With Republican Members of Congress united in opposition to the pending coronavirus relief legislation, Democrats require both an unusual degree of consensus and the special protections of “budget reconciliation” procedures to enact the legislation on their own. Budget reconciliation allows Congress to pass certain kinds of important fiscal legislation with only a simple majority rather than the 60 votes ordinarily required to cut off a filibuster in the Senate. To keep reconciliation procedures from being hijacked to ram through every item on the majority party’s wish-list on which it lacks the votes to end a filibuster, the statute establishing them imposes strict criteria for what provisions are eligible for reconciliation treatment. Democrats have known all along that some provisions they wanted to include in the relief bill might not meet the requirements for budget reconciliation. Chief among these was their proposed stepped increase in the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Superficially, that looks more like a regulatory initiative rather than a fiscal one. Democrats’ hopes were buoyed when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that increasing the minimum wage would cost the federal government a lot of money. This is not because the federal government has a lot of minimum wage workers itself, but rather because CBO believes an increase in the minimum wage would prompt employers to eliminate some low-skilled jobs, reducing those workers’ tax payments and increasing their need for subsistence benefits. ADVERTISEMENT Not just any fiscal impact, however, suffices. Architects of budget reconciliation procedures knew the possible effect of some tax or spending provision in an otherwise unrelated proposal. One could, for example, repeal the Clean Water Act but charge polluters a trivial tax for each ton of sludge they dumped. To guard against this, the statute excludes not just overtly non-fiscal provisions but also those whose fiscal impact is ...
Democratic party policies
CPAC Speech Proved It’s Still Donald Trump’s Republican Party, Says Brexit’s Farage
Brexit leader Nigel Farage said that former President Donald Trump’s speech at CPAC cemented his position as the leader of the Republican Party, hailing the return of a true “opposition” in the United States. Mr Farage said that following Trump’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Sunday, it is clear that “Trump’s grip on the Republican Party seems to be as strong as ever”. “I will be the first to acknowledge that we are talking about a cult of personality here, but that is because, in 2021, it is Donald Trump’s Republican Party,” Farage wrote for Newsweek, predicting that Trump will further solidify his power within the party through winning battles against so-called RINOs in Washington DC. Mr Farage said the speech also secured Trump’s role as the true opposition leader in the United States, something which the Brexit leader said has been sorely missing from American politics. The U.S. has not had much in the way of “opposition leadership” for several years, Farage explained, adding that the lack of a credible opposition is “unhealthy in any democracy”. “Following Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, there was a vacuum at the top of the Democratic Party that was filled by CNN and The New York Times . By the time Joe Biden won the nomination, the campaign was in full swing and the key message was simply ‘Vote for me, not the other guy,'” Farage said. The leader of the Brexit movement and the recently renamed Reform UK party said that Mr Trump “has what it takes to do the job well”. “Trump made it clear how he intends to use his new role. He will hold Biden’s administration to account and he will not shy away from criticizing it when he has to. It’s true that opposition leadership is, in certain ways, easier than being in charge, but it requires considerable amounts of energy and skill to be a truly effective opposition leader,” Farage said. Farage Praises Trump as ‘Bravest Person’ He’d Ever Met, Who Stands Up for ...
Democrats Courted Fight for $15. The Movement Wants Them to Deliver.
Photo: Jemal Countess/Getty Images for One Fair Wage When LaTonya Jones Costa goes to work, her shift can start at a deathbed. It happened that way in December, when the home health aide arrived at the residence of a much-loved client. The woman’s lips were blue; there was vomit and feces on her. Still conscious, she worried about missing a doctor’s appointment, but Costa knew she needed a hospital and called for an ambulance. By the time the medics arrived, they couldn’t find the woman’s vitals. They took her away, and the same day, Costa received the call she’d been dreading: The woman had died. “What hurt me the most was that I wasn’t able to be there with her,” Costa said, choking up. Costa makes $10 an hour. This is a fifty-cent improvement from when she first started working as a certified nursing assistant in Georgia in 2007. Paying her bills is a question of “creative budgeting,” she said. The lights have to stay on now, and her twelve-year-old daughter needs the internet for school. But “the water bill is due on the 11th, and I won’t receive a shut off notice until the 20th. So this can go a little bit longer,” she explained. After her client died in December, she started driving for Lyft to try to make up the income. She said she lost money instead. What she needs, she said, is a $15 minimum wage. And she needs it this year, not at some future date to be determined by lackadaisical legislators. So does Ieisha Franceis, who works for $9.20 an hour at Freddy’s Frozen Custard and Steakburgers in Durham, North Carolina. Like Costa, Franceis is an activist with the Fight for $15 and a Union and helped lead two walkouts at Freddy’s last year over what she said were dangerous lapses in pandemic safety. She had hopes for this Congress. Now, on the phone, she sounds like a woman out of patience. “It’s ridiculous,” Franceis said. “You have this unelected ghost that just popped up out of nowhere. Who is this person, this Senate parliamentarian? Who are you ...
Raid the Republican Party to save the party
Democrats’ instinct after winning the White House and Congress in 2020 might be to stand back and let the Republican Party slowly self-destruct. Such inaction would not necessarily preserve democracy. A Trumpist GOP would continue to win elections, maintain power over certain states, and could regain control of the Senate or House in 2022. The responsibility of saving the Republican Party — and the rule of law — has been thrust not onto principled Republicans alone, but also Democrats and independents. To do so, they must contend with a primary system that easily could end the political careers of the Republicans who crossed Donald Trump in defending the 2020 elections, such as Georgia’s Gov. Brian Kemp Brian Kemp Trump says 2018 endorsement of Kemp 'hurt' Republicans Rick Scott acknowledges Biden 'absolutely' won fair election Georgia teachers to be next in line in state for coronavirus vaccine MORE and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Democrats and independents need to cross over and vote in Republican primary elections. Such “reverse primarying” could ensure that the general election at least would be a choice between candidates who believe in the sanctity of elections and good governance. ADVERTISEMENT Raiding a party’s primary is typically done to scupper a rival party in the general election by voting for their more extreme candidate. I propose the opposite: increasing a moderate Republican’s chances by cutting the far right off at the knees. Nearly 60 percent of GOP voters want Trump to keep playing a major role in the party. Eradicating the danger of extremism will require more than focusing on voter registration and increasing turnout. Non-Republicans need to “primary from across the aisle,” and do it nationally. Some Republicans who value facts are defecting from their party, rather than fighting to take it back. Starting a third party composed of Republican emigres has been recently floated . If these ...
FNC’s Carlson: The Party that Runs Baltimore, East St. Louis Is ‘Going to Make the Middle East a Much Better Place’
Monday, FNC “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host Tucker Carlson opened his program criticizing President Joe Biden’s so-called “counterterrorism” approach to Middle East foreign policy, which recently included airstrikes on Syria. Carlson noted the phraseology used to describe the act, which still left a lot of unanswered questions. Transcript as follows: CARLSON: Just 36 days into a new administration, and already, Joe Biden has fulfilled a major campaign promise. If you didn’t vote for him, it might be hard to admit this, but don’t worry, this is nothing that’s going to improve your life or the life of the United States. It’s nothing that’s going to make you freer or happier, help you drop 20 pounds or bring you closer to your family. It’s nothing you can use to buy dinner. You’re not getting a stimulus check this week. Your kids are not going back to school. You’re not getting a raise. You thought you might be, back on the campaign trail, Joe Biden promised low-wage workers will bump to 15 bucks an hour. Remember that? Sorry, not happening, not because hiking the minimum wage might eliminate jobs. That is a real argument, but it’s not relevant to what just happened. The minimum wage isn’t going to 15 bucks because the Senate Parliamentarian wouldn’t allow it. Raising the minimum wage to that level would violate established procedure, the Parliamentarian said, and of course, the White House wanted no point, no part of violating procedure. As Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain put it, quote: “We’re going to honor the rules of the Senate and work within the system.” Okay. Keep that in mind when they try to eliminate the filibuster or pack the Supreme Court or making D.C. a state. In the meantime, though, no living wage for you. That’s one campaign promise that Joe Biden appears to have forgotten. But the promise he remembered wasn’t made to you in the first place or to the country. It was made to defense contractors and neocon think tanks in ...
