Democrats in the caucus. The polling found that voters were largely unaware of the filibuster and when they were made aware “in fairly neutral terms, support for keeping the filibuster is solid”.“On the filibuster, voters are much more aligned with the position and statements of Senator Kyrsten Sinema than they are with the position and statements of Senator Mark Kelly,” the One Nation polling memo said. Sinema has expressed stubborn opposition to changing the filibuster while Kelly has expressed openness to some kind of reform.The fact that one of the primary McConnell-aligned groups published those results underscores congressional Republicans’ position on the filibuster. McConnell has warned about longer-term consequences of filibuster reform and has argued it would change change the Senate to a “scorched-earth” body.“Let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: nobody serving in this chamber can even begin, can even begin, to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like,” the top Republican said in March. Heritage Action and 28 other groups published a letter in January urging every member of the Senate to oppose filibuster reform.“The legislative filibuster is an essential part of ensuring a strong system of checks and balances,” the letter read. “While we typically do not weigh in on Congressional procedure, we believe elimination of the filibuster could result in a slew of destructive policy changes.”Manchin and Sinema are favorite targets for conservatives looking to fight support for filibuster reform. Americans for Prosperity, another outside group, funded by Charles Koch, has launched a six-figure ad campaign focused on those two senators.Similarly, Ken Cuccinelli, a former official in the Department of Homeland Security during Donald Trump’s presidency and a former attorney general of Virginia, is leading a conservative group that has encouraged Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to oppose filibuster reform.Even the US Chamber of Commerce, which at times has worked with Joe Biden’s administration and endorsed a set of congressional Democrats, has voiced opposition to filibuster reform. Suzanne Clark, the president and CEO of the chamber, tweeted the group’s statement.Issues of national importance deserve the time, thoughtfulness, and deliberation that the #filibuster provides. Debate doesn’t have to mean obstruction—lawmakers should be able to have passionate convictions AND find solutions. Read our full statement: https://t.co/z9YPkm7x3E— Suzanne Clark (@SuzanneUSCC) March 16, 2021
      Thank you @Sen_JoeManchin for your principled stand on preserving the #filibuster. American businesses—together with the West Virginians you serve so well—appreciate your commitment to solving our nation’s problems through collaboration and consensus-building. #leadership— Suzanne Clark (@SuzanneUSCC) April 9, 2021
      Issues of national importance deserve the time, thoughtfulness, and deliberation that the #filibuster provides. Debate doesn’t have to mean obstruction—lawmakers should be able to have passionate convictions AND find solutions. Read our full statement: https://t.co/z9YPkm7x3E— Suzanne Clark (@SuzanneUSCC) March 16, 2021
      Whether the filibuster will be dramatically altered depends on Democrats. No Republican senator has expressed support for it – and at this point, there are not enough Democratic votes to change it.Democrats who do not usually weigh in on Senate procedure or legislating have begun to argue for reform, however.And more than 350 prominent historians published a letter arguing for getting rid of the filibuster.“Only in recent decades have filibusters effectively created a regular supermajority threshold for routine legislation, with prior norms of restraint all but disappearing,” the letter, first reported by Talking Points Memo, said.Fix Our Senate, an alliance of about 70 groups that aims to get rid of the filibuster, has launched a six-figure ad buy urging Democrats to gut the mechanism. The group will also be holding a town hall with senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to argue for its elimination.“It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Republican leaders and their special interest allies are pulling out all the stops to protect the filibuster as the best weapon they have to block President Biden’s agenda and prevent Democrats from delivering on their promises,” Eli Zupnik, a Fix Our Senate spokesman, said in a statement. “But voters across the country are learning more about this ‘Jim Crow relic’ and will see through these desperate attempts by Senate Republicans to maintain power from the minority.” More

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      Tim Scott ‘hopeful’ deal can be reached with Democrats on US policing reform

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      Tim Scott, the Republican senator leading negotiations with Democrats over police reform, who insisted during his rebuttal to Joe Biden’s address to Congress the US was not a racist country, said on Sunday he was “hopeful” a deal can be reached. Scott, from South Carolina and the only Black Republican in the Senate, said he saw progress in talks which stalled last summer as protests raged following the killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans.“One of the reasons why I’m hopeful is because my friends on the left aren’t looking for the issue, they’re looking for a solution, and the things that I offered last year are more popular this year,” the senator told CBS’s Face the Nation.“The goal isn’t for Republicans or Democrats to win, but for communities to feel safer and our officers to feel respected. If we can accomplish those two major goals, the rest will be history.”The talks are intended to break an impasse over the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House in March but is frozen by the 50-50 split in the Senate.Negotiations have taken on increasing urgency following the high-profile killings of Daunte Wright in Minneapolis and Andrew Brown in North Carolina, Black men shot in their vehicles by officers, killings which sparked outrage.“The country supports this reform and Congress should act,” Biden said on Wednesday during his address on Capitol Hill.I personally understand the pain of being stopped 18 times driving while BlackA panel including Scott, the New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker and Karen Bass, the author of the House bill and a Democrat from California, met on Thursday to discuss key elements including individual liability for officers who abuse their power or otherwise overstep the line.Republicans strongly oppose many of the proposals but Booker said it had been “a promising week”.Scott, a rising star in Republican ranks, said he was well-placed to help steer the discussion.“One of the reasons why I asked to lead this police reform conversation on my side of the House is because I personally understand the pain of being stopped 18 times driving while Black,” he said.“And I have also seen the beauty of when officers go door to door with me on Christmas morning, delivering presents to kids in the most underserved communities. So I think I bring an equilibrium to the conversation.”Scott said he was confident major sticking points in the Senate version of the proposed legislation could be overcome and the bill aligned to that which passed the House.“Think about the [parts] of the two bills that are in common … data collection,” he said. “I think through negotiations and conversations we are closer on no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and then there’s something called Section 1033 that has to do with getting government equipment from the military for local police.“I think we’re making progress there too, so we have literally been able to bring these two bills very close together.”The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, placed no timeline on when a revised version of the bill would get a vote.“We will bring it to the floor when we are ready, and we will be ready when we have a good, strong bipartisan bill,” she said on Thursday. “That is up to the Senate and then we will have it in the House, because it will be a different bill.”On the issue of whether lawsuits could be filed against police departments rather than individual officers, Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, said: “We’re moving towards a reasonable solution.”Scott said the issue was “another reason why I’m more optimistic this time”.He said: “We want to make sure the bad apples are punished and we’ve seen that, through the convictions of Michael Slager when he shot Walter Scott in the back to the George Floyd convictions.“Those are promising signs, but the real question is how do we change the culture of policing? I think we do that by making the employer responsible for the actions of the employee.”Others senators in the negotiations include Dick Durbin of Illinois and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, senior figures in their parties.Scott also broke with Republicans who support Donald Trump’s big lie that the presidential election was rigged, saying the party could only move on once it realised “the election is over, Joe Biden is the president of the United States”.On CNN’s State of the Union, Susan Collins, a moderate Republican senator from Maine, appeared to acknowledge Scott’s rising profile.“We are not a party that is led by just one person,” she said. “There are many prominent upcoming younger men and women in our party who hold great promise for leading us.” More

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      in Elections

      Elizabeth Warren: Democratic party was reluctant to nominate a woman in 2020

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      In a new book, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren suggests part of the reason for her failure in the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination lay in the party’s reluctance to nominate another woman.“I had to run against the shadows of Martha and Hillary,” Warren writes in Persist, which will be published on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported.Hillary Clinton, a former New York senator and secretary of state, lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.Martha Coakley, an attorney general of Massachusetts, lost a 2010 election for a US Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy, to Scott Brown, and a 2014 gubernatorial election to Charlie Baker.Both women started as favourites but suffered losses which dealt crushing blows to Democrats on the national stage.Warren led the 2020 Democratic primary early on. In her book, the Post said, she repeats a conversation with her husband, Bruce Mann, who said: “Babe, you could actually do this. You could be president.” Warren also writes about she imagined her inauguration.But she did not win any states and withdrew on 5 March. With most of the rest of the field, she endorsed Joe Biden against the progressive standard bearer, Bernie Sanders. Biden went on to beat Trump convincingly but Warren was passed over for vice-president and a cabinet post.On the page, Warren attributes some of the blame for her defeat to a failure to explain how she would pay for her ambitious progressive proposals, particularly on expanding healthcare.She also reportedly “offers a heavy dose of praise for allies and competitors and little score-settling or tale-telling”, calling Biden a “steady, decent man” and Sanders “fearless and determined”.The Post said Warren’s book “glosses over” a clash with Sanders over whether he told her a woman could not beat Trump. Warren says he did. Sanders says he did not.Warren considers a debate in Nevada in which she assailed the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg over his behaviour towards women and compared him to Trump. Warren, the Post said, writes that she was surprised Bloomberg did not immediately respond.“Like so many women in so many settings, I found myself wondering if he had even heard me,” she writes.Warren’s book, her third, also considers a previously disclosed incident at the University of Houston when she says a male colleague tried to grope her, and its effect on her academic career.The book’s title comes from a famous clash with Mitch McConnell in 2017. Attempting to silence Warren during debate, the then Republican majority leader said: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”The Post said text on the back of Warren’s book says it is about “the fight that lies ahead”.“Warren offers few hints on whether she might run again for president,” the paper said. “At 71, she is younger than Biden and could plausibly launch another campaign in 2024, particularly if he does not seek a second term.” More

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      Antitrust: Hawley and Klobuchar on the big tech battles to come

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      Antitrust is hot. In February, the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar introduced the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act of 2021. Weeks later, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley proposed the Trust-Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act. Both bills are pending before the Senate judiciary committee.Hawley and Klobuchar have both published books. Hawley offers The Tyranny of Big Tech, and Klobuchar Antitrust. There is plenty of overlap but the substantive and stylistic differences are glaring.Hawley takes pride in owning the libs. Klobuchar criticizes the Trump administration’s lack of antitrust enforcement. His book is barbed. Hers methodical.On 6 January, Hawley gave a clench-fisted salute to pro-Trump militants and voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election. On the page, he doubles down.Two weeks after the Capitol attack, Klobuchar told the presidential inauguration: “This is the day our democracy picks itself up, brushes off the dust and does what America always does.” She remains angry with Hawley and “Flyin’” Ted Cruz for the insurrection and its aftermath.Playing to type, Hawley has also provided the sole vote against a bill to crack down on anti-Asian hate crime and opposed renaming military bases named for Confederate generals. Roy Blunt, Missouri’s senior senator and the No 4 member of GOP Senate leadership, parted ways with Hawley on both. In the civil war, Missouri was a border state. A century and a half later, it looks like Hawley has picked the losing side.In his book, he upbraids corporate America, “woke capitalism”, Amazon, Google and Facebook. He demands that Google “be forced to give up YouTube and its control of the digital advertising market”.He would also have Facebook “lose” Instagram and WhatsApp, and accuses Amazon of destroying Parler, the conservative alternative to Twitter funded by Rebekah Mercer, a Hawley donor along with her father, Robert Mercer and other Trump acolytes.Hawley’s embrace of antipathy toward big business – even that in which he invests – is not exactly new.In 2008 he published a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, subtitled Preacher of Righteousness and approving of the 26th president’s relentless support for the little guy.Almost a decade later, as Missouri attorney general, Hawley launched an antitrust investigation of Google. Shortly after that, as a Senate candidate, he told Bloomberg News: “We need to have a conversation in Missouri, and as a country, about the concentration of economic power.”But Hawley is buffeted by contradictions. He has for example feted Robert Bork as a conservative martyr, even as Bork’s legal writings have served as intellectual jet fuel for those developments in the marketplace Hawley professes to abhor.The Tyranny of Big Tech makes no mention of the professor who wrote an influential anti-antitrust book, The Antitrust Paradox, in 1978, nine years before he was blocked from the supreme court.Klobuchar, by contrast, gives Bork plenty of face time.“For Bork,” she writes, “the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few is not a relevant consideration for antitrust law.”Bork had issues with civil rights too. In 1963, when Jim Crow was still in full force, he branded what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “legislation by which the morals of the majority are self-righteously imposed upon a minority”.In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Hawley also blasts corporate abuse of personal data and data mining – all while he looks to Peter Thiel of Palantir for donor dollars.Left unstated is that Palantir was embroiled in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Cambridge Analytica was owned by the Mercer family and Thiel was an early funder and board member of Facebook. The circle is complete.Hawley’s book can be viewed as plutocrat-populism in print. Tucker Carlson’s praise is blurbed on the jacket. Inside, Hawley defends Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News from purported predations by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Both Murdoch and Zuckerberg are billionaires many times over.Hawley is on stronger ground when he revisits the nexus between the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and Google. Eric Schmidt, then head of the company, was Obama’s chief corporate ally. On election night 2016, Schmidt, wore a Clinton staff badge, having spent months advising her campaign.In her book, Klobuchar furnishes an overview of the evolution of US anti-monopoly law and a call for rebalancing the relationship between capital and labor. She condemns corporate consolidation and wealth concentration, and views lax antitrust enforcement as antithetical to democracy.In a footnote, she commends Hawley for addressing the “turf wars” between the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, and their negative impact on antitrust enforcement. Unlike Hawley, however, Klobuchar vehemently disapproves of the supreme court’s Citizens United decision and characterizes it as opening “the floodgates to dark money in our politics”.In 2016, Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, wrote an op-ed titled: “Josh Hawley for [Missouri] Attorney General”. In his maiden Senate race, Hawley’s campaign received $10,000 from the Citizens United Political Victory Fund.Unfortunately, Klobuchar goes the extra mile and calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn that decision. Her would-be cure is worse than the disease – an attack on free speech itself.The proposed amendment would expressly confer upon “Congress and the states” broad power to curtail campaign fundraising and spending. It also provides that “nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the states the power to abridge the freedom of the press”.Not so curiously, it is silent about “abridging the freedom of speech”, an existing constitutional protection. Media barons rejoice – all others start sweating.In 2020, Klobuchar came up way short in her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now, she chairs the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee, where Hawley is a member.Both senators were law review editors: she at the University of Chicago, he at Yale. If Hawley has written a sort of campaign manifesto for the Republican presidential primary in 2024, Klobuchar’s book reads at times like an application for supreme court justice. It contains hundreds of pages of footnotes and pays repeated tribute to the late justice Louis Brandeis.Klobuchar also heaps praise on Stephen Breyer, a member of the court appointed by Bill Clinton and a former Harvard Law professor who in 1982 authored Regulation and Its Reform, a counter to Bork and the “Chicago School”.Klobuchar extends an array of “thank yous”. There is one for Jake Sullivan, her former counsel, now Joe Biden’s national security adviser; another for Matt Stoller, a former staffer to Bernie Sanders on the Senate budget committee and a sometime Guardian contributor; and another for Paul Krugman of the New York Times. All three come with definite viewpoints and are strategically placed.Increased antitrust enforcement by the DoJ, the FTC and the states appears to be more likely than wholesale legislative change. A government antitrust case against Google proceeds. Furthermore, Biden has already appointed two critics of big tech to key slots at the White House and the FTC. Who will lead DoJ’s antitrust division is an open question. Finding a suitable non-conflicted pick appears difficult.Klobuchar and Hawley will be heard from. Their books matter. More

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      ‘Not as dramatic as Trump’: Republicans respond to Biden’s address

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      Republican reaction to Joe Biden’s first congressional speech on Thursday centered as much on what the new president was perceived to have omitted as much as the policy proposals he did lay out.“He didn’t discuss the border and the fact that tens of thousands of people are pouring into our country,” former president Donald Trump said during a morning appearing on Fox News’ Mornings with Maria, seizing on a familiar grievance.“It’s out of control. It could destroy our country.” (Biden did, in fact, address immigration, and his proposed plan for border issues and paths to citizenship.)The Arizona congressman Andy Biggs was another to criticize Biden for not addressing the situation at the southern border, which has seen migrant apprehensions surge.“That is the worst crisis that America is facing today and I was sorely disappointed that the president did not take that on,” he told Fox & Friends.Biggs said Biden “was more methodical and not as dramatic or energetic” as Trump was while delivering his final address to Congress last year, but praised elements of the speech.“When he started talking about the need to end forever wars, and getting us out of Afghanistan, that was good. When he started talking about being competitive with China and we need to buy America, support America, those things, on narrative messaging point, were right on the money,” he said.“However, his policy statements affiliated with those things are dubious. You can’t throw $6tn in spending out the door as quickly as they want to do, we just don’t have the money for that. Taxes will have to go up across the board.”It was Biden’s ambitious social agenda, and accompanying price tag, that led senior Republicans to frame Biden’s address as a “bait and switch” operation“He talks like a moderate but is governing to satisfy the far left,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, said, according to the Kentucky Courier Journal, rehashing a favored Republican talking point.“I think the storyline on the Biden administration, underscored by the president’s speech tonight, could best be described as bait and switch. The bait was that he was going to be a moderate, a unifying force, and bring us all together. The switch is that Bernie Sanders, for all practical purposes, won the debate in the Democratic party over what it ought to look like.”The perceived lack of a unifying message was the main topic of the South Carolina senator Tim Scott’s rebuttal, the only Black Republican in the chamber insisting that: “The actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”Predictably, Scott’s performance drew praise from Trump, who said: “I thought Tim Scott last night was fantastic. I thought he did an incredible job.” More

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      Why a filibuster showdown in the US Senate is unavoidable

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,During Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office, there are few issues more pressing than the escalating attack on the right to vote in America. Democrats may be running out of time to address it.As Republicans have pushed more than 360 bills across the country to restrict access to the ballot, the president and Democrats have strongly condemned those efforts, but they’ve been unable to stop them. Even though Democrats control both chambers of Congress in Washington, they can’t pass a sweeping voting rights bill because they don’t have enough votes to get rid of the filibuster, an arcane senate rule that requires 60 votes to advance legislation. A showdown over the filibuster has loomed over the first 100 days of the Biden administration, but during the next 100 days, it’s clear that a showdown over getting rid of the procedure is unavoidable.Amanda Litman, the executive director of the Run for Something, a group that recruits candidates for state legislative races, told me this week she thinks some Democrats still don’t fully appreciate how dangerous and consequential the GOP’s ongoing efforts are. “This is really an existential crisis. It’s a five-alarm fire. But I’m not sure it’s quite sunk in for members of the United States Senate or the Democratic party writ large,” she told me.“If the Senate does not kill the filibuster and pass voting rights reforms … Democrats are going to lose control of the House and likely the Senate forever. You don’t put these worms back into a can. You can’t undo this quite easily,” she added.Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, last week set August as a deadline for Democrats to pass their sweeping voting rights bill, which would require early voting, automatic and same-day registration, among other measures. Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said the White House supports that effort.But the window for Democrats to have the most impact with their legislation is rapidly closing. The decennial process of redrawing district lines is set to take place later this year, and a critical portion of the Democratic bill would set new limits to prevent state lawmakers, who have the power to draw the maps, from severely manipulating districts for partisan gain. While it’s probably already too late to set up independent redistricting commissions for this year, Democrats could still pass rules to prevent the most severe partisan manipulation.“You could pass new criteria, including a ban on partisan gerrymandering…require greater transparency in the process,” Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There’s a lot that could be done.”I also asked the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat who chairs the Senate committee currently considering the bill, what kind of message it would send if Democrats failed to take any action to protect voting rights while they held the reins of government. “Failure is not an option,” she said, adding she wasn’t going to let the filibuster stand in the way.“This is our very democracy that’s at stake,” she said. “I’m not gonna let some old senate rule get in the way of that.”Also worth watching …
      My colleague Tom Perkins and I reported on a particularly anti-democratic effort underway in Michigan, where Republicans have already hinted they plan to utilize a little-used maneuver to get around a gubernatorial veto and enact voting restrictions.
      The Census Bureau announced its long-awaited apportionment totals on Monday that determine which states gain and lose seats in Congress. Colorado, Montana, Oregon, North Carolina, and Florida will all gain a seat and Texas will add two. California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will all lose a seat. More