Progressives Every Day: The Final Countdown
Progressives Every Day: The Final Countdown
Get ready to... take a deep sigh of relief.
Welcome to a Tuesday edition of Progressives Everywhere! Premium edition!
After a four year storm that alternated between lighting strikes of evil and long showers of stupidity, we are now less than 18 hours away from the end of Donald Trump’s historically awful presidency. Joe Biden’s impending inauguration feels more like an occasion for relief than a cause for sheer celebration. Given the chaos that Trump is leaving in his wake, there are both active fires to put out and a foundational rot to address before the rebuilding process can begin.
Whether Democrats are up to the challenge of a thorough and equitable rebuilding process also remains to be seen. Thankfully, we have more influence over them than we did over the arsonists that burnt everything down. At least in theory.
One other note: The United States officially passed 400,000 COVID-related deaths today. At the same time, the mass murderer most responsible for the genocide was preparing to pardon a long list of convicted criminals. What a system.
Important News You Need to Know
Be Better, Democrats
It’s been an odd 24 hours for me. Yesterday, CNN reported that Chuck Schumer was on the verge of a power-sharing agreement with Mitch McConnell due to the Senate’s 50-50 composition. The vague outlines of the deal suggested that the deal would give Democrats control of the floor schedule and the chairmanship of each committee while providing Republicans equal representation in each committee.
Between the lack of constitutional imperative to strike a deal like this and the bitterness Democratic voters feel towards Mitch McConnell for his abusive of Senate rules over the last decade-plus, it struck me as a remarkably stupid compromise, something I expressed in no uncertain terms on Twitter:
The tweet went viral thanks to the total lack of trust in leadership that Democratic voters have right now (as well as a few retweets from people with big followings). I received plenty of blowback for the tweet, though, from people telling me that this was an inevitability based on Senate rules (that reach all the way back to… 2001, which might as well be 1901 at this point).
There were plenty of people who had the same reaction as I did, including conservatives like Norm Ornstein who, for all their faults, very much understand the Senate rules and the realities of parliamentary politics far better than anyone on Twitter. Still, I admitted to potentially overreacting and said I’d be happy to eat my words if the actual deal turned out to be more of a mere formality than any giveaway to Republicans.
Alas, it looks like I might be going hungry tonight, because Mitch McConnell is trying to use his newfound leverage to preserve the filibuster.
Last night, Adam Jetleson, a former deputy to Sen. Harry Reid and an expert on the Senate’s rules and politics, said that the power-sharing agreement was likely going to be no big deal. Now, he’s not so sure:
Jetlseon has been saying that he thinks it’s likely that Democrats will wind up nuking the filibuster at some point during Biden’s first year in office, once the GOP tries to block a popular policy initiative that Dems can’t afford to let fail. If Schumer takes the bait on this from McConnell, he may be surrendering before the new administration even gets started.
Not that the Biden administration is signaling some great commitment to bold reform right now. As we noted in Sunday’s edition of this newsletter, stepping up anti-trust enforcement and breaking up tech monopolies should be one of Democrats’ top priorities this year.
As The American Prospect and The Intercept report, Biden is “leaning toward two attorneys with deep experience advising monopoly platforms to head the antitrust division at the Department of Justice.”
Renata Hesse, a former Justice Department official under President Barack Obama, worked alongside Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) defending Google a decade ago, helped shepherd through the Amazon/Whole Foods merger, and represented several pharmaceutical companies and other clients in antitrust cases. She is the leading contender for the assistant attorney general for antitrust position, multiple sources told the Prospect and The Intercept on Friday. Sources also said that Juan Arteaga, another Obama Justice Department veteran who defended JPMorgan Chase and several other financial firms in fraud cases and represented AT&T in its merger with Time Warner, was also being considered but was more likely to be appointed deputy assistant attorney general in the antitrust division. Reuters on Sunday reported that Hesse and Arteaga were the leading candidates for AAG.
No one went into this thinking Biden would be some Teddy Roosevelt-style trust-buster or Zephyr Teachout’s favorite president. But putting foxes in the henhouse is a pretty bad way to get started.
Voting Rights
As was the case with their House counterparts in 2019, Senate Democrats will open their time in the majority by introducing a bill that would massively expand voting rights across the country.
The difference is this time, it’s not just a nifty bit of symbolism.
The For the People Act addresses a multitude of voter suppression tactics used by Republicans, reinstitutes most of the regulations that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013, and most crucially in my opinion, requires every state to institute an independent redistricting committee to avoid the egregious gerrymandering that cemented GOP legislative majorities regardless of voters’ wishes.
Alas, unless Democrats nuke the filibuster this thing isn’t passing. And even if they do that, unless they expand the Supreme Court and even out its ideological imbalance, much of it probably wouldn’t survive the parade of challenges that would come from Republican attorneys general and interest groups. So again, it’s all a matter of how much of a stand Democrats are willing to take over the next few years.
If they don’t go all the way, well, things are only going to get worse. I’ve documented the voter suppression tactics that Republicans in Georgia are bandying about after losing three national elections within two months, and now we’re starting to see local Republicans call for measures even more punitive and suppressive than state lawmakers.
In Gwinnett County, where growing Democratic margins and vast turnout helped the party win the presidency and both Senate seats, the GOP Board of Registrations and Elections chairwoman is now suggesting they should do away with no-excuse absentee voting.
“I was on a Zoom call the other day and I said, ‘I’m like a dog with a bone. I will not let them end this session without changing some of these laws,’ “ O’Lenick said. “They don’t have to change all of them, but they’ve got to change the major parts of them so that we at least have a shot at winning.”
Georgia Republicans already want to require voter ID on absentee ballots. O’Lenick’s proposal to limit those who can request a ballot at all would be all the more damaging.
As they’re discovering, Republicans can really only win when they cheat, especially when Trump isn’t on the ballot. Instead of trying to broaden their appeal, they’re seeing numbers like the record Latino turnout and deciding to simply try to strip away their votes.
A study released this week by the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative (UCLA LPPI) estimated that a record 16.6 million U.S. Latinos voted in the 2020 national election —a 30.9% increase from 2016— resulting in key state victories for the Democratic presidential ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
The 30.9% increase “was the single largest 4-year increase in Latino vote ever,” and “was nearly double the nationwide 15.9% growth in ballots cast between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections,” the study noted.
Weed Watch
Good news and bad news to report.
New York: First, Democrats are i n c h i n g towards finally coming to an agreement on what legalization would look like, which would cap a four-year fight to finally introduce marijuana to naive New Yorkers. Gov. Cuomo’s new proposal includes an Office of Cannabis Management, which seems like it’ll be the only fun bureaucracy in Albany.
Mississippi: And now the bad — and incredibly annoying — news. While it’s no surprise that conservative lawmakers are trying to overturn the ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in the state last fall, the American Medical Association has now joined one of the lawsuits. Its brief suggests that marijuana hasn’t been proven to have effective medicinal effects, which is a bunch of malarkey, but hey, it’s important to keep up good relationships with the pharmaceutical companies.
In Other News…
It looks like Lauren Boebert and her Klan of House Republicans really did give tours of the Capitol to insurrectionists. That will certainly be noted in my ongoing list of Republican terrorists.
Relatedly, scientists have found the first intact dinosaur butthole. I believe in science.
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