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How Unions Defeated a Right-to-Work Bill in Deep-Red Montana |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=57598"><span class="small">Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Intercept</span></a>
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Sunday, 14 March 2021 13:52 |
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Cunningham-Cook writes: "The labor movement in Montana scored a historic win earlier this month when a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans defeated a 'right-to-work' bill on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives."
Workers from across Montana protest so-called right-to-work legislation at the state Capitol before a floor vote in the House in Helena, Mont., on March 2, 2021. (photo: Courtesy Montana AFL-CIO)
How Unions Defeated a Right-to-Work Bill in Deep-Red Montana
By Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Intercept
14 March 21
Montana is the first state where Republicans control the legislature and governorship that has failed to pass right-to-work laws.
 he labor movement in Montana scored a historic win earlier this month when a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans defeated a “right-to-work” bill on the floor of the Montana House of Representatives. What makes it more surprising is that the bill had the support of the state’s governor and legislative leaders as well as an unspecified level of support from the Koch-backed dark-money group Americans for Prosperity, which has successfully pushed right-to-work laws in other states.
Since the twofold combination of the Citizens United decision and the decision by Charles Koch to dramatically ramp up his political activity, labor has been dealt a string of legislative defeats at the state level. Right-to-work laws, which eliminate the requirement that people represented by a union join and pay dues to the union in the private sector, passed in Indiana and Michigan in 2012, Wisconsin in 2015, West Virginia in 2016, and Kentucky in 2017. A right-to-work law also passed in Missouri in 2017 but failed at the ballot box in a veto referendum in August 2018. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would ease paths to unionization and ban state right-to-work legislation, passed the U.S. House on a party-line vote Tuesday.
Until now, there has not been a single state in which Republicans control the legislature and governorship where right-to-work legislation has made it out of committee and then failed to pass.
The Montana labor movement didn’t just stop the right-to-work bill, it also halted a “paycheck deception” bill that would have banned automatic dues deductions for unions in the public sector, potentially damaging the unions by forcing them to collect dues by hand, a much more time-consuming process. Unions fight these measures in both the private and public spheres because they can create a downward spiral in which management successfully pressures more and more members to quit the union, reducing its power.
“From our perspective, being able to stop virtually every bill that attacks collective bargaining is an unbelievable victory,” said Al Ekblad, executive secretary of the Montana AFL-CIO. “That’s what we have been working towards for 10 years here in Montana.”
While Republicans have controlled both houses of the Montana Legislature since 2009, the state had Democratic governors from 2005 until the 2020 elections, when former U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte, made famous by shoving a reporter in 2017, was elected governor. The Intercept reported in November that a draft priority list had been circulating in the Legislature which included rollbacks of workers’ rights, including right-to-work and paycheck deception legislation and an attack on Montana’s unique status as a state that requires employers to have just cause for terminating workers.
Amanda Curtis, president of the Montana Federation of Public Employees, the state’s largest union with 25,000 members, said that the Republican landslide in the state in November triggered thousands of her members to get involved.
“After the November election results, we knew we would be in hot water,” said Curtis. “We started meeting with labor leaders in Iowa and Wisconsin” — Iowa passed a paycheck deception attack on public sector unions in 2017 — “and we asked them, ‘What do you wish you would have done?’ They really laid out the bills that passed in their states and what they wished they had done differently.”
The day after the election, Curtis said, she sent out an email to her membership, asking if they were ready to fight. “We got so many responses to that email, with 2,637 members of MFPE participating. They’re meeting every other week; they break out by region so people can talk about their interactions with legislators. It’s just been overwhelming.”
Ekblad credits labor’s win in Montana to their ability to work with Republicans. In the House, the right-to-work bill was defeated on March 2 by a landslide 62-38 vote, while the paycheck deception bill went down in the Montana Senate by a 28-22 vote. (Republicans hold a 67 to 33 majority in the Montana House and a 31 to 19 majority in the Montana Senate.) “If we hadn’t been able to work with Republicans, we would have lost,” said Ekblad. “Around the rest of the country, the idea that we could defeat through legislative process was hard to believe. Even within [the AFL-CIO] … there was a sense we were being naive.” There are several Republican union members in the state Legislature, and unions have actively worked in GOP primaries to support pro-labor candidates.
State Rep. Derek Harvey of Butte, a union firefighter, agreed. “We had to work across the aisle with moderate Republicans to make it a priority that whatever happens, this bill needs to die,” he said. “We built great relationships, and labor folks were relentless, sending emails and pressuring the Legislature. I’ve been averaging 100 messages a day personally.” Thousands of calls in total were made to the Legislature, according to the Montana AFL-CIO.
A key component of their success, Harvey concluded, was that “labor was standing strong, not having the public-private sector division. In Wisconsin, [then-Gov. Scott] Walker tried to separate out the police and fire unions. In Montana, knowing that history, we vowed that labor is labor in the state of MT and we’re all going to stand together.”
Unions under the umbrella of the state AFL-CIO made the decision to flood the Capitol when the Legislature voted, with 300 to 400 members showing up. “With Covid, we haven’t seen a lot of the public at the Capitol. It was really a gamble,” said Harvey. “When people are literally fighting for their livelihoods it really makes an impact. Making representatives walk past all these workers. It was really powerful that day. That was by far the biggest group we’ve seen in the Capitol this session.”
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FOCUS:The Most Economically Liberal Legislation in Decades |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58657"><span class="small">Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 14 March 2021 11:56 |
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Lemann writes: "Biden's bill is a sign that our democracy isn't completely broken, and may convince Americans that government can solve problems."
Joe Biden. (photo: Getty Images)
The Most Economically Liberal Legislation in Decades
By Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker
14 March 21
Biden’s bill is a sign that our democracy isn’t completely broken, and may convince Americans that government can solve problems.
raditionally, every new Democratic President starts out by passing a big economic package (and every new Republican President starts out by passing a tax cut). Jimmy Carter’s, in 1977, cost twenty billion dollars. Bill Clinton’s, in 1993, was mainly a tax increase, aimed at eliminating the federal deficit. Barack Obama’s, in 2009, which passed during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, cost eight hundred billion, some of it spending increases, some tax relief.
The American Rescue Plan, which President Joe Biden signed last week, is on an entirely different scale. It will cost the government $1.9 trillion, even though the economy today is in better shape than it was when Obama took office; and, unlike Clinton’s opening economic initiative, it is proudly indifferent to the size of the federal deficit. The law’s most famous feature, its fourteen-hundred-dollar payments to individuals (meaning that many families will wind up with much more), is only the beginning. There are also extensions of eligibility for unemployment benefits and food stamps; debt relief for renters; subsidies for state and local governments that are out of money, so that they can continue to provide services; a bailout for insolvent pension funds; health-care subsidies; and a nearly universal child-care benefit.
The left’s disappointments with the adjustments necessary to get the bill through the Senate—it doesn’t raise the federal minimum wage, and the cash value of unemployment benefits was reduced—should not obscure the important point. This is the most economically liberal piece of legislation in decades. It is not just much bigger than but different in kind from the Obama Administration’s version, which helped people mainly through end-of-year tax credits. Biden’s bill was designed to send regular monthly checks to millions of American families, so it will be palpable that the government is helping them in a tough moment. Gone are the work requirements, the sensitivity to the risk of inflation, and other centrist concerns that have been at the heart of Democratic programs for decades. The side that always seemed to lose the argument within the Democratic Party has finally won.
In 2009 and again in 2020, the Federal Reserve drew the assignment of staving off a depression, which it did by keeping interest rates low and by buying many billions of dollars in financial instruments to prevent the markets from collapsing. Those maneuvers meant that people in finance, and, more broadly, people who have secure employment and assets in the markets, were spared the severe pain felt by millions of working people. Only Congress has the tools to provide direct help to the people most in need. That it is now able to act, quickly and effectively, is a sign that our democracy isn’t as completely broken as a lot of people have been assuming, and that government can moderate the grotesquely unequal effects of the pandemic on people’s well-being.
A year ago, nobody was predicting that Joe Biden would be presiding over a neo-New Deal. His long career didn’t seem to indicate it, and he was clearly not on the way to having large majorities in both houses of Congress, as Franklin Roosevelt did. So how did this happen? The obvious answer is the pandemic, which generated the sense of urgent, universal crisis that the American system requires in order to make major changes. It’s less obvious, but just as pertinent, that the response to the 2008 financial crisis is now seen as having been woefully insufficient, in ways that led to years of unnecessary suffering and a populist political revolt that disrupted both parties. It feels as if half a century’s effort to reorient the political economy away from the state and toward the market may finally have run its course.
No Republicans voted for the American Rescue Plan—it would not have passed if the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia had turned out differently—but the G.O.P. still played a part in what happened last week. The Party’s new sense of itself as a competitor for working-class votes meant that it was supporting major covid-relief programs through last year; the Democrats had to top the Republicans’ performance. And, their votes aside, the Republicans have chosen not to wage a full-scale rhetorical war on the new law, perhaps because polls show it to be highly popular. Because the law provides such immediate and tangible help to most Americans, it’s more difficult to campaign against than the 2009 relief effort was. Two generations’ worth of modest Democratic anti-poverty programs have foundered because their opponents portrayed them as mainly benefitting minorities; Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the welfare benefit that primarily assisted children of single mothers that Bill Clinton ended, both representing tiny fractions of the federal budget, are leading examples. Now, because the economic pain is so widespread, the new law has a very large and racially diverse group of beneficiaries, which ought to make it less vulnerable to the familiar attacks on social programs.
Yet the American Rescue Plan is actually a kind of economic appetizer. Its most progressive provisions—notably the child allowance, a monthly check of up to three hundred dollars per child, which would be the first true guaranteed family-income program in the United States, and would cut child poverty nearly in half—are temporary, expiring by the end of the year. The main course is what may be called “the Build Back Better bill,” soon to be unveiled by the White House. It will be bigger and more permanent, representing a real remaking of the government’s role in the economic lives of ordinary Americans. But that’s only if it passes.
The bill that Biden signed into law last week had the advantage of a deadline, because the Trump Administration’s pandemic-aid programs were due to expire in March. Build Back Better may contain large infrastructure programs, green-energy programs, and wealth taxes—a long list, with most of its items lacking the rescue plan’s pandemic-induced sense of crisis management. The new bill’s fate will depend on Americans embracing the idea that the reason the misery of the pandemic may finally be abating is that government can solve problems. Republicans, accustomed to caricaturing Democratic programs as élitist schemes created by a party that doesn’t care about ordinary people, will have to feel too intimidated by their constituents’ appreciation for the American Rescue Plan to stage an all-out assault on the new bill.
It is not yet time to celebrate. It is time to prepare for a months-long campaign with the highest possible stakes: a new social compact, which might finally bring an end to forty years of rising inequality.
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FOCUS: 2022 Governors Races Could Be Armageddon for Voting Rights |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43327"><span class="small">Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Sunday, 14 March 2021 10:47 |
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Kilgore writes: "The big 2021 political story, aside from efforts to end and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, is a guerrilla war over voting rights."
Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp are expected to hold a gubernatorial rematch - and grudge match - in 2022. (photo: John Bazemore/Getty Images)
2022 Governors Races Could Be Armageddon for Voting Rights
By Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine
14 March 21
he big 2021 political story, aside from efforts to end and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, is a guerrilla war over voting rights. Across the country, drawing inspiration from Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud, Republican-controlled legislatures are battling to restrict the franchise in ways almost too numerous to count (though the Brennan Center for Justice is trying to keep up).
It’s no accident that some of the most intense voter-suppression activity is in states narrowly carried by Joe Biden in 2020 but where Republicans hold a governing trifecta, namely Arizona and Georgia. In these two states they are entirely able to enact voting restrictions with Democrats left howling on the outside. If the GOP can overcome its own divisions, and not write laws so stupidly that the courts will strike them down, they can perhaps hold off or reverse blue trends simply by shrinking the electorate. Or so they hope. They also hope to head off Democratic efforts to preempt state voter suppression activity via a restored Voting Rights Act or the much more definitive legislation already passed by the U.S. House in H.R. 1, the For the People Act (both likely doomed in the Senate unless there is filibuster reform).
At the same time, Republican-controlled legislatures and governors will seek to use their power to exploit the decennial redistricting process and tilt the scales even further in their direction in future U.S. House and state legislative contests. Two highly contested states with Republican-controlled legislatures, Arizona and Michigan, have independent commissions that play a key role in redistricting. But in Georgia, and reasonably competitive Florida and New Hampshire, redistricting is an all-Republican show. Add in the historical phenomenon that midterm elections tend to produce wind beneath the sails of the party that does not control the White House, and you can see that 2022 could be a pretty good Republican year nationally, especially if voting restrictions are adopted widely.
But the future of voting rights, and in turn of the partisan balance, in many states will be on the ballot in 2022 as well. There are a number of highly competitive states where a Democratic governor is the only thing standing between Republicans and further screwing around with the franchise, such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Since state legislatures tend to shift ground more slowly than governorships (particularly in the first year after redistricting, which usually solidifies incumbents), 2022 gubernatorial races could represent a huge battle that will both reflect and intensify the fight over who gets to vote and how, along with a vast array of other policy issues dividing the two major parties. Let’s look at a few examples:
Georgia: Ground Zero for the Battle Over Ballots
Georgia’s GOP legislature is on the brink of passing an assortment of new voting restrictions limited only by their internal divisions over the best way to make voting harder for Democrats (which in Georgia means harder for Black voters) without discommoding their own voters. But the battle will bleed quickly over into the 2022 gubernatorial race, which is expected to be a rematch (and most definitely a grudge match) between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican incumbent Brian Kemp. There aren’t just any two pols; they are both most prominently known for diametrically opposed positions on voting rights. Abrams’s entire career has been devoted to the task of registering and mobilizing disenfranchised groups of voters, particularly minority voters. And Kemp’s claim to fame when he ran for governor in 2018 was his record as a shrewd and successful vote suppressor who refused to give up his control as secretary of State over election machinery despite the blatant conflict of interest that involved. There’s not much question that Kemp’s tight and unfriendly grip on the voter rolls made the crucial difference in his narrow win over Abrams.
Abrams, the unquestioned leader of her party in Georgia, passed up the opportunity to run for the Senate in 2020 (when she would have almost certainly have won, given the January runoff victories of both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock), presumably because she craves another chance to take down Kemp. And whatever help Kemp gets from either the voting restrictions under development right now, or a helpful midterm environment, could be neutralized by a credible primary challenge fed by Trump’s fury with him for his certification of Biden’s 2020 victory. Close Trump ally and unsuccessful 2020 Senate candidate Doug Collins is mulling a challenge to Kemp at the 45th president’s urging. Even if Collins demurs or decides to run for the Senate again, in a state full of ambitious Trump fans it’s hard to imagine Kemp will escape a primary challenge altogether. But no matter who winds up facing Abrams, voting rights will most definitely be front and center in the campaign, and the results should be close and consequential. It’s worth remembering again that Georgia requires general election runoffs if no one wins a majority in November, so another expensive and savage overtime campaign in the Peach State is a distinct possibility.
Arizona: A Post-Ducey Scramble
Arizona has rivaled Georgia in the plethora of voting restrictions Republican legislators have embraced, with nearly two dozen bills having been introduced this year, including some restricting voting by mail and others beefing up voter-ID requirements. But like its counterpart in Georgia, Arizona’s GOP is bitterly divided. One major object of Trumpist wrath in the state, Governor Doug Ducey is term-limited. While the 2022 gubernatorial field is forming slowly, Democrats have several strong possibilities, including Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego. Among Republicans, one of several right-wing U.S. House members could try to return to Phoenix, including House Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Biggs and Dave Schweikert, and Attorney General Mark Brnovich appears to be appealing to conservative voters via border-security alarms. More moderate options are State Treasurer Kimberly Yee and former Ducey chief of staff (and former House speaker) Kirk Adams.
Despite Arizona’s purple political status, Democrats haven’t won a gubernatorial election there since 2006, when Janet Napolitano secured a second term.
Pennsylvania: A Mix of Geography and Ideology
In Pennsylvania, Democratic governor Tom Wolf is an obstacle to GOP voter-suppression plans, which hasn’t kept Republican legislators from introducing bills to eliminate no-excuse voting by mail and add onerous new signature verification requirements. If they could replace the term-limited Wolf with one of their own, voter suppression efforts might succeed.
Pennsylvania is also another state where an open Senate seat will beckon some ambitious pols; Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is running for the seat Republican Pat Toomey is giving up. Attorney General Josh Shapiro is considered the early Democratic front-runner, though it could get interesting if Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney decided to run. Another possibility is long-time officeholder and diplomat Joe Torsella, who was upset in his reelection bid as Treasurer in 2020. All three of these men are from southeastern Pennsylvania, which could tempt candidates from other parts of the state into the contest.
As in many states, Pennsylvania’s Republicans have divisions over loyalty to Trump. One very Trumpy local official, Montgomery County Commission Joe Gale, is already in the gubernatorial race, where he could be joined by national MAGA favorite and congressman Mike Kelly, who may have an advantage as someone from western Pennsylvania. Still another Trump-adjacent possibility is state senator Doug Mastriano from central Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of testing positive for COVID-19 after chairing a mostly maskless post-election legislative hearing to air Rudy Giuliani’s insane election-fraud theories. There are an array of less divisive state legislators also looking at the race, which will likely revolve around the usual Keystone State mix of geographical and ideological factors.
Wisconsin: Always Vicious
Democratic governor Tony Evers is eligible for another term, and will presumably run without intra-party opposition. But the Republican field has been temporarily frozen by the ambivalence of GOP senator Ron Johnson about his 2022 plans. If RonJon runs again, the gubernatorial race could get crowded, with Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, Congressman Mike Gallagher, former congressman Sean Duffy, former Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson, and Waukesha County executive Paul Farrow, all mulling bids. So, too, is a very familiar face: former RNC chairman and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus.
While there will likely be some efforts among Republicans to out-conservative each other, this is a state where partisan divisions are so bitter and voting coalitions are so competitive that ideological issues are usually cast in the shade. Evers defeated every Wisconsin Democrat’s bête noire, Scott Walker, by only 29,000 votes, and the last two presidential elections in the state were decided by fewer votes than that.
The intensely competitive nature of the state means that relatively small changes in election procedures could matter a lot. And while Wisconsin Republicans haven’t made national headlines with proposed voter suppression measures, they haven’t been inactive, either, as one local news report explained:
In late February, Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature began circulating a slate of bills that would, among other changes, tighten absentee voting and the definition of “indefinitely confined” voters, two components challenged by President Donald Trump’s campaign in Democratic-majority Dane and Milwaukee counties in a failed attempt to throw out votes. Three Democratic members of the Assembly Elections Committee called the proposals “a full-on assault on our elections and the ability for Wisconsinites to vote.”
Florida: Is the State Red Now?
It says a lot that the big source of buzz about Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis is about his abrupt rise as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, not about any threat to his reelection in 2022. Florida has arguably been trending red of late. The legislature has been in Republican hands since the mid-1990s. The last Democrat to win a gubernatorial election in the Sunshine State was the Lawton Chiles in 1994. And Donald Trump significantly expanded his margin of victory in Florida between 2016 and 2020.
Still, the last gubernatorial contest was very close, and Florida is such a rich prize that a host of Democrats are considering a race against DeSantis, including former governor (as a Republican) and now-congressman Charlie Crist, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried (the only Democrat in statewide office), and two congresswomen, Gwen Graham and Val Demings (who made Biden’s veep short list).
It’s a token of their self-confidence that this year Florida Republicans are only pushing relatively minor tweaks in the state’s voting laws (though their maneuver to gut a voter-approved restoration of felon voting rights last year was pretty audacious). Democrats may need a break or a DeSantis stumble to take the relatively small steps needed to make Florida very competitive again.
It All Gets Started This Year
There are off-year gubernatorial elections this year in two states. In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy is strongly favored for reelection over his likely Republican opponent, former legislator and unsuccessful 2017 gubernatorial primary candidate Jack Ciattarelli. And in Virginia, where Democratic Governor Ralph Northam is term-limited, his predecessor, Terry McAuliffe, is the front-runner to reclaim the job, though he faces multiple primary opponents (including scandal-plagued Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax). Virginia Republicans decided to hold a nominating convention instead of a primary to head off the candidate who calls herself “Trump in high heels,” Amanda Chase.
California could also hold a gubernatorial election in 2021: organizers of a recall petition drive against Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom think they have the signatures necessary to force him onto the ballot this fall in an up-or-down vote that could remove him from office (a second voter option would choose a replacement if the recall wins a majority; this is exactly how Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of the Golden State in 2003). But the state’s Democratic character and perhaps fading anger over Newsom’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it likely he will hold onto office.
But wildly varying state political climates mean anything can, and probably will, happen by the end of 2022. It’s another big development wherein Joe Biden’s relative success or failure could have a large and significant ripple effect, not least on the question of who controls laws and procedures for voting the rest of the decade and beyond.
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Joe Manchin Is the Poster Boy for a Doomed Centrist Politics |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54706"><span class="small">Ross Barkan, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Sunday, 14 March 2021 08:31 |
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Barkan writes: "There has always been something particularly vexing about Joe Manchin."
If you are for it, Joe Manchin is probably against it. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
Joe Manchin Is the Poster Boy for a Doomed Centrist Politics
By Ross Barkan, Jacobin
14 March 21
West Virginia senator Joe Manchin is an embodiment of centrist Democrats’ worst instincts. He says he wants to win over Republican-voting workers, but he is consistently on the wrong side of populist economic issues like a minimum wage hike that are wildly popular among those workers.
here has always been something particularly vexing about Joe Manchin. The West Virginia Democrat, a longtime enemy of the poorest in his own state, has perpetually frustrated anyone attempting to implement economic populism in America.
If you are for it, Manchin is probably against it. Unemployment insurance is too high, a $15 minimum wage is too generous, the stimulus checks can’t be $2,000, though that’s apparently good enough for Donald Trump. In the pockets of the oil and mining interests that have decimated the lands he represents, Manchin is a living caricature of a corroded, compromised Washington, existing to placate his richest donors.
It’s at this point when the Beltway operatives and think tank apparatchiks chime in from the sidelines: Don’t you understand what Manchin’s doing? He represents a state Trump won with almost 70 percent of the vote! He does what he needs to do to survive! Without Manchin, there is no Democratic majority, no $1.9 trillion stimulus, no chance to bolster the welfare state you big city leftists claim to care so much about.
On the surface, like most political arguments, there is a logic to this. Manchin survived reelection in 2018 in a blue wave year that nevertheless took down other centrist colleagues. It is easy to read him as a canny survivor, even a mild genius. He’s great with constituent work, apparently.
But Manchin’s got it all backward. If Democrats have any hope of winning back rural states and voters without college degrees — it’s not just working-class whites trending away from them anymore — they will need to recommit to much of the policy that the allegedly wise centrists like Manchin have scorned.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that the neoliberals are losing. America is far away from becoming a socialist state, but it’s now a place where Larry Summers can whine about the stimulus bill being too big and get blown off entirely. Trump was a venal, right-wing president, but he managed to oversee more stimulus spending than Barack Obama ever did, sending out free money to millions of Americans. Biden, a tired centrist in the Manchin mold, has nevertheless been reactive enough to the zeitgeist to understand that the mistakes of 2009 cannot be repeated.
Democrats have created a generous childcare welfare policy that is not dependent on punishing work requirements favored by Bill Clinton and his ilk. If it becomes permanent, it has the ability to cut deeply into child poverty.
As with all welfare expansions, it can always be weakened but will be difficult to revoke entirely. Austerity-hungry Republicans know this; it’s why they fear progressive ideas so much. Social Security, despite their best efforts, was not privatized. Neither was Medicare nor Medicaid.
If Manchin wants to survive 2024, with Trump potentially on the ballot again, he will need to start promising the vast working class and poor of his state tangible gains. He will need to pump more money directly into their pockets, attempt to give them better health care, and guarantee them, in some way, access to decent-paying jobs. That was the idea behind the $15 minimum wage, a policy popular enough to pass in Florida as Trump won the state handily and Democrats were obliterated.
If a Democrat wants to survive in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump, they will probably have to make concessions on cultural issues that take up the most oxygen in right-wing media. Republican voters are firmly opposed to gun control and more generous immigration policy, for example, but they have no problem with the government spending more lavishly on their behalf.
Manchin has sought to appease Democrats on gun control while shrinking unemployment benefits and no-strings-attached stimulus checks. A savvier politician would likely attempt the opposite: increase the size of the check, to $2,000 or more, while ditching his goal to establish universal background checks for gun purchases. Though he would be pilloried for this posture when he ran for president, Sanders took a version of this approach in Vermont, where Republicans held far more power in his early years than they do today.
Manchin’s politics make little sense in a world where even the most outwardly conservative voters want cheaper health care, higher wages, and more cash from the government. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which sent $1,200 checks to poor and middle-class Americans alike, likely helped bolster Trump’s reelection campaign, which defied public polling that showed Biden blowing him out. The Democrats’ victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs seemed almost entirely predicated on the promise that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock could deliver $2,000 checks to Georgians and the Republican incumbents could not.
Remarkably, Manchin has remained committed to foiling the ambitions of Ossoff and Warnock, who similarly need to worry about a Republican vote while bolstering material conditions in Georgia before tough reelection bids. Too deluded by his newfound power in the Senate, Manchin can’t seem to grasp how much he is dooming his own party. And he has no singular vision for helping those in his own state.
A Republican may wipe him out in 2024 regardless, but he can be so much more valuable before that day comes. By choosing not to, he punishes the rest of us.
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think of the chicken when I crack the two eggs into the fry pan for breakfast but when I put in the sausage patty, I don’t think of the pig. The egg is a work of art; the sausage is a product. As a young man I tried to make art but I didn’t want to work in a factory (teach) to support my art, so I chose to do radio, which is a form of sausage. I admire the egg but I enjoy the sausage more. And it makes me feel good about my life, a good thing at 5 a.m.
