Tucker Carlson Accuses Biden of Faking Mental Sharpness for More Than an Hour
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
Friday, 26 March 2021 12:08
Borowitz writes: "Calling it a 'scandal bigger than Watergate,' the Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused President Biden of 'thoroughly faking mental sharpness' for more than an hour during his press conference on Thursday."
President Joe Biden. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Tucker Carlson Accuses Biden of Faking Mental Sharpness for More Than an Hour
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
26 March 21
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
alling it a “scandal bigger than Watergate,” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused President Biden of “thoroughly faking mental sharpness” for more than an hour during his press conference on Thursday.
“Doing everything he could to give the appearance of mental acuity, he answered questions in detail, stayed on point, and uttered suspiciously complete sentences,” Carlson alleged. “I’ve seen some shameless stunts in my time, but this one takes the cake.”
Carlson said that Biden’s “desperate charade” extended to “accomplishing concrete things to make himself seem competent.”
“When he said that he would double the number of vaccinations in his first hundred days, my jaw dropped,” he said. “President Trump would never have tried to pull something like that.”
FOCUS: 110 Years Since the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Its Lessons Are Still Unlearned
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58836"><span class="small">Bob Hennelly, Salon</span></a>
Friday, 26 March 2021 11:37
Hennelly writes: "The mistreatment of essential workers during the pandemic speaks to our nation's persistent labor crisis."
Workers and organizers are pushing for what would be one of the biggest victories for labor in the United States over the past few decades if successful in the first Amazon warehouse union election in Bessemer, Alabama. (photo: Getty)
110 Years Since the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Its Lessons Are Still Unlearned
By Bob Hennelly, Salon
26 March 21
The mistreatment of essential workers during the pandemic speaks to our nation's persistent labor crisis
n this day 110 years ago, 146 garment workers, including 123 mostly young immigrant women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in lower Manhattan. Many of these women were forced to jumped from several stories to the pavement below because the intensely anti-union sweat shop owners had insisted on keeping exits locked and only one of four elevators were operating.
These women were paid $15 a week and worked at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week. The owners of the sweatshop were outliers, who refused to acquiesce to the workers' demands that were made during the city-wide strike by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union for better pay and a more humane work schedule.
The very public grotesque death on a city sidewalk of so many women, filled with all of the potentiality of youth, pricked the conscience of New York City and helped spark a national movement for unions, labor rights and worker safety that would, a generation later, be foundational to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.
The manslaughter trial of sweatshop owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, a.k.a. the "Shirtwaist Kings", resulted in their acquittal. Yet they were forever condemned in the court of public opinion, which was informed by the disclosure that they had previously had fires at the Triangle site and their Diamond Waist Company plant had also burned twice.
In the years since, the annual commemoration in lower Manhattan of this horrible day has served as a solemn occasion to remember all of the lives of workers lost the previous year as a consequence of corporate greed and of government complicity in the form of lax or non-existent regulation on the commercial interests that rent our politics to this very day.
And in the intervening years, these gatherings have helped to spotlight just how, with the decline of the union movement, we have seen a dramatic increase in the precarity of employment itself. Union activists, alongside the descendants of the victims from the 1911 fire, annually commemorate the names of the Triangle victims — and, in recent years, also reference the dozens of undocumented immigrants that have died at non-union construction work sites without basic protections like workers' compensation or disability and death benefits.
This year, the Triangle Fire Coalition and the New York Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO annual memorial will be a virtual celebration to highlight the plight of the nation's millions of essential workers and their families who have been infected with COVID-19 and have died by the thousands from the deadly virus.
And as with the death of the Triangle workers, the culpability for the death toll is to be found at the confluence of corporations and the government — who turned a willful blind eye to the spread of the highly contagious and deadly virus in places like the nation's meat plants at the beginning of the pandemic. It was there that the Trump administration, in complete supplication to the meat processors, subverted the efforts of unions and local public health officials to stop the spread of the virus.
Indeed, thousands of workers have suffered nationwide due to a lack of adequate workplace protections during the pandemic. In nearly all cases, having a union could have helped.
Hence, pandemic-related labor strife is happening all around the country. In Amazon's Bessemer Alabama distribution plant, the multinational behemoth is doing all it can to defeat the union organizing drive aimed to enlist 6,000 mostly Black workers into the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).
At a March 22 Moral Monday celebration, Rev. Dr. William Barber took Amazon's Jeff Bezos to task for trying to use his commitment of gifting $10 million to African American causes "to show he is concerned about Black Lives Matter" while seeking to derail Amazon workers bid for collective bargaining.
"I am going to say today that Amazon doesn't care about Black Lives Matter if you give chump change to Black organizations but then block the labor and union rights for workers right here in Bessemer," Barber preached. "Don't play with us like that. If they are any national organizations taking money from Jeff Bezos they ought to give it back until he stops the attack on these workers."
"If you care about Black folks, let them have labor rights . . . if you care about Black folks let them have sick leave and health care . . . if you care about Black folks don't pay a woman two weeks when she needs three weeks because she got sick in your plant," he said.
As 20,000 Amazon workers fell sick with COVID-19, some of whom died Bezos's personal wealth "skyrocketed from $113 billion to $189 billion during COVID," Barber said. The co-leader of the national Poor People's Campaign observed that spike in wealth happened as eight million more Americans fell into poverty during the pandemic, which continues to pose significant occupational health risks for essential workers that are not getting hazard pay.
Amazon's labor pains extend to New York state, too. Last month, New York State Attorney General Letitia James sued Amazon for "repeatedly and persistently" failing "to comply with its obligation to institute reasonable and adequate measures to protect its workers from the spread of the virus in its New York City facilities" in Staten Island and in Queens.
New York's attorney general alleged that Amazon's "flagrant disregard for health and safety requirements... threatened serious illness and grave harm to the thousands of workers in these facilities" and posed a "continued substantial and specific danger to the public health."
James also called out the company for allegedly retaliating against their employees who had raised concerns about how Amazon was addressing the considerable occupational health challenges posed by the pandemic.
Amazon has maintained in its court filings that its COVID precautions "far exceeded" what New York State required and that it had passed a March 30 surprise inspection by New York City officials. Back in the fall it reported that just 1.44 percent of its workforce had been infected by the virus, 42 percent lower than the rate of spread detected in the general population.
With over 30 million Americans infected by COVID-19, we can project, depending on the research study one examines, that as many as one in three Americans will be left with lingering health effects from COVID of varying severity. That's millions of people, many of whom will have contracted the virus while working. Yet right now, most states do not provide a Workers Compensation presumption from COVID meaning that employers can, and already have, fight the claims by disabled workers.
One of the problems with today's pandemic-inspired labor movement is that no one really knows how many workers have died or been infected on-the-job. We have hints here and there from reporting projects: for instance, thanks to a joint reporting project by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News, we do know that more than 3,500 health care workers who were under 60 years of age died from COVID, with 700 from just New Jersey and New York alone.
We also know that hundreds of law enforcement officers have died from COVID-19, making it the leading cause of death for that workforce.
But certainly, the COVID disease and death toll for health care workers and first responders is only a partial picture of the bigger picture of the occupational health crisis that has ensnared the entire essential workforce.
Some legislators are working to change that. New York State Senator Brad Hoylman lives in lower Manhattan just three blocks away from the site of the Triangle Fire and not far from the World Trade Center. Recently, Hoylman has introduced state legislation to create a voluntary COVID Health Registry, similar to the one that was created for the 9/11 WTC first responders and survivors. It was that registry which helped both state and federal policy makers gauge the public health implications from the toxic exposure as they became evident years later.
"We don't know what the long-term effects of COVID are yet," Hoylman said. "Yet, we know there are lingering side effects from respiratory conditions to psychotic breakdowns and that is all just coming to light. Hopefully, this is not a lifetime disability, but there are some worrisome signs that suggest the impact could be long term for as many as ten percent or more of COVID cases."
New York state is one of at least thirty states that don't not have a workers compensation guarantee for essential workers who contracted the deadly virus on their job. In these states, workers that are sidelined can be left unemployed without the financial resources to support themselves while they convalesce.
Similarly difficult to account for are undocumented workers, many of whom kept working amid the pandemic.
"I am hopeful that this kind [the health registry] of evidence of long-term health consequences from COVID can help change that," he said.
Without these basic numbers, the number of essential workers battling COVID-19 will remain hidden. The best way to honor the essential workers that have died from COVID is to honor the ones that are still living.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38663"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The Boston Globe</span></a>
Friday, 26 March 2021 11:17
McKibben writes: "The 2020 elections, at Harvard and in the US, have shown what a majority of voters want: climate action and inclusive governance."
Harvard University. (photo: Getty)
Harvard Tries to Subvert Votes Too
By Bill McKibben, The Boston Globe
26 March 21
The 2020 elections, at Harvard and in the US, have shown what a majority of voters want: climate action and inclusive governance.
oter suppression is truly ugly business. From Georgia to Arizona, Republican lawmakers are introducing legislation to ban mail-in voting, restrict ballot dropboxes, even eliminate Sunday voting to make sure that members of Black churches don’t continue the practice of walking to the polls after services. The Democratic answer to this — HR1, the For the People Act, an effort to protect access to the polls — may turn out to be the test on which the Senate filibuster stands or falls. It’s all the stuff of great and ominous drama.
A lower-key version of this tragedy is playing out in Cambridge — less a threat to democracy, but just as ugly in its demonstration that people in power don’t yield it easily. Harvard, of all places, is trying to break the power of voters too.
The nation’s oldest college has a unique system of governance among universities in that one of its two governing bodies, the Board of Overseers, is democratically elected by the 300,000 living alumni of the university. Last year, a group of alumni decided to challenge the officially recruited university candidates, running an insurgent campaign on a bold platform of climate action and inclusive governance that called for divesting the institution’s $41 billion endowment from fossil fuels and welcoming younger voices to the Board so that the university is better prepared to face the 21st century. The group, called Harvard Forward, put forth five recent alumni in an outsider bid for the board.
To even qualify for the ballot, these candidates had to overcome obstacles seemingly designed to make them fail — the system for allowing alumni to endorse the nominations took more than hour to navigate on my laptop. But with strong grass-roots support from the alumni community, the Harvard Forward Five managed to collect nearly 5,000 alumni signatures to qualify for the election. In contrast, Harvard’s official candidates did not have to do much of anything to get on the ballot.
But then the petition candidates did something truly unforgivable: they won a free and fair democratic election. Harvard Forward’s candidates secured three of the five open overseer seats — the first petition candidates elected since Archbishop Desmond Tutu won in 1989 on a platform protesting Harvard’s investments in apartheid South Africa. Their victory also marked the first time ever in Harvard’s 384-year history that petition candidates have won a majority of seats up for election.
Harvard alumni spoke loudly and clearly at the ballot box in favor of climate action and more open, transparent, and accountable governance. And what did Harvard do? Did it decide that the time had come to change policies and match the obvious desire of their various constituencies for change? No. One month after the election, the university announced that it would create new rules to restrict petition campaigns, limiting the number of board members who can be elected via the petition process to six out of 30. No limit on petition overseers existed previously; this means that there is no longer any chance of a majority that reflects the will of voters.
This is not far removed from the concept of undermining elections. But anyone surprised by Harvard’s antidemocratic behavior has not been paying attention.
The reason the 2020 petition candidates were the first to win since 1989 was that Harvard reacted to the last success in much the same way: After Tutu’s win, it changed the rules to make it harder for petition candidates to win. Harvard Forward overcame those barriers through grass-roots organizing, and now, in response, Harvard is limiting petition candidacies — no matter how much organizing alumni groups like Harvard Forward do, they’ll always be limited to a fifth of the seats.
It’s an open question why Harvard is doing this: Though its holdings are complicated and often opaque, refusing to divest from fossil fuel stocks has presumably cost its endowment huge sums of money since those companies have hit the skids. Harvard says it has no coal and oil stocks at the moment, but it refuses to join peers such as Oxford, Cambridge, or the University of California in joining the global fight to rein in fossil fuel. When UC made its divestment announcement in 2019, it said “continuing to invest in fossil fuels poses an unacceptable financial risk to UC’s portfolios and therefore to the students, faculty, staff and retirees of the University of California.” A 2018 study of New York state’s pension fund found that failing to divest had cost it the equivalent of $20,000 per state retiree, which is doubtless one reason that the state comptroller finally signed on for divestment last year.
Three more candidates are running on the Harvard Forward banner this winter — Dr. Yvette Efevbera, Megan Red Shirt-Shaw, and Natalie Unterstell. They can’t form a majority because of Harvard’s new rules. But they can help form a new conscience for the world’s richest university. The 2020 elections, at Harvard and in the United States, have proved the strength of grass-roots organizing and shown what a majority of voters want: climate action and inclusive governance. Attacking elemental democratic principles does not change that fact.
At some level, Harvard recognizes the folly of interfering with elections. The university tossed one of its grads — Representative Elise Stefanik of New York — off a Kennedy School of Government advisory board in January because she refused to recognize the results of November’s election. That was right — in the wake of the attempted coup, we realize how dangerous this kind of prevarication can be. It’s time for Harvard to apply the same logic to its own governance.
Six Days in Fallujah: Yet Another Video Game That Refuses to Question US Militarism
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58834"><span class="small">Emad Ahmed, Middle East Eye</span></a>
Friday, 26 March 2021 08:10
Ahmed writes: "First announced in 2009 before being dropped, the Konami video game offering serves as a perfect mixture of ignorance and imperialist propaganda."
A scene from the trailer for Six Days in Fallujah, which is due to be released sometime this year. (photo: Highwire Games)
Six Days in Fallujah: Yet Another Video Game That Refuses to Question US Militarism
By Emad Ahmed, Middle East Eye
26 March 21
First announced in 2009 before being dropped, the Konami video game offering serves as a perfect mixture of ignorance and imperialist propaganda
n 2009, gaming heavyweight Konami announced it would publish Six Days in Fallujah, a first-person shooter game set during the second Battle of Fallujah - a gruelling struggle between American-led forces and Iraqi armed groups, which lasted six weeks in the winter of 2004.
The offensive involving US and British troops, who eventually captured the city, left at least 800 civilians dead, according to the International Red Cross, making it one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq War. Even five years after the battle, plans to release a game centred around the memories of the events created huge controversy, which resulted in Konami dropping the title.
With the local and regional fallout of the Iraq invasion now spanning nearly two decades, the entire episode is seen by many analysts as an unmitigated disaster. It’s therefore even more shocking to see the game return from the dead.
Now in the hands of Highwire Games, a studio made up of the developers behind the popular Halo and Destiny franchises, new publisher Victura announced in February that the game would be released at some point this year.
Given the soul-searching that followed the start of the war and the fact that there is a genealogy linking the invasion and the later development of the Islamic State (IS) group, you would think the creators of the game would have used the decade since it was dropped for some introspection. Instead of going back to the drawing board or dropping the game entirely, however, Victura and Highwire decided to awaken Six Days in Fallujah from its 11-year slumber.
Whose narrative?
There are many reasons to place a permanently suspicious side-eye to this spectacle. Peter Tamte, head of Victura, gave some worrying answers to pop culture and gaming site Polygon in response to the collective scepticism gaming aficionados such as this author have.
“We do want to show how choices that are made by policymakers affect the choices that [a marine] needs to make on the battlefield,” he said, showing some signs of the required self-awareness needed to demonstrate the complexity of warfare. However, he continued: “Just as that [marine] cannot second-guess the choices by the policymakers, we’re not trying to make a political commentary about whether or not the war itself was a good or a bad idea.”
It’s this second bit that immediately dissolves all of Victura’s credibility, even more than the cop-out, dual-narrative set-up created by Highwire, where you follow an Iraqi family fleeing from the violence, alongside the shooting gallery offered to the player, through the eyes of an American soldier.
Too often there are people who use the smokescreen of "avoiding politics" to absolve their own political principles from receiving any sort of criticism. The mind bends trying to untangle the cognitive dissonance required to claim a game about an actual war, in which people are shot at and in which people have the choice to shoot, can be anything but political.
The widely condemned disaster of the Iraq War has created a perfect opportunity for an engaging narrative that could expose the flaws not just of the overall war, but specific episodes, such as that of Fallujah.
Instead, Six Days in Fallujah seems destined to fall into a genre of creative output, which compartmentalises, by virtue of its focus on the experience of the US soldier, aspects of war that can never be separated. Every bullet shot has a narrative attached to both the person doing the shooting and the person on the receiving end. Victura and Highwire, by putting players primarily in control of a marine, choose to prioritise one of those narratives over the other. It is therefore the narrative the player experiences - that of the marine - that matters, not anyone else’s.
Highwire’s attempts to placate this concern by pointing to the subplot about a fleeing Iraqi family is simply not enough, abdicating responsibility by creating a false sense of balance. The effect of the war on ordinary Iraqis was about more than just running away from fighting and the impact of this specific battle remains visibly present. In just one example, years after the battle, survivors were giving birth to children with hugely increased numbers of defects and pediatric cancers.
Faux-strategists sitting in armchairs and cheerleaders of the war, as well as those trying to remain "neutral", such as Tamte, aren’t particularly interested in those details. It has ended up making the stories of war they produce - whatever the medium - stale and futile. High-profile developers seem unable to focus on any retelling of the Iraq War solely from the perspective of the ordinary people affected by it.
Since the resurfacing of the controversy, Victura has said that the events portrayed in the game are "inseperable from politics" but added that it has worked to ensure it includes multiple perspectives.
An industry-wide problem
Sappy stories to elicit empathy for US troops have never been the best vehicle to understand the nuances of war, especially in the shooter genre. Back in 2005, Ubisoft brought Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 to the market to prove otherwise. The game was praised for its attention to detail and for allowing players to follow the actual missions of real-life soldiers in World War Two. However, support for the allies in that particular war is much easier to digest for most, principally due to the atrocities blamed on the people they were fighting and the eventual formation of repentant and renewed governments in both Germany and Japan.
Since that release, most big-name studios seemed to have doubled down on creating war-based shooters or military-themed games without any semblance of nuance. Splinter Cell: Double Agent included a storyline of a Pakistani nuclear scientist selling dangerous materials, and eventually having his assassination authorised by the National Security Agency. Spec Ops: The Line follows Afghan-war veterans fighting in a follow-up war in sandstorm-hit Dubai. There was even a Blackwater game, celebrating Erik Prince’s infamous mercenary outfit, which was notably (and mercifully) awarded Giant Bomb’s Worst Game of the Year accolade. And before Call of Duty decided to bring a wrinkly Ronald Reagan back to life in its most recent instalment, it gave players the opportunity to literally blast bullets indiscriminately at civilians in an airport.
Maybe we should be thankful they’re less on-the-nose than 2003’s America’s 10 Most Wanted, which had you capture figures such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. This military-video game industrial complex has led to an absurdist Twitter account showing which video games allow you to violate the Geneva Conventions and in what ways.
The silver lining about the ever-increasing ubiquity and mainstream enjoyment of video games is that it has brought huge opportunities for some developers to take creative risks and challenge our views on a range of complex topics. Papers, Please remains one of the gold standards, where you control a border crossing in a fictional Eastern European country, balancing your personal finances and the faceless bureaucratic orders from above in order to survive. But such offerings are exceptions rather than the rule.
In their place, we’re left with games about Arabs, the Middle East or brown people in general where developers aren’t even bothered to get the language right. The most recent example of this has come from the latest Hitman game, with Arabic incorrectly displayed from left to right in nonsense-level translation. As a side note, a previous Hitman game depicted Sikhs being killed in the holy Golden Temple, a highly insensitive choice given the deaths of hundreds of Sikhs at the Amritsar temple in 1984. It goes to show how little of an afterthought non-western cultures are at many gaming studios, where repeated mistakes are often ignored.
The root problem to avoiding military whitewashing, continuous errors and displays of ignorance within the medium is the need for more prominent Arab, African and South Asian gaming studios. These are places that don’t currently have the necessary funding for developers to fulfil their creative dreams, compared to other parts of the world. And although Japan and Europe (especially the UK) have been at the forefront of game development since the beginning, it seems to be a fixation for US developers to continually share stories of heroic troops in combat.
The US army has taken note, attempting to recruit newcomers via Twitch. But the current stalemate of bland-but-popular military games isn’t sustainable in this growing market and eventually it’ll have to make way, hopefully for something original, inclusive and much more exciting.
If the Democrats Don't Kill the Filibuster, They're Screwed
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58154"><span class="small">Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, Jacobin</span></a>
Thursday, 25 March 2021 12:13
Excerpt: "There are many reasons to end the filibuster. It is undemocratic, it has been abused, it has no constitutional foundation, and it empowers a tiny minority to stop anything."
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
If the Democrats Don't Kill the Filibuster, They're Screwed
By Andrew Perez and Julia Rock, Jacobin
25 March 21
The Democratic Party’s leadership must immediately kill the filibuster and move key legislation — because the GOP is one heartbeat away from reclaiming control of the Senate.
here are many reasons to end the filibuster. It is undemocratic, it has been abused, it has no constitutional foundation, and it empowers a tiny minority to stop anything. But maybe the best reason to get rid of the filibuster is this: Mitch McConnell is one heartbeat away from becoming Senate majority leader again, and the filibuster makes it impossible for Democrats to pass much of anything quickly, even though they could lose power at any moment.
The Senate is split 50-50, and ten Democratic senators are from states whose Republican governors could replace them with GOP appointees in the event they are rendered incapacitated by a health event. Among that group, six are over seventy years old. The pandemic has provided ample evidence that such health events can occur at any moment — and that’s especially true for septuagenarians and octogenarians. And, while deaths of younger senators have been rare, three such casualties have occurred in the last thirty years.
Two months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Democrats have passed one major piece of legislation: a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package. Democrats used the budget reconciliation process to pass the bill by a simple majority vote, but they cannot use the process for most legislation. Plus, the move comes with clear downsides, as it provided the basis for killing a $15 minimum wage. It’s not a real substitute for ending the filibuster.
By preserving the filibuster, Democrats are choosing to allow Republicans to indefinitely block virtually all legislation, outside of occasional spending bills, unless they can win over ten GOP votes. Garnering such Republican support seems like a fantasy, given the minority party’s highly conservative and disciplined opposition: no Republicans voted for the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, even though it is wildly popular with the public.
While Biden and conservative Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia have started publicly mulling some limited filibuster reform — a return to the “talking filibuster” — when you read about the idea, it quickly starts to sound unnecessarily complicated. There is also no indication yet that it would actually stop Republicans from blocking legislation for long periods of time.
In truth, spending any time at all considering such half measures could prove disastrous — and at least one report suggests some Biden aides are starting to appreciate this.
“People close to Biden tell us he’s feeling bullish on what he can accomplish, and is fully prepared to support the dashing of the Senate’s filibuster rule to allow Democrats to pass voting rights and other trophy legislation for his party,” Axios reported yesterday. “His team sees little chance he’s going to be able to rewire the government in his image if he plays by the rules of bringing in at least 10 Republicans.”
If that anonymously sourced story proves true — a big if — it would be good news, because right now, Democrats are wasting time they don’t have. Their hemming and hawing over the filibuster is needlessly stalling the implementation of huge swaths of their agenda during what could be the only, brief opportunity they have during Biden’s presidency to put their platform into law. Their majority is so razor-thin, after all, that it could end at literally any moment.
A Majority That Could End Any Day
Democrats controlled the presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate from 2009 to 2010, during Barack Obama’s first two years as president, and they only regained full control in Washington this year, after senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won their runoff races in Georgia.
But the party’s grip on the Senate is exceedingly narrow. The chamber is split 50-50, with Democrats relying on Vice President Kamala Harris to break tie votes. In effect, any unexpected personal health crisis among key Democratic lawmakers is a political emergency imperiling the party’s hold on the Senate.
In January, days after Democrats took power in Washington, Vermont senator Patrick Leahy was briefly hospitalized. Leahy, eighty, said he “had some muscle spasms” and was given “a clean bill of health.”
Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s other senator, is seventy-nine and had a heart attack during his presidential campaign last year.
Vermont governor Phil Scott is a Republican, and he would have the power to appoint a replacement — one who would likely be from his party — if either of the state’s senators were unable to finish their terms.
Four other Democratic senators who are older than seventy represent states with GOP governors that have the power to make appointments to fill Senate vacancies — Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Manchin in West Virginia. In all, thirty-four Senate Democrats are at least sixty years old.
Democrats should know full well how perilous their majority is. In 2009, seventy-seven-year-old Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy’s death from brain cancer ended the party’s sixty-seat, filibuster-proof majority and nearly tanked Democrats’ health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act.
After Republican Scott Brown unexpectedly won the election to replace Kennedy, Democrats were forced to pass a version of the Affordable Care Act that had already been approved by the Senate and only made light changes a few months later, using the budget reconciliation process.
“I Don’t Need to Wait Another Minute”
After a gunman killed ten people this week at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, reportedly using an “AR-15-style pistol modified with an arm brace,” Biden demanded that Congress pass new gun regulations immediately.
“I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take commonsense steps that will save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Senate to act,” Biden said Tuesday, calling for Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, as well as expand background checks.
None of those ideas are likely to garner substantial Republican support, even if Democrats were to water them down. Until Democrats eliminate the filibuster, any talk of new gun rules is meaningless and should be treated as such.
The same can be said of most of Democrats’ policy agenda, including the items they’re emphasizing in Congress right now. The party’s democracy reform and voting rights legislation, H.R. 1, isn’t going anywhere with the GOP able to block it, and statehood for Washington, DC, certainly isn’t either.
According to the Intercept, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is telling union leaders that Democrats will bring their landmark labor legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, to the floor once it has at least fifty cosponsors, but the chance that ten or more Republicans will support the bill is close to nonexistent.
Democrats aren’t talking much these days about a public health insurance option, which Biden pitched as an alternative to Medicare for All. Instead, they opted to use their COVID bill to deliver tens of billions of dollars to health insurance companies in order to put people on mediocre private insurance plans. But if Democrats are ever going to get serious about passing a public option, they would surely have to do it without any Republican votes.
Democrats would also likely have to significantly scale back their proposed $15 minimum wage hike in order to win any GOP support on the issue. That would mean shortchanging workers who have been paid too little for years.
Increasing the minimum wage isn’t some ideological wish-list item. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 has been in place since 2009, and it’s worth less today than it’s ever been, according to Federal Reserve research.
The people most impacted by this long-delayed wage increase are also the ones who have borne the brunt of the nation’s yearlong medical emergency. A recent Brookings Institution study found that essential workers during the COVID pandemic “comprised approximately half (47%) of all workers in occupations with a median wage of less than $15 an hour.”
Democrats, in other words, have a moral obligation to fulfill their promise to raise the minimum wage immediately, because it will not happen in a McConnell-led Senate.
They similarly have a moral obligation to protect people’s voting rights, since Republicans around the country are working diligently to make it much harder to vote. According to a Brennan Center report last month, lawmakers in forty-three states “have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access.”
Democrats can’t move quickly on any of these pressing items with the filibuster in place. In fact, one of the few things they can do with their fifty-one-vote majority is to change the Senate rules and eliminate the filibuster. And that might be the only way to put all — and maybe any — of these other ideas into law.
Reconciliation Is Not the Answer
Conservative Democrats’ interest in preserving the filibuster, combined with GOP intransigence, led Democrats to use the budget reconciliation process to pass their COVID relief bill by majority vote.
Reconciliation is a process historically only used once or twice per year, and it allows the Senate parliamentarian to weigh in and recommend tossing measures that aren’t budget items. In February, parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised Senate Democrats that their $15 minimum wage provision wasn’t budget-related and shouldn’t be part of their pandemic aid bill.
While Democrats have the power to ignore MacDonough’s opinion (a process requiring only forty-one votes) or replace her — like Republicans did in 2001 when the parliamentarian wasn’t ruling their way — they chose to do neither.
Sanders has been arguing that Democrats can use the reconciliation process more often, and he’s now pushing to use reconciliation to pass a series of measures designed to lower drug prices. But Sanders’s strategy could ultimately rely on Democrats ignoring the parliamentarian — something his colleagues do not seem interested in doing.
In short, this seems like a futile and frustrating way to try to write policy, when Democrats should really just end the filibuster.
If Democrats genuinely want to enact new gun regulations or pass any of their broader policy priorities, they can’t waste any more time debating such pointless matters. They control the presidency, the House, and the Senate, and their caucus is just large enough to vote to kill the filibuster tomorrow if their members wanted to — and they should want to, as soon as possible.
Democrats have all the structural power they need to pass their promised agenda today. They might not have that power tomorrow.
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alling it a “scandal bigger than Watergate,” the Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused President Biden of “thoroughly faking mental sharpness” for more than an hour during his press conference on Thursday.
n this day 110 years ago, 146 garment workers, including 123 mostly young immigrant women, died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in lower Manhattan. Many of these women were forced to jumped from several stories to the pavement below because the intensely anti-union sweat shop owners had insisted on keeping exits locked and only one of four elevators were operating. 
oter suppression is truly ugly business. From Georgia to Arizona, Republican lawmakers are introducing legislation to ban mail-in voting, restrict ballot dropboxes, even eliminate Sunday voting to make sure that members of Black churches don’t continue the practice of walking to the polls after services. The Democratic answer to this — HR1, the For the People Act, an effort to protect access to the polls — may turn out to be the test on which the Senate filibuster stands or falls. It’s all the stuff of great and ominous drama.
n 2009, gaming heavyweight Konami announced it would publish Six Days in Fallujah, a first-person shooter game set during the second Battle of Fallujah - a gruelling struggle between American-led forces and Iraqi armed groups, which lasted six weeks in the winter of 2004.
here are many reasons to end the filibuster. It is undemocratic, it has been abused, it has no constitutional foundation, and it 
