A Year Of American Renewal, Thanks To Democrats

 

 

Before we move on too quickly, a little more crowing is in order regarding the passage of the COVID relief and stimulus bill (American Rescue Plan Act), and why it's such an important piece of legislation at any time, but particularly so early in the Biden Administration.  Here are some facts:

The roughly $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which only Democrats supported, spends most of the money on low-income and middle-class Americans and state and local governments, with very little funding going toward companies. The plan is one of the largest federal responses to a downturn Congress has enacted and economists estimate it will boost growth this year to the highest level in decades and reduce the number of Americans living in poverty by a third.  [snip]

“This legislative package likely represents the most effective set of policies for reducing child poverty ever in one bill, especially among Black and Latinx children,” said Indivar Dutta-Gupta, co-executive director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality. “The Biden administration is seeing this more like a wartime mobilization. They’ll deal with any downside risks later on.”

The total numbers are staggering. Cumulatively, the government will hand out $2.2 trillion to workers and families between the relief passed last year and this latest bill, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group. That’s equivalent to what the government spends annually on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid combined.  [snip]

The Democratic stimulus package also provides significant funding for vaccine distribution and state and local governments. Business and health leaders say getting most Americans vaccinated is key to the economic recovery. But most of the attention on the bill has focused on its overall price tag and the payments that are set to go to about 150 million American households.

The latest stimulus will reduce poverty by a third, lifting nearly 13 million Americans out of it, according to an analysis by Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. Black Americans, Hispanic Americans and poor families with children are set to benefit the most. Child poverty would be reduced by more than half, the researchers predict.  [snip]

The magnitude of aid, especially combined with last year’s relief, is much greater than the U.S. government has responded to other economic crises. The response to the Great Recession was about $1.8 trillion over several years and the most optimistic estimates are that about 6 million Americans were kept out of poverty in 2009 because of efforts by Congress at the time.

Biden and his top officials have repeatedly said they have learned lessons from the mistakes made during the Great Recession response. This time around they want to go big enough to ensure jobs return swiftly. They want a package that, in the words of White House press secretary Jen Psaki, will get families “talking about it at their dinner tables.”

Though it would seem unnecessary to point out what this bill will mean to millions of Americans, the bad faith two- legged rats (a.k.a., the Republican Party) and their faithful hacks in the media have already started a campaign of lies about the bill.  Therefore, Democrats need to do one other thing they largely failed to do after they passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010:  mount an aggressive political- style public relations campaign that anticipates the Republican disinformation effort and targets the party in general, and vulnerable Representatives and Senators in particular, for their obstruction and opposition to helping Americans during this crisis that their former guy made much worse than it had to be.

This is going to be a year of American renewal, and Democrats can and must claim exclusive rights to that renewal.  Keep up the victory lap!

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

That the Biden Administration will deliver the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill in a timely manner reflects on their competence (and the popularity of their policies):

A little more than one month since President Joe Biden entered office, his cornerstone legislative priority -- a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package -- is on the path to passage by the deadline his administration set, largely mirroring the key elements he originally proposed.

 

While Biden's hope for GOP support on Capitol Hill has all but disappeared in the last several weeks, his enthusiasm for the proposal -- and his view that despite its high price tag it will only serve to bolster Democrats as they remain unified -- has hardly waned.  [snip]

 

As House Democrats prepare to push through the legislation next week, with Senate Democrats set to follow suit in short order, it's a moment that underscores a confluence of factors on politics, policy and quiet, but wide-ranging, behind-the-scenes work that has nearly all gone Biden's way.

 

It was equal parts an inside- and outside-the-Beltway effort by the White House, aided by congressional Democrats involved early, and often, on both the substance and politics of the proposal. Supporters were boosted by a continuous run of positive public polling -- which White House officials and congressional leaders made a point of regularly putting in front of their members -- all as they sought to capitalize on state and district-level officials and advocacy groups they knew would hold sway on Capitol Hill.

While this will pass via the reconciliation process which requires only a majority vote, it bodes well for passage of other Democratic priorities -- if they're not afraid to kill the filibuster when Republicans try to block other legislation not governed by the rules of reconciliation.  You win elections by showing government can work effectively to meet peoples' needs, not by allowing bad faith nihilists to delay or wreck your agenda.

 

Here's where killing the filibuster will likely come into play:

Congressional Democrats are pushing a sweeping package of voting rights, gerrymandering, election, campaign finance and ethics reforms, called the For the People Act. It’s listed as H.R. 1 in the House and S. 1 in the Senate, signifying that it is Democrats’ top legislative priority. For the past two decades, every bill labeled both H.R. 1 and S. 1 has become law.

If the For the People Act is to pass, though, Democrats will need to surmount the one obstacle clogging up almost all legislation that doesn’t directly affect the federal budget: the filibuster. Democrats hold only 50 votes ― plus Vice President Kamala Harris’ to break ties ― and Republicans could easily use the filibuster to prevent voting reform. McConnell, who previously called the legislation “socialism” and a “power grab,” blocked it from a Senate vote in 2019. [snip]

Right now, Republican-controlled state legislatures are pushing bills to limit early and absentee voting, purge voters from the rolls, and toughen voter ID requirements. The For the People Act would ban almost all of these schemes to make it harder for certain communities to vote.

“Here we are with a very, very slim majority, a majority that we’ll probably lose if voter suppression goes on steroids as seems to be the path that so many state legislatures are on right now,” Merkley said. “And so this is the critical moment to pass this bill.”

Furthermore, the bill would ban partisan gerrymandering by requiring states to use independent, nonpartisan redistricting panels to draw House district lines. Given the extent of current Republican control of state legislatures, which exists thanks to district lines gerrymandered back in 2011, the Democratic House majority could theoretically be gerrymandered out of existence ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Passing the For the People Act quickly could potentially prevent this as well as blocking new voter suppression laws.

We've got to this this right or we'll be in danger of handing over government to the worst collection of anti- democracy neo- fascists our country has ever seen.

An eagerly- awaited defamation lawsuit has landed:

 

Mike Lindell, the Trump-loving CEO of MyPillow, has been hit with a new $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit over his lies about the 2020 presidential election.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Dominion Voting Systems has sued Lindell for his false claims about the company conspiring to steal votes from former President Donald Trump at the behest of the Chinese government.

In its lawsuit, Dominion accuses Lindell of telling a "Big Lie" about the election being stolen from Trump as a shameless way to gin up publicity for his business.

"He is well aware of the independent audits and paper ballot recounts conclusively disproving the Big Lie," the complaint says. "But Lindell…sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows."

Soak the Mein Pillow guy for every penny he's worth.

In case you missed her article last week, Pulitzer Prize winning senior science writer Laurie Garrett writes in Foreign Policy that malignant moron Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump committed pandemicide:

There is vast evidence of Trump’s negligence during the pandemic’s third wave. Had I been a member of the House of Representatives during the body’s impeachment deliberations, I would have added to Trump’s indictment the crime of pandemicide, naming him as responsible for most of the COVID-19 deaths that transpired while he, the nation’s leader, was preoccupied with damning Joe Biden’s election victory. Trump’s failure to, as he vowed in his oath of office, “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States” promulgated a scale of lives lost exceeding anything experienced in the country since the Civil War, 160 years ago.

I do not accuse Trump of pandemicide in reference to mistakes made by his administration between January 2020—when it generally ignored the outbreak in Wuhan, China—and the summer surge of cases and deaths across the United States. I do not charge pandemicide over Trump’s Feb. 26, 2020, dismissal of the COVID-19 threat as miniscule, claiming, “The level that we’ve had in our country is very low, and those people are getting better, or we think that in almost all cases they’re better or getting. We have a total of 15.” Nor do I charge pandemicide over his repeated insistence that COVID-19 cures were available in the forms of hydroxychloroquine, bleach, ultraviolet light, convalescent plasma therapy, the Regeneron cocktail, oleander extract, or simply warm weather. [snip]

So, I level the charge of pandemicide against Trump for his failure to say or do anything to halt the soaring burden of infection and death across the United States from Election Day to his departure from office. During a period when experts inside his government warned that holiday travel and interactions over Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s could lead to massive spread of the virus, and states clamored for aid to disseminate vaccines, Trump was mum.

That was a brief snippet from Garrett's article.  In the whole, she makes the case that history will use to judge COVID Donnie, and it's irrefutable.

OK, we'll say it:

 

USA Today/Suffolk poll: 73% of Republicans do not believe that Joe Biden legitimately won the election and 58% say the attack on the US Capitol was "mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters."

Say it with me everyone: It's a cult.

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) February 21, 2021

 

Finally, please check out Infidel 753's link round-up to interesting, amusing, frightening, elucidating posts from around the Internet (and those were only the top four adjectives we came up with).  Be a regular visitor there, too.

Tweets Of The Day -- An Offer You CAN Refuse

 

 

The Senate Republican counteroffer to Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief plan is $160 billion on vaccines, testing and PPE + some undetermined amount on direct aid and unemployment insurance. https://t.co/66ri6xIq5n

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) January 31, 2021

 

Echoes of 2009 when the group of Republicans pretending to be negotiating a health-care bill in good faith included Mike Enzi, and somehow a lot of people convinced themselves it wasn’t just a trap. https://t.co/fxe0aBWyvi

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) January 31, 2021

 

The funny thing about this is it's basically them saying look you absolutely positively need to go the reconciliation route because even our Lucy deal means you get jack, humiliation and destruction at the polls in two years. https://t.co/SQF2MpVxYj

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 31, 2021

 

Let us get this straight. Just five Senate Republicans think you can impeach and convict a president who orchestrated a terrorist attack against the United States. But ten Senate Republicans want us to give less relief to suffering Americans? And they think we should care?

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) January 31, 2021

 

How can we possibly pass a Covid rescue without bipartisanship? pic.twitter.com/rNSeChy8o5

— Schooley (@Rschooley) January 31, 2021

 

That's not a compromise, it would be abject surrender. Not even worth discussing. https://t.co/xQPPbEoGWE

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 31, 2021

 

As a political party, they’d be better off spending their time trying to suppress voting in the next election cycle. That’s the better way to pursue policies unpopular with Americans.

Oh wait, they’re doing both. https://t.co/UVit2o92er

— David Simon (@AoDespair) January 31, 2021

 

You want a bipartisan COVID Recuse Plan? It turns out, @POTUS delivered one -- the American Rescue Plan. https://t.co/OcxzAg8vX9

— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) January 28, 2021

 

 

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

This is good news on the COVID relief bill, both as a signal of things to come and as an immediate lifeline to people and States in need:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday that he and Democrats holding the Senate majority will use budget reconciliation, a process by which certain legislation can be passed with the support of a simple majority, to pass a coronavirus relief bill “as soon as we possibly can.” 

“We are going to use reconciliation ― that is 50 votes in the Senate plus the vice president ― to pass legislation desperately needed by working families in this country right now,” Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” [snip]

“What we cannot do is wait weeks and weeks, and months and months, to go forward,” Sanders said, arguing against a protracted debate over the relief bill. “We’ve got to act now.”

Never put "bipartisanship" and "unity" over saving peoples' lives and livelihoods.  The Republicans would have tried to block this in the Senate if given the chance.

In that vein, E.J. Dionne, Jr., says Democrats aren't going to be patsies:

So, as Biden would say, here’s the deal: He and his party should indeed make every effort to negotiate with Republicans to win what support they can get. Bipartisanship is great when it works, so it’s constructive that Brian Deese, the head of the White House’s National Economic Council, is meeting with moderates and moderate conservatives, including Collins and Romney, to try to find common ground. What Democrats can’t afford, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview, is the “long drawn-out process” that characterized the party’s approach during the early Obama years on both economic stimulus and health care.

The 2009-2010 example comes up again and again in conversations with Democrats. “We have to learn from that experience in an even more urgent crisis,” Rep. Katherine M. Clark (D-Mass.), the assistant House speaker, said in an ­interview.

This means being willing to move quickly to what is known as the reconciliation process, which would allow passage of economic relief on a simple Senate majority.

“We should give Senate Republicans a very short amount of time to signal if they want to be partners in moving the country forward, or if they intend to be obstructionists,” Van Hollen said. “And the early signaling is that they are reverting to their obstructionist mode.”

Clearly, it looks like Democrats are not messing around with Republicans wanting to obstruct the COVID relief bill.  More, please.  (See also David Rothkopf's article in USA Today on America needing results more than "unity.")

Infidel 753 has some words of wisdom for Democrats in a post about "the end of an (un)lamented era":

The Democrats hold razor-thin margins in both the House and the Senate.  They inherit a federal government in shambles, a nation devastated and paralyzed by covid-19, a population tens of millions of whom are in the grip of paranoid delusions (and heavily armed), a court system packed with ideological wingnuts, and a Congressional opposition consisting largely of lunatics, or of cowards in thrall to lunatics.  They will, at times, fall short and fail to get things done, at least at first.  They will sometimes go in objectionable directions, because the Democratic party includes constituencies with goals different from yours (or mine), and with such narrow majorities they can't afford to alienate any faction.  So, yes, be prepared to push them to do what's right, but at the same time, resolve to be as supportive as you possibly can, through whatever happens.  Because if we don't support them, well, we know what the alternative looks like.  We've seen it in action for the last four years.

Now, more than ever, we need to stick together as much as possible.  Will Rogers said nearly 100 years ago, "I belong to no organized party.  I'm a Democrat."  They're a lot more organized now, but still we're a big tent party that happens to be the only one standing between democracy and tyranny.  Remember that.

Ambitious young seditionist Sen. Josh "Haw Haw" Hawley (Riot-MO) appears to have been an extremist hiding in plain view for some time:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) exhibited "warning signs" of an extremist sympathizer long before he sided with a mob of people who set out to attack the U.S. Capitol, according to a recent report.

The Kansas City Star revealed on Sunday that Hawley has a history of standing up for racists and extremists that stunned his early mentors.

According to the Star, Hawley spoke up for the rights of militia members after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and defended L.A. police detective Mark Fuhrman against charges of racism following the trial of O.J. Simpson.

“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped," Hawley wrote regarding militia groups following the bombing. “Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings."

Hawley also argued in his writings that Fuhrman was unfairly called a racist after his use of racial slurs came to light during the Simpson trial.

If expulsion from the Senate isn't feasible, then censure or making sure he has no committee assignments is the least that should be done to this Trumpist demagogue.

Speaking of demagogues, the second impeachment trial of would- be autocrat Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump is set to begin on February 8.  The single article of impeachment is scheduled to be sent to the Senate today. The Washington Post is keeping a running account of the positions of the Senators on impeachment here.  If your Senators need to know how you feel about making sure this menace to democracy is held accountable and is never able to hold federal office again, be sure to call them -- (202) 224-3121.

Here's the horrible milestone we've officially reached on COVID-19:

The United States has recorded 25 million coronavirus cases, reaching the threshold Saturday afternoon, according to a New York Times database.

Experts say that as staggering as that figure is, it significantly understates the true number of people in the country who have been infected and the scope of the nation’s failure to contain the spread of the virus.

The official tally works out to about one in every 13 people in the country, or about 7.6 percent of the population.  (our emphasis)

Before you go, make sure you get over to the aforementioned Infidel 753 and his always excellent link round- up of posts from around the Internet.  We guarantee you'll be awed, or your money back!

 

Trump's Malicious Vengeance

Twitterbating and golfing at his Florida Merde-o'-Lardo golf club, nitwit/ narcissist/ nihilist Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump is determined to take revenge on the American people and on the institutions and party that let him down in his quest to become president for life.  His refusal to approve the COVID relief bill and attached omnibus funding bill has put millions of Americans at risk, with more pain to come:

Unemployment benefits for millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet lapsed overnight as President Donald Trump refused to sign an end-of-year COVID relief and spending bill that had been considered a done deal before his sudden objections. [snip]

Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, has calculated that 11 million people would lose aid from the programs immediately without additional relief; millions more would exhaust other unemployment benefits within weeks.

Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said the number may be closer to 14 million because joblessness has spiked since Thanksgiving. [snip]

In addition to the unemployment benefits that have already lapsed, Trump’s continued refusal to sign the bill would lead to the expiration of eviction protections and put on hold a new round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses, restaurants and theaters, as well as money for cash-starved transit systems and for vaccine distribution.

The relief was also attached to a $1.4 trillion government funding bill to keep the federal government operating through September, which would mean that failing to sign it by midnight Tuesday would trigger a federal shutdown.

After weeks of White (Supremacist) House assurances that Mango Mussolini would sign the bill,  his reneging on a bipartisan deal effectively pantsed Republicans in the House and Senate who had voted for it.  It's hard not to believe that was no small part of his intent, as he's been whining on Twitter since the election that Republicans haven't supported his fraud lies and subsequent coup- by- court attempts.  Now, he gets to posture that he's a man of the people, supporting a larger stimulus check to which he knows his sociopathic party won't agree.  (Democrats tried to pass the additional funding but were blocked by Republicans in the House, who seem determined to live down to their tax- cuts- for- the- rich party's "afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable" philosophy.)

It's a breathtaking act of sabotage and bad faith, essentially the coin of the realm under Mango Mussolini and his Republican sycophants and enablers.  That it's coming in the "dark winter" of a killer pandemic that was made far worse and more deadly by Mango Mussolini's incompetence and inhumanity amounts to reckless disregard for the lives of the people he took an oath to protect.

BONUS:  Here are scenarios for what could happen next.