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Why Is The Media Against Republicans

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Why Is The Media Against Republicans

Mcconnell And Co Are Playing As Dirty A Game As Possible In Their Quest To Fill Ginsburgs Seat Before The Election But You Wont Find That Story In Most News Coverage

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US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell at a press conference at the US Capitol on September 22, 2020. McConnell said in a statement that the Senate would take up President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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The argument against confirming Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court before the inauguration is a Republican argument. They invented it, they enacted it, and they own it. That’s because it was Republicans, not Democrats, who changed the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to eight for 10 months in 2016, when a Democratic president was in the White House. It was Republicans who argued that no Supreme Court nominee should even be considered by the Senate in an election year. And it was Republicans who promised to block the confirmation of Hillary Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees in the event that she became president while Republicans retained control of the Senate.

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And that argument is simply untenable. We do not have a legitimate third branch of government if only one party gets to choose its members.

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Vaccine Advocacy From Hannity And Mcconnell Gets The Media Off Republicans’ Backs But Won’t Shift Public Sentiment

Sean Hannity, Mitch McConnell and Tucker Carlson

Amid a rising media furor over the steady stream of vaccine disparagement from GOP politicians and Fox News talking heads, a number of prominent Republicans spoke up in favor of vaccines early this week.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “shots need to get in everybody’s arm as rapidly as possible” and asked that people “ignore all of these other voices that are giving demonstrably bad advice.” House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, got the vaccine after months of delay and then publicly said, “there shouldn’t be any hesitancy over whether or not it’s safe and effective.” And Fox News host Sean Hannity, in a widely shared video, declared, it “absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated.” This was treated in the press as an unequivocal endorsement, even though the use of the word “many” was clearly meant to let the Fox News viewers feel like he’s talking about other people getting vaccinated.

Is this an exciting pivot among the GOP elites? Are they abandoning the sociopathic strategy of sabotaging President Joe Biden’s anti-pandemic plan by encouraging their own followers to get sick? Are the millions of Republicans who keep telling pollsters they will never get that Democrat shot going to change their minds now?

Ha ha ha, no.

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— Matthew Gertz July 20, 2021

The Technology 202: New Report Calls Conservative Claims Of Social Media Censorship ‘a Form Of Disinformation’

with Aaron Schaffer

A new report concludes that social networks aren’t systematically biased against conservatives, directly contradicting Republican claims that social media companies are censoring them.

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Recent moves by Twitter and Facebook to suspend former president Donald Trump’s accounts in the wake of the violence at the Capitol are inflaming conservatives’ attacks on Silicon Valley. But New York University researchers today released a report stating claims of anti-conservative bias are “a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.”

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of Trump were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service — and if anything, the companies took a hands-off approach for a long time given Trump’s position.

The report also noted several data sets underscore the prominent place conservative influencers enjoy on social media. For instance, CrowdTangle data shows that right-leaning pages dominate the list of sources providing the most engaged-with posts containing links on Facebook. Conservative commentator Dan Bongino, for instance, far out-performed most major news organizations in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In The Past The Gop Would Be Rallying Their Voters Against This Bill Their Failure To Do So Now Is Ominous

Mitch ?McConnell, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro

With surprising haste for the U.S. Senate, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, just after passing a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. And Democrats could not be more excited, as the blueprint covers a whole host of long-standing priorities, from fighting climate change to creating universal prekindergarten. The blueprint was largely written by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who released a statement calling it “the most consequential piece of legislation for working people, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor since FDR and the New Deal of the 1930s.”

Sanders isn’t putting that much spin on the ball.

While the bill fallls short of what is really needed to deal with climate change, it is still tremendously consequential legislation that will do a great deal not just to ameliorate economic inequalities, but, in doing so, likely reduce significant gender and racial inequality. It’s also a big political win for President Joe Biden. In other words, it is everything that Republicans hate. Worse for them, it’s packed full of benefits that boost the middle class, not just the working poor. Traditionally, such programs are much harder to claw back once Republicans gain power — as they’ve discovered in previous failed attempts to dismantle Social Security and Obamacare.

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But that’s not really happening here.

The Actual Reason Why Republicans And Their Media Are Discouraging People From Getting Vaccinated

Independent Media Institute

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a CNN Medical Analyst, said last week, “A surprising amount of death will occur soon…” But why, when the deadly Delta variant is sweeping the world, are Republicans and their media warning people not to get vaccinated?

there’s always a reason

Dr. Anthony Fauci told Jake Tapper on CNN last Sunday, “I don’t have a really good reason why this is happening.”

But even if he can’t think of a reason why Republicans would trash talk vaccination and people would believe them, it’s definitely there.

Which is why it’s important to ask a couple of simple questions that all point to the actual reason why Republicans and their media are discouraging people from getting vaccinated:

1. Why did Trump get vaccinated in secret after Joe Biden won the election and his January 6th coup attempt failed?

2. Why are Fox “News” personalities discouraging people from getting vaccinated while refusing to say if they and the people they work with have been protected by vaccination?

3. Why was one of the biggest applause lines at CPAC: “They were hoping — the government was hoping — that they could sort of sucker 90% of the population into getting vaccinated and it isn’t happening!”

4. Why are Republican legislators in states around the country pushing laws that would “ban” private businesses from asking to see proof of vaccination status ?

Death is their electoral strategy.

Is there any other possible explanation?

So, what’s left?

Destroying Trust In The Media Science And Government Has Left America Vulnerable To Disaster

For America to minimize the damage from the current pandemic, the media must inform, science must innovate, and our government must administer like never before. Yet decades of politically-motivated attacks discrediting all three institutions, taken to a new level by President Trump, leave the American public in a vulnerable position.

jonmladd

Trump has consistently vilified the national media. When campaigning, he the media “absolute scum” and “totally dishonest people.” As president, he has news organizations “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” over and over. The examples are endless. Predictably, he has blamed the coronavirus crisis on the media, saying “We were very prepared. The only thing we weren’t prepared for was the media.”

Science has been another Trump target. He has gutted scientific expertise and administrative capacity in the executive branch, most notably failing to fill hundreds of vacancies in the Centers for Disease Control itself and disbanding the National Security Council’s taskforce on pandemics. During the coronavirus crisis, he has routinely disagreed with scientific experts, including, in the AP’s words, his “musing about injecting disinfectants into people .” This follows his earlier public advocacy for hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment, also against leading scientists’ advice. Coupled with his flip-flopping on when to lift stay-at-home orders, the president has created confusion and endangered people.

Media Bias Against Conservatives Is Real And Part Of The Reason No One Trusts The News Now

Members of the media were shocked as he was supposedly revealed as incredibly anti-woman presidential candidate, perhaps even the most ever nominated by a major political party in the modern era. He had admitted that he reduced women to objects and the Democrats pounced, seeking to make him lose him the support of women and, in turn, the presidency.

I’m not talking about the media coverage of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and the “Access Hollywood” tape, but his predecessor, Mitt Romney.

His sin? Saying that he had “binders full of women” that he was looking at appointing to key positions were he elected president. Sure, it was an awkward way of stating a fairly innocuous fact about how elected executives begin their transition efforts — with resumes of candidates for every position under the sun —- well before an election is held. Yet, the media and commentators came for Mitt Romney and they did so with guns blazing, as he was portrayed as an anti-woman extremist… for making a concerted effort to hire women to serve in his administration as governor of Massachusetts.

There Is No Liberal Media Bias In Which News Stories Political Journalists Choose To Cover

1Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.

2University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.

3Brigham Young University-Idaho, Rexburg, ID 83460, USA.

?*Corresponding author. Email: hans.hassellfsu.edu ; jh5akvirginia.edu

?† These authors contributed equally to this work.

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‘it’s Time To End This Forever War’ Biden Says Forces To Leave Afghanistan By 9/11

The enormous national anger generated by those attacks was also channeled by the administration toward the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which was conceived to prevent any recurrence of attacks on such a massive scale. Arguments over that legislation consumed Congress through much of 2002 and became the fodder for campaign ads in that year’s midterms.

The same anger was also directed toward a resolution to use force, if needed, in dealing with security threats from the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. That authorization passed Congress with bipartisan majorities in the fall of 2002, driven by administration claims that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction.” It became law weeks before the midterm elections.

Once those elections were over, the Republicans in control of both chambers finally agreed to create an independent commission to seek answers about 9/11. Bush signed the legislation on Nov. 27, 2002.

The beginning was hobbled when the first chairman, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and vice chairman, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, decided not to continue. But a new chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, and vice chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, filled the breach and performed to generally laudatory reviews.

Long memories

Top House Republican Opposes Bipartisan Commission To Investigate Capitol Riot

But McCarthy replied by opposing Katko’s product, and more than 80% of the other House Republicans did too. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., initially said he was keeping an open mind but then announced that he too was opposed. This makes it highly unlikely that 10 of McConnell’s GOP colleagues will be willing to add their votes to the Democrats’ and defeat a filibuster of the bill.

Republicans have argued that two Senate committees are already looking at the events of Jan. 6, as House panels have done as well. The Justice Department is pursuing cases against hundreds of individuals who were involved. Former President Donald Trump and others have said any commission ought to also be tasked to look at street protests and violence that took place in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd.

But with all that on the table, several Republicans have alluded to their concern about a new commission “dragging on” into 2022, the year of the next midterm elections. “A lot of our members … want to be moving forward,” said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the No. 2 Senate Republican toMcConnell. “Anything that gets us rehashing to 2020 elections is, I think, a day lost.”

Resistance even after 9/11

The Taliban were toppled but bin Laden escaped, and U.S. forces have been engaged there ever since. The troop numbers have declined in recent years, and President Biden has indicated that all combat troops will be out by this year’s anniversary of the 2001 attacks.

Opiniontrump And His Voters Are Drawn Together By A Shared Sense Of Defiance

Americans in general have begun to catch on: 66 percent of Americans believe that the media has a hard time separating fact from opinion and, according to a recent Gallup poll, 62 percent of the country believes that the press is biased one way or the other in their reporting.

So when CNN, NBC News, Fox News, or another outlet break a hard news story, there is a good chance that a large swathe of the public won’t view it as legitimate news.

And politicians, right and left, are taking advantage of this.

The entire ordeal is part of an ever-growing list of examples in which the media seemed to be biased, whether consciously or not, against Republicans.

Before Donald Trump, there was New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who in 2014 accused the media of “dividing us” because they asked him about some protesters who had chanted “NYPD is the KKK” and . He also accused the media of McCarthyism when they dug into the personal life of an aide of his, who reportedly had a relationship with a convicted murderer. The mayor also publicly and privately accused Bloomberg News of being biased against him, since it is owned by his predecessor. However, de Blasio is not terribly popular within his own party, so Democrats in New York did not buy what he was selling.

The Media Has Entered The Republicans Pounce Stage Of Critical Race Theory

Now that polls show a majority of Americans oppose Critical Race Theory, the Democratic Party and their scribes in the legacy media have launched a rearguard action against parents — by casting them as the aggressors. As is true every time the Left misfires or overreaches, the media ignore the offense and focus on the popular backlash in a tactic popularly known as “Republicans pounce.”

Media coverage proves that CRT has entered the “Republicans pounce” stage. Witness the words of one Politico writer, who said on Thursday, “he right is hoping to capitalize on the grassroots angst over critical race theory and excite its base voters in next year’s midterms.” Chris Hayes, who has the unenviable position of competing directly with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC, agreed Thursday night that all the Republican Party’s “rhetorical fire has moved away from the deficit and on to some random, school superintendent in Maine after his district dared to denounce white supremacy after the murder of George Floyd.”

But why are grassroots Americans so filled with “angst”? Because they are intellectually deficient and, of course, racist, according to Vox.com.

“Conservatives have launched a growing disinformation campaign around the academic concept” of CRT. “It’s an attempt to push back against progress,” wrote Vox.com reporter Fabiola Cineas. The problem is that “Republicans … want to ban anti-racist teachings and trainings in classrooms and workplaces across the country.”

Trump Continues To Push Election Falsehoods Here’s Why That Matters

Republican opposition to the commission

Rice was featured in one of the very few congressional commissions ever to receive this level of attention. Most are created and live out their mission with little notice. Indeed, Congress has created nearly 150 commissions of various kinds in just the last 30 years, roughly five a year.

Some have a highly specific purpose, such as a commemoration. Others are more administrative, such as the five-member commission overseeing the disbursement of business loans during the early months of pandemic lockdown in 2020. Others have been wide-ranging and controversial, such as the one created to investigate synthetic opioid trafficking.

In the initial weeks after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the idea of an independent commission to probe the origins of the attack and the failures that let it happen seemed a no-brainer. It had broad support both in Congress and in public opinion polls. It still enjoys the latter, as about two-thirds of Americans indicate that they think an independent commission is needed. The idea has fared well — particularly when described as being “9/11 Commission style.”

Opiniona Guide For Frustrated Conservatives In The Age Of Trump

Conscious bias or not, such practices do not engender trust in the media amongst conservatives. They only reinforce the belief that the media seeks to defend their ideological allies on the left and persecute those on the right while claiming to be objective.

This idea that the media is made up of unselfconsciously liberal elites who don’t even recognize the biases they have against conservative policies and conservatives in general goes back decades, to when newsrooms were more or less homogenous in nearly every way. At first, conservatives fought back by founding their own magazines; after Watergate and in the midst of the Reagan administration and liberals’ contempt for him, organizations like the Media Research Center began cataloguing the myriad examples of biased coverage, both large and small.

And there was a lot to catalogue, from opinion pages heavily weighted in favor of liberals to reportage and analysis that looks a lot more like the opinion of the writers than unbiased coverage.

Despite Cries Of Censorship Conservatives Dominate Social Media

GOP-friendly voices far outweigh liberals in driving conversations on hot topics leading up to the election, a POLITICO analysis shows.

The Twitter app on a mobile phone | Matt Rourke/AP Photo

10/27/2020 01:38 PM EDT

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Republicans have turned alleged liberal bias in Silicon Valley into a major closing theme of the election cycle, hauling tech CEOs in for virtual grillings on Capitol Hill while President Donald Trump threatens legal punishment for companies that censor his supporters.

But a POLITICO analysis of millions of social media posts shows that conservatives still rule online.

Right-wing social media influencers, conservative media outlets and other GOP supporters dominate online discussions around two of the election’s hottest issues, the Black Lives Matter movement and voter fraud, according to the review of Facebook posts, Instagram feeds, Twitter messages and conversations on two popular message boards. And their lead isn’t close.

As racial protests engulfed the nation after George Floyd’s death, users shared the most-viral right-wing social media content more than 10 times as often as the most popular liberal posts, frequently associating the Black Lives Matter movement with violence and accusing Democrats like Joe Biden of supporting riots.

Politifact Va: No Republicans Didn’t Vote To Defund The Police

Rep. Bobby Scott speaks at a 2015 criminal justice forum.

Speaker: Bobby ScottStatement: “Every Republican in Congress voted to defund the police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan.”Date: July 12Setting: Twitter

In last fall’s campaigns, Republicans thundered often inaccurate charges that Democrats wanted to defund police departments.

U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., is flipping the script and saying that all congressional Republicans voted to defund police this year when they opposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus plan.

“Every Republican in Congress voted to defund police when they voted against the American Rescue Plan,” Scott tweeted on July 12.

Scott represents Virginia’s 3rd congressional district, stretching from Norfolk and parts of Chesapeake north through Newport News and west through Franklin.

His claim, echoing a Democratic talking point, melts under scrutiny. Here’s why.

The Facts

The term “defunding police” arose after the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. Many advocates say it does not mean abolishing police, but rather reallocating some of the money and the duties that have traditionally been handled by police departments.

Scott’s explanation

Barbera sent an NBC article noting that communities in at least 10 congressional districts represented by Republicans who opposed the bill are using some of its relief funds to help their police departments.

Our ruling

We rate Scott’s statement False.

Opinion:no The Media Isnt Fair It Gives Republicans A Pass

The right-wing media, willfully ignoring the press investigations into Tara Reade’s accusations, insist that former vice president Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has not been treated similarly to accused conservative men . They have a point, but not the one they were trying to make.

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Let’s start with the big picture: Right-wing groups persistently engage in conduct for which Republicans are not held to account. The latter are allowed to remain silent after instances of conduct with a strong stench of white nationalism, but pay no penalty for their quietude. Right-wing demonstrators at Michigan’s statehouse this week — angrily shouting, not social distancing, misogynistic in their message, some carrying Confederate garb — were not engaged in peaceful protest. This was a mob endangering the health of police officers and others seeking to intimidate democratic government. Some protesters compared Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to Adolf Hitler and displayed Nazi symbols. Newsweek reported:

The media has adopted the approach that a pattern of sexual harassment claims over decades is not relevant because Trump has denied them, yet they want investigated the single assault claim against Biden. Biden responded in an interview and in a lengthy ; the media insists these things have to be investigated further. They do not ask Trump’s campaign why the president does not respond to questions. They do not ask Republicans about Carroll, Zervos or others.

Social Media: Is It Really Biased Against Us Republicans

Wednesday promises to be another stressful day for Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Their chief executives will be grilled by senators about whether social media companies abuse their power.

For Republicans, this is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for.

Two weeks ago, Twitter prevented people posting links to a critical New York Post investigation into Joe Biden.

It then apologised for failing to explain its reasoning before ditching a rule it had used to justify the action.

For many Republicans, this was the final straw – incontrovertible evidence that social media is biased against conservatives.

The accusation is that Silicon Valley is at its core liberal and a bad arbiter of what’s acceptable on its platforms.

In this case, Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz believed Twitter would have acted differently if the story had been about President Donald Trump.

Sobering Report Shows Hardening Attitudes Against Media

NEW YORK — The distrust many Americans feel toward the news media, caught up like much of the nation’s problems in the partisan divide, only seems to be getting worse.

That was the conclusion of a “sobering” study of attitudes toward the press conducted by Knight Foundation and Gallup and released Tuesday.

Nearly half of all Americans describe the news media as “very biased,” the survey found.

“That’s a bad thing for democracy,” said John Sands, director of learning and impact at the Knight Foundation. “Our concern is that when half of Americans have some sort of doubt about the veracity of the news they consume, it’s going to be impossible for our democracy to function.”

The study was conducted before the coronavirus lockdown and nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd.

Eight percent of respondents — the preponderance of them politically conservative — think that news media that they distrust are trying to ruin the country.

– Deal gives Atlanta company control of Anchorage TV news

The study found that 71% of Republicans have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable opinion of the news media, while 22% of Democrats feel the same way. Switch it around, and 54% of Democrats have a very favorable view of the media, and only 13% of Republicans feel the same way.

That divide has been documented before but only seems to be deepening, particularly among conservatives, Sands said.

In The Age Of Trump Media Bias Comes Into The Spotlight

Almost 20 years ago, after my first book, “,” came out, I made a lot of speeches, some of them to conservative organizations. The book was about liberal bias in the mainstream media. I had been a journalist at CBS News for 28 years and, so, it was a behind-the-scenes exposé about how the sausage was made, about how bias made its way into the news.

I said that despite what many conservatives think, there was no conspiracy to slant the news in a liberal direction. I said that there were no secret meetings, no secret handshakes and salutes, that anchors such as CBS’s Dan Rather never went into a room with top lieutenants, locked the door, lowered the blinds, dimmed the lights and said, “OK, how are we going to screw those Republicans today?”

It didn’t work that way, I said. Instead, bias was the result of groupthink. Put too many like-minded liberals in a newsroom and you’re going to get a liberal slant on the news.

Liberal journalists, I said, live in a comfortable liberal bubble and don’t even necessarily believe their views are liberal. Instead, they believe they are moderate, mainstream and mainly reasonable views — unlike, of course, conservative views which, to them, are none of those things.

But what I wrote and spoke about then — mainly about how there was no conspiracy to inject bias into news stories — seems no longer to be true today.

Pandering, it seems, is good for business.

Bias shows itself not only in what’s reported, but also in what’s ignored.

Florida Republicans Move Against Social Media Companies

TALLAHASSEE — Concerned that social media companies were conspiring against conservatives, Florida Republicans sent a measure Thursday to Gov. Ron DeSantis that would punish online platforms that lawmakers assert discriminate against conservative thought.

The governor had urged lawmakers to deliver the legislation to his desk as part of a broader effort to regulate Big Tech companies — in how they collect and use information they harvest from consumers and in how social media platforms treat their users.

Republicans in Florida and elsewhere have accused the companies of censoring conservative thought on social media platforms by removing posts they consider inflammatory or using algorithms to reduce the visibility of posts that go against the grain of mainstream ideas.

With the ubiquity of social media, the sites have become modern-day public squares — where people share in the most trivial of matters but also in ideas and information that often are unvetted.

In recent years, social media companies have acted more aggressively in controlling the information posted on their platforms. In some cases, the companies have moved to delete posts over what they see as questionable veracity or their potential to stoke violence.

DeSantis is a strong ally of the former president, and the Republican governor is supporting hefty financial penalties against social media platforms that suspend the accounts of political candidates.

America Hates The Republicans And They Dont Know Why

@jonathanchait

Americans harbor certain deep-rooted impressions of the two parties, which have held for generations. Democrats are compassionate and generous, but spendthrift, dovish, and indulgent of crime and prone to subsidize poor people who don’t want to work. Republicans are strong on defense and crime, but too friendly to business and the rich. What is striking about the Republican government is how little effort it has made to push against, or even steer around, the unflattering elements of its brand. President Trump and his legislative partners have leaned into every ingrained prejudice the voters hold against them. They have acted as if none of their liabilities even exist.

That is not the approach Democrats have taken in office. Bill Clinton famously fashioned himself as a “New Democrat,” angering his base on crime and welfare and declaring the era of big government over. Barack Obama did not position himself quite so overtly against his party’s brand — which had recovered in part because of Clinton’s success — but he did take care to avoid confirming political stereotypes. Obama frequently invoked the importance of parenting and personal responsibility. He did not slash the defense budget, and took pains to woo Republican support for criminal-justice reform. Obama tried repeatedly to get Republicans to compromise on a deal to reduce the budget deficit. Whatever the merits of these policies, they reflect a grasp of the party’s innate liabilities.

Placing Some News Sources On The Political Spectrum

Here are a few examples of major news sources and their so-called “bias” based on ratings from AllSides and the reported level of trust from partisan audiences from the Pew Research Center survey.

Note that much of these ratings are based on surveys of personal perceptions. Consider that these may be impacted by the hostile media effect, wherein “partisans perceive media coverage as unfairly biased against their side” . A three-decade retrospective on the hostile media effect. Mass Communication and Society, 18, 701-729. ).

The Capitol Siege: The Arrested And Their Stories

It would only be logical for that memory to inform the imagination of any Republican contemplating a similar independent commission to probe what happened on Jan. 6. The commission would likely look at various right-wing groups that were involved, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, some members of which have already been charged. The commission might also delve into the social media presence and influence of various white supremacists.

Moreover, just as the 9/11 Commission was expected to interview the current and preceding presidents, so might a new commission pursue testimony from Trump and some of his advisers, both official and otherwise, regarding their roles in the protest that wound up chasing members of Congress from both chambers into safe holding rooms underground.

House Minority Leader McCarthy was asked last week whether he would testify if a commission were created and called on him to discuss his conversations with Trump on Jan. 6.

“Sure,” McCarthy replied. “Next question.”

All this may soon be moot. If Senate Democrats are unable to secure 60 votes to overcome an expected filibuster of the House-passed bill, the measure will die and the questions to be asked will fall to existing congressional committees, federal prosecutors and the media. To some degree, all can at least claim to have the same goals and intentions as an independent commission might have.

The difference is the level of acceptance their findings are likely to have with the public.

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skypalacearchitect · 4 years

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“I acknowledge that we are on the ancestral homelands of the Nacotchtank, Anacostan, and Piscataway people,” Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico said in her opening remarks on the first day of her Senate confirmation hearing to lead the Interior Department.

It’s likely the first time a Cabinet nominee acknowledged tribal lands upon testifying before the Senate. If confirmed, Haaland — a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe — would also be the first Native American Cabinet secretary in history.

But it is her pledge to protect the environment and tribal communities that has some in the Republican Party up in arms. In the days leading up to Tuesday’s hearing, Republican Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Steve Daines of Montana, both of whom have financial ties to the oil industry, have attacked Haaland’s plans to transition away from fossil fuels and threatened to block her nomination.

Barrasso — the top Republican official on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which is considering Haaland’s nomination — said he is “troubled by many of [Haaland’s] radical views,” such as her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline and support for the Green New Deal, both of which are supported by the majority of Democratic voters. The Wyoming senator, who has taken close to $1.2 million from Big Oil since his election to the Senate in 2007, pressed Haaland about her personal views on President Joe Biden’s executive actions to temporarily pause new oil and natural gas leases on public lands, and demanded she provide evidence that fracking actually contributes to the climate crisis.

The “radical” nature they’re referring to is Haaland’s career-long commitment to protecting the environment and Indigenous communities by challenging the status quo that relying on the fossil fuel industry is needed to bolster the economy. During her hearing Tuesday, Haaland repeatedly emphasized that, if confirmed as Interior secretary, she will work hard to bridge party lines and take Congress members’ concerns into consideration — but also said she would not push aside environmental concerns nor Biden’s climate agenda.

“As I’ve learned in this role, there’s no question that fossil energy does and will continue to play a major role in America for years to come. I know how important oil and gas revenues are to fund critical services,” Haaland said in her opening remarks. “But we must also recognize that the energy industry is innovating, and our climate challenge must be addressed.”

The US Interior Department oversees the country’s 500 million acres of public lands, which are set to play a crucial role in Biden’s sweeping climate agenda to slash greenhouse gas emissions. But over the past few decades, the lands have instead been major contributors to the climate crisis: They hold massive reserves of fossil fuels, which are extracted and burned by oil and gas companies, thus releasing planet-warming emissions.

Biden, who has promised a climate-focused agenda, spent his first hours in office dismantling energy policies that catered to the fossil fuel industry and centering environmental justice throughout the federal government. One of the major concerns from Republicans is that a pause on new fossil fuel activity would negatively affect American jobs — a theme that served as the backdrop to their line of questioning during Haaland’s hearing.

But Haaland said she is committed to finding the right balance between economic growth and saving the planet. “As part of this balance, the Department has a role in harnessing the clean energy potential of our public lands to create jobs and new economic opportunities,” she said. “The president’s agenda demonstrates that America’s public lands can and should be engines for clean energy production.”

Despite GOP pushback, Haaland’s confirmation is still expected to go through, according to HuffPost, because the Republican Party is now in the congressional minority. Haaland could even gain the support of moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), whose home state is 18 percent American Indian or Alaska Native. Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska even stopped by Tuesday’s hearing to give Haaland a bipartisan introduction, encouraging his GOP colleagues to confirm her to the post.

“She has worked with me. She has crossed the aisle, and as a member of this administration, I know she will do a good job,” Young said. “Respectfully, I want you to listen to her. Understand that there’s a broad picture.”

Democrats note the historic nature of Haaland possibly overseeing tribal lands

Beyond overseeing public lands, the Interior Department also manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which oversees more than 55 million acres of tribal land. The first Native American nominated to serve as a Cabinet secretary, Haaland has firsthand knowledge of how to improve tribal communities, as she has done as vice chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and as chair of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.

As the hearing got underway, Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico noted that having a Native American secretary for the Interior is “frankly something that should have happened a long time ago.”

“How can we help make Indian lives better?” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders asked Haaland, who listed numerous issues — a lack of education funding, a lack of clean air and water, the Indigenous women who have gone missing, and severe health care disparities.

“It’s the job of the federal government to live up to its tribal trust promises,” Haaland said. “The pandemic has highlighted these disparities. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.”

Haaland, who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline before joining Congress as one of the first two Native American women, was also questioned by Republican senators, who inquired about the possibility of Haaland recusing herself in decisions related to the pipeline. But Haaland’s opposition to the project, which sparked the monthslong Standing Rock protests, stems from the fact that it cuts through tribal lands and has the potential to contaminate the primary source of drinking water for nearby tribes.

In her opening remarks, Haaland said one of her utmost priorities as Interior secretary would be to “honor the sovereignty of tribal nations and recognize their part in America’s story.”

When senators return on Wednesday for a second round of questioning before their vote, she could be one step closer to fulfilling that promise.

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#Deb Haaland #Secretary of the Interior #environmental activism #indigenous #native #wow #u.s. politics #skypalacearchitect #representation matters

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theliberaltony · 6 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

After a quiet July, the primary calendar roars back to life in August. Here at FiveThirtyEight, that means putting our trusty primary-preview-writing pen to paper (did you miss us?) and cranking up the ol’ live blog (join us Tuesday night as we digest some results). We’ve got four states coming at you this week:

Missouri

Races to watch: Proposition A Polls close: 8 p.m. Eastern

The primary is a formality in the one Missouri campaign that everyone’s following this year: the U.S. Senate race. Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill will almost certainly face (spoiler alert!) Republican Josh Hawley, the state attorney general, in one of the marquee matchups of the 2018 Senate map. Nevertheless, Missouri will still play host to one of Tuesday’s most consequential elections: a ballot measure, Proposition A, that would allow non-union members who benefit from a collective-bargaining agreement to not pay union dues.

Missouri’s Republican-dominated legislature originally passed Senate Bill 19, commonly referred to as a “right-to-work” law, in 2017, but outraged labor unions turned to an already-energized liberal electorate and collected three times the number of signatures needed to subject the law to a voter referendum. After being dealt heavy blows in other Midwestern states and, recently, the U.S. Supreme Court, organized labor has gone all-in to defeat the right-to-work law in Missouri, raising $16.1 million and dwarfing the $4.3 million raised by supporters of Proposition A. (Since the vote is technically on whether to adopt Senate Bill 19, a “yes” vote is a vote for right-to-work rules.) So far, it looks like they’re succeeding: According to the most recent poll, the referendum is poised to fail 56 percent to 38 percent. The vote is being watched nationally and will be viewed as either a needed symbolic win or a devastating symbolic loss for the labor movement.

Kansas

Races to watch: 2nd and 3rd congressional districts; governor Polls close: 8 p.m. Eastern in most of the state, 9 p.m. Eastern in a few westerly counties

After Republican Rep. Lynn Jenkins announced her retirement from Kansas’s 2nd Congressional District and former state House Minority Leader Paul Davis said he would run for the Democrats, Republicans openly fretted that none of their seven candidates was strong enough to beat him, despite the district’s R+20 partisan lean1 — a measure of how much more Republican- or Democratic-leaning an area is than the country as a whole. Now, for better or for worse, they’ll pick one of those seven. Spending on behalf of Army veteran and former Iditarod musher Steve Watkins — half from his own campaign, half from a super PAC run by his father — has totaled more than all the other Republican candidates’ spending combined. Anyone else the GOP nominates — say, state Sen. Caryn Tyson, state Sen. Steve Fitzgerald or former state House Speaker Doug Mays — could struggle to play financially in Davis’s league (he’s raised $1.6 million).

The Democratic primary is anyone’s ballgame in the 3rd Congressional District, where Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder is defending an R+4 seat. Each wing of the party is represented. Bernie Sanders has endorsed former labor lawyer Brent Welder. Emily’s List is spending $400,000 to promote Native American activist Sharice Davids, who could probably beat you up. As a teacher at an elite private high school, Tom Niermann has the moderate cred to win over country-club Republicans in this well-educated district around Kansas City. That would normally suggest he’d give Democrats the best chance to win in November, but a poll sponsored by a progressive group also showed Welder doing well.

Sensing the chance for a pickup, Democrats have their first contested primary for Kansas governor since 1998. State Sen. Laura Kelly is the pick of the local political establishment, including former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, and it shows in her muscular fundraising. Former state Secretary of Agriculture Joshua Svaty’s campaign is almost like a modern-day incarnation of the Populist Party, the progressive agrarian political movement that won five states (including Kansas) in the 1892 presidential election. Svaty has devoted his campaign to winning back rural voters by combining liberal positions, like Medicaid expansion, with conservative ones, like opposition to abortion. The campaign has been defined by the Planned Parenthood-endorsed Kelly attacking Svaty for his pro-life record and Svaty attacking Kelly for her votes against gun restrictions and for voting restrictions. Former Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer, a more mainstream liberal, has emerged mostly unscathed. He is running to be Kansas’s first black governor and could be a strong general-election candidate despite the state’s R+23 partisan lean.

Elevated to the office early this year after the resignation of Sam Brownback, Gov. Jeff Colyer is running for his first full term. But first he has to beat Secretary of State Kris Kobach in the Republican primary. Kobach is the rare down-ballot state executive to have a national profile, thanks to his divisive role on President Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity and zealous efforts to prosecute voter fraud (despite scant evidence that it exists in any abundance). That’s left him with a higher profile than Colyer but also higher unfavorable ratings among Republicans.

Embarrassing headlines have beset Kobach throughout the campaign: In April, he was held in contempt for disobeying a court order. In June, a court overturned his main policy priority, a law requiring that Kansans provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, as unconstitutional. Just last week, ProPublica reported on how Kobach — doing his best Lyle Lanley impression — convinced several small towns to pass strict anti-immigration ordinances, then personally profited from defending them in court, with little success. There’s little question that Kobach is Republicans’ weakest play in the general election: A mid-July poll showed Colyer leading Kelly by 10 points, but Kobach trailing the Democrat by 1.

Michigan

Races to watch: U.S. Senate; 1st, 6th, 9th, 11th and 13th congressional districts; governor Polls close: 8 p.m. Eastern in most of the state, 9 p.m. Eastern in four counties on the Upper Peninsula

The Republican primary for Michigan governor is a question of who is more in touch with the modern GOP: Trump or outgoing Gov. Rick Snyder. So far, Trump is winning handily. The president endorsed state Attorney General Bill Schuette last September, and Schuette has led in primary polls throughout the race. The latest average has him 16 points ahead of Lt. Gov. Brian Calley. Schuette has kept his opponent down by reminding primary voters that Calley renounced his support for Trump after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in 2016 — an episode that likely played a role in Trump’s decision to endorse Calley’s opponent.

Meanwhile, Calley’s loyalty to Snyder (who has endorsed him) may hurt more than it helps, given the governor’s -15 net approval rating. Schuette has even prosecuted members of the Snyder administration for their actions related to the Flint water crisis, while Calley has been the face of the administration’s defense. Even the specter of an FBI investigation into Schuette’s use of state resources doesn’t seem to have done much to change the trajectory of the race.

For Democrats, former state Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer has led most recent polls by 20 points or more, but there are a few warning signs for her campaign. The highest-quality poll2 of the race showed a much closer contest and came as her closest rival, Shri Thanedar, reported pouring $10 million of his own money into the race. Thanedar is campaigning as the progressive antidote to Whitmer’s establishment persona, but his business record and level of commitment to his positions (he reportedly considered running as a Republican) have been called into question. Perhaps to blunt Thanedar’s momentum, Sanders recently announced his support for former Detroit health director Abdul El-Sayed, and Sanders and fellow progressive hero Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist who recently won the Democratic nomination for a New York congressional seat, have committed to an aggressive campaign schedule on El-Sayed’s behalf. Whitmer is likely Democrats’ strongest general-election candidate for this slightly Republican-leaning (R+0.3) state: She is the only one who comfortably defeats Schuette in polling, and Republicans have covertly attacked her from the left in an effort to defeat her in the primary.

The open 11th Congressional District (R+7) is an electoral trifecta: a competitive Democratic primary, a competitive Republican primary and a toss-up race in November. An EPIC-MRA poll suggests that the Democratic front-runners are Tim Greimel, a state representative; Haley Stevens, who played a starring role in the Obama administration’s efforts to save General Motors and Chrysler; and Suneel Gupta, who is running on his unusual background as the co-founder of a health startup (with his brother Sanjay — maybe you’ve heard of him). For Republicans, Lena Epstein, the co-chair of the Trump campaign in Michigan, has parlayed a $1 million personal investment into front-runner status. A trio of current and former state legislators — former state Rep. A. Rocky Raczkowski, state Rep. Klint Kesto and state Sen. Mike Kowall — are her closest competition. Former Congressman Kerry Bentivolio — a reindeer farmer who plays Santa Claus on the side — is also attempting a comeback, but it’s not expected to go anywhere.

For U.S. Senate, 37-year-old military veteran John James looks like the likely Republican nominee over 61-year-old financier Sandy Pensler. The two were locked in a tight race when Trump endorsed James on July 27. Neither candidate is favored to beat longtime Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow in November, but the primary will be another data point in the debate over the value of Trump’s endorsement. Likewise, GOP Rep. Fred Upton will be tough to dislodge from Michigan’s 6th Congressional District (R+9), but Democrats will try to choose the best person for the job. Top Michigan Democrats are behind former Kellogg lobbyist George Franklin, but he has come under fire for demeaning descriptions of women in his memoir. Physician Matt Longjohn has raised almost as much money as Franklin and could swing the upset. And keep an eye on the 1st District (R+21): Republican Rep. Jack Bergman has a chance to run unopposed in November, but that all depends on whether Matt Morgan gets enough write-in votes in the Democratic primary. Morgan, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, was impressing observers with his strong fundraising before getting booted from the ballot in June over a paperwork mistake on his nominating petitions.

Finally, Democratic primaries in solidly blue districts will decide the likely next member of Congress in two open seats. In the 9th District (D+7), Andy Levin, benefitting from plenty of establishment and union backing, probably thought he would have no trouble winning a seat that his father and uncle have held for the last 40 years. But then Emily’s List backed former state Rep. Ellen Lipton, who has outraised the dynastic favorite $1.1 million to $900,000. Both candidates support Medicare for all and agree on many other progressive priorities, so this one may hinge on the Levin family name vs. the “Year of the Woman.” A poll in late July gave Levin a 23-point lead. In the 13th District (D+61), polls suggest it’s a three-person race. Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones is organized labor’s candidate and is doing especially well with African-American voters. Former state Rep. Rashida Tlaib, seeking to become the first Muslim woman in Congress, has harnessed the progressive grassroots movement to the tune of over $1 million in donations. And if the Detroit vote winds up split between these candidates, that could throw victory to Bill Wild, the white mayor of suburban Westland who is the race’s only candidate from outside the city.

Washington

Races to watch: 3rd, 5th and 8th congressional districts Ballots due: 11 p.m. Eastern

Primaries in Washington state are important to watch for two reasons: to see who’s on the November ballot, sure, but also as a dry run for the state’s vote in November. Like California, Washington uses a top-two primary, meaning that all candidates — Democrats, Republicans and independents — run on the same ballot on Tuesday, with only the top two finishers advancing to the general election. Historically, the combined total vote share of all the Democratic candidates vs. that of all the Republican candidates has closely matched the eventual two-party margin in November.

Pay special attention to the margins in the 3rd District and the 5th District. In the latter, Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Democrat Lisa Brown are almost assured to advance to the general election, but analysts disagree on whether McMorris Rodgers — the No. 4 Republican in the House — is in any serious danger of losing this R+15 seat. Same with the 3rd District (R+9), which is either “Safe Republican” or “Likely Republican” depending on whom you ask. Voters in the 3rd will also choose which Democrat they want to face GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler. The likeliest options, based on fundraising prowess, are self-described pragmatist Carolyn Long or self-funding progressive David McDevitt.

Everyone, though, agrees that the open 8th District (D+0.1) is a toss-up. State Sen. Dino Rossi has one of the top two spots all but locked up for the GOP, leaving three well-funded Democrats to battle for the second. An internal poll by the Democrat-affiliated House Majority PAC suggested that, of the three, former prosecutor Jason Rittereiser appeals the most to independents. That’s a bit odd (or not), because Rittereiser is in favor of single-payer health care and turned heads with an ad accusing Trump of treason. However, opponents Shannon Hader and Kim Schrier, both women and doctors, are arguing that Congress doesn’t need another male attorney in its ranks. Schrier enjoys the backing of Emily’s List and is thought to be the front-runner.

Results will start to be released shortly after 11 p.m. Eastern, but don’t stay up too late waiting for them all to be counted — Washington votes by mail, and ballots can be postmarked as late as Election Day, meaning results won’t be final for days.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nathaniel Rakich

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Do Republicans Think About Healthcare

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-do-republicans-think-about-healthcare/

What Do Republicans Think About Healthcare

Republicans On The Affordable Care Act

Warren Buffett says GOP health reform bills are relief for the rich

In the 2012 Republican Part Platform, Republicans spoke out against the Affordable Care Act, stating that the Democrats used it more as an assertion of power than they used it to improve health care conditions in this country, and in doing so they detrimentally damaged the health of this nation. The Republican Party views the requirement for United States citizens to purchase health insurance as an attack on the Constitution. They believe that the financial burden it would bring upon the country, and specifically on individual states, through the expansion of Medicaid is unsustainable, and will harm the nation as a whole. The act was so firmly opposed by the Republican Party that not a single Republican voted for the final version that Obama signed into law.

Obamacare Repeal Requires Replacement After 2016 Election

Republicans had spent eight years trashing the Democratic health care overhaul, but now that they were in power, they ran up against the same political winds that forced ObamaCare tolook like such a political Frankenstein’s monster to begin with. Conservatives wanted a complete and total repeal of the law; moderative Republicans wanted to protect certain pieces of it.

Do Americans Like Socialism

In a list of ten ideologies;YouGov;put to Americans, socialism ranked fifth in terms of favorability. Three in ten Americans have a favorable view of socialism, while 47% do not. Another 13% arent sure, and 10% dont know what the term means in the first place.;

Least;favorable;are totalitarianism , fascism and authoritarianism .;

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the popularity;of self-proclaimed;democratic socialist Bernie Sanders,;Democrats take a more;favorable;view of socialism, and Republicans less so. Half of Democrats have a;favorable;view, while just over a quarter;;have an;unfavorable;one. Among Republicans,;11% have a;favorable;view and 75% an;unfavorable;one.;

Don’t Miss: Why Is There Republicans And Democrats

Nbc News/commonwealth Fund Health Care Poll

Three in 10 likely voters are worried about being able to afford health insurance and costs for prescription drugs and other health care over the next year; among most worried are Democrats, blacks, Hispanics, and people earning under $50,000

Nearly 80 percent of likely voters believe reducing health care costs should be a high priority for the next president

Press Release

In next weeks Super Tuesday primaries, voters in 14 states and American Samoa will cast their ballots for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. Health care has emerged as one of the top issues in the 2020 election, at times dominating the Democratic presidential debates.

Controlling Drug Prices Top Issue For Republicans

Controlling drug prices is a top health care priority of the Trump administration, says James C.

Capretta, a resident fellow and the Milton Friedman Chair at the right-leaning think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. In the healthcare sphere, drug pricing would be number one, he said. Then other issues, such as price transparency and health reimbursement accounts, would follow behind that.

If Trump wins re-election and the Republicans control at least the U.S. Senate, then its safe to say that past will be prologue for 2021 if not longer, Capretta observes.

The agenda for Republicans is almost certainly going to remain as it has been since 2017, he notes. By that I mean there will be a focus on administrative action related to loosening regulations.

If there is a second Trump administration, executive orders and administrative changes are likely to be the main tools of its healthcare policies because Democrats are expected to retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives regardless of how the presidential vote turns out and whether the Republicans keep their current 53-47 hold on the Senate.

The idea of any kind of Trump legislative initiatives making it through the Congress seems quite remote, Capretta continues. Moreover, I don’t think they have a legislative health agenda that they would be ready and wanting to push as a priority.

Recommended Reading: Who Won More Democrats Or Republicans

Republicans And Democrats Think With Different Parts Of Their Brains

American liberals and conservatives use different parts of their brains when assessing risks, a new study finds.

A new study says that the brains of American Democrats and Republicans are wired differently, and that they use entirely different sections when making risky decisions.

Let the debates commence.

Liberals show a higher level of activity in the left insula, a portion of the brain associated with self-awareness, social cues, addiction, emotional processing, empathy, and even orgasms .

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to weigh risk in the right amygdala, an area of the brain that aids in survival, including reacting to violations of personal space and controlling social interaction, fear, and aggression .

These conclusions were drawn from a study of 82 people performed by political scientists and neuroscientists at the University of Exeter and the University of California, San Diego. The study was published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

George W Bush On Health Care

During his time in office, George W. Bush advocated for HIV/AIDS relief, HIV prevention, and abstinence-only education. He implemented the ABC method of HIV prevention . He also worked towards HIV relief and prevention through efforts that emphasized regular testing, early diagnosis, ongoing monitoring, and the elimination of HIV/AIDS in newborns. He also increased the amount spent on abstinence-only education. Bush also restricted federal funding for stem cell research and created a ban on human cloning and the creation of human embryos that were solely for experimental purposes. During his time in office, he also restored a policy that banned the use of controlled substances for assisted suicide.

You May Like: Did The Republicans Win The Senate Last Night

Trump And Republican Health Care Reform: The Republicans’ Irrational Opposition To Medicaid

President Trump and almost all Congressional Republicans have consistently opposed Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid.

Their opposition is irrational.

It is also unpopular with voters. In dark red states like Nebraska, Idaho and Utah voters recently went over the heads of their Republican legislators and governors by approving referendums to expand the program. And, Kansas is about to become the 37th state to expand Medicaid under Obamacare after a bipartisan agreement between the Democratic governor and Republican leaders in the legislature.

While Obamacare’s individual health insurance reforms and subsidies have been a disaster for the middle class , the Medicaid expansion in the states that have approved it has covered millions of people that would never have been covered otherwiseat a cost that could never have been less.

Republican opposition has centered around a number of arguments. Let’s take a look at each of them.

We can’t afford such a massive expansion of the welfare state and the impact that would have on deficit spending.

Our rapidly exploding deficits are a big issue we seem to have recently forgotten about.

But blowing up the deficit over health care didn’t bother Congressional Republicans in 2003 when they created the Medicare Part D drug benefit and didn’t pay for it adding $700 billion to the deficit over the following ten years . But that unpaid-for entitlement expansion helped a big Republican constituencyseniors.

Why Do Republicans Oppose Obamacare

Why Do Republicans Think Socialists Are Anti-Gun?

Patrizia Rizzo, SEO Reporter

11:10 ET, Nov 11 2020

Patrizia Rizzo, SEO Reporter

Invalid Date,

REPUBLICANS have campaigned against Obamacare ever since it was signed into law in 2010.;

But with a change in presidency ahead, the Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including;key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Also Check: Who Raises Taxes More Democrats Or Republicans

Challenges Under The Affordable Care Act

Also known as Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010. The measure was an attempt by former President Obama to give every American access to affordable health insurance. At the time, 39 Democrats and 178 House Republicans voted against the ACA. The remaining 218 Democrats in the House voted for the ACA. The Senate passed the ACA with a 68-30 vote, with 68 Democrats and two Independents voting yea and 39 Republicans voting nay. The party-line vote exposed the ideological differences between the two sides on healthcare.

Despite widespread support among Democrats for the ACA, Obamacare has not lived up to some of its hype, and even those on the left agree that the law hasnt accomplished its full potential over the last seven years.

Here are some of the challenges that Obamacare faced:

Many Americans found it difficult to understand why the law required them to acquire insurance or face a fine. To further compound the problem, most people did not understand how the law imposed the fine. Plenty of taxpayers were surprised when they got charged an additional fee during tax time.

Is The Supreme Court Likely To Save Obamacare

The Supreme Court is likely to leave in place the bulk of Obamacare, including key protections for pre-existing health conditions.

Conservative justices John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared in two hours of arguments to be unwilling to strike down the entire law a long-held Republican goal.

The courts three liberal justices are almost certain to vote to uphold the law in its entirety and presumably would form a majority by joining a decision that cut away only the mandate, which now has no financial penalty attached to it.

Leading a group of Democratic-controlled states, California and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives are urging the court to leave the law in place.

A decision is expected by late spring.

Also Check: Are There Any Republicans Running Against Donald Trump

Obama And Trump Healthcare Policies Compared

There could not be a more radical divide between administrations than there is between these two. The Obama administration worked against almost insurmountable opposition from the GOP in order to pass the ACA. The Trump Administrations quest is to dismantle everything the Obama Administration has done. They even have court cases pending in order to do so.

Republicans Have A Health Plan Finally

The House Republican Study Committee has come out with a viable plan.

Getty

For the past ten years Republicans in Congress have been largely AWOL on health care.

If memory serves, there has never been a hearing to showcase the victims of Obamacare. Nor has there been a hearing to show how sensible reforms could make the lives of those victims better.

When it came to legislation, the GOP only had two ideas: either abolish Obamacare entirely or toss it to the states. Neither approach actually solved a health care problem. They just allowed Republicans in Washington to wash their hands of the issue and pass the problems along to someone else.

Until now.

The House Republican Study Committee has accepted the challenge and delivered. In a 68-page document, it identifies the worse problems in our health care system and shows how they can be solved.

The proposals are bold, impactful and easy to understand. Here is a quick summary.

Personal and portable health insurance. In an ideal world, if people like the insurance they get from an employer, they would be able to take it with them from job to job and in and out of the labor market. Under the Obama administration, this practice was not only illegal, employers who bought individually owned insurance for their employees faced huge fines.

You May Like: Is Red The Color Of Republicans

Religion And The Belief In God Is Vital To A Strong Nation

Republicans are generally accepting only of the Judeo-Christian belief system. For most Republicans, religion is absolutely vital in their political beliefs and the two cannot be separated. Therefore, separation of church and state is not that important to them. In fact, they believe that much of what is wrong has been caused by too much secularism.

Those are the four basic Republican tenets: small government, local control, the power of free markets, and Christian authority. Below are other things they believe that derive from those four ideas.

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Despite what they say on television about protecting the most vulnerable, one by one the Republican senators are all getting in line behind Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. We don’t yet know who that is, but we can assume how he or she will vote on Obamacare.

People with pre-existing conditions like me are again terrified of losing our insurance, this time in the midst of a pandemic. We’ve lived through years of scary uncertainty and now months of sheltering in place. Enough is enough. We are all health care voters now. We’ll see whether our wavering senators are health care voters, too.

Laura Packard is a Denver-based health care advocate and cancer survivor. She is the founder of Health Care Voices, a non-profit grassroots organization for adults with serious medical conditions, co-chair of Health Care Voter, and runs the pharma accountability campaign for Hero Action Fund. Follow her on Twitter:

Also Check: Who Is Correct Democrats Or Republicans

Groups Opposing The American Health Care Act

Over 50 organizations oppose the proposed healthcare plan that will make Americans will pay more for less.;The list includes nurses, doctors, hospitals, teachers, churches, and more. You can see a few here:;

AARP: AARP opposes this legislation, as introduced, that would weaken Medicare, leaving the door open to a voucher program that shifts costs and risks to seniors.

Before people even reach retirement age, big insurance companies could be allowed to charge them an age tax that adds up to thousands of dollars more per year. Older Americans need affordable health care services and prescriptions. This plan goes in the opposite direction, increasing insurance premiums for older Americans and not doing anything to lower drug costs.

On top of the hefty premium increase for consumers, big drug companies and other special interests get a sweetheart deal.

Finally, Medicaid cuts could impact people of all ages and put at risk the health and safety of 17.4 million children and adults with disabilities and seniors by eliminating much-needed services that allow individuals to live independently in their homes and communities. Although no one believes the current health care system is perfect, this harmful legislation would make health care less secure and less affordable.

AARP stands ready to work with both parties on legislation that puts Americans first, not the special interests.

That just wont do.

That is, above all, why physicians must be involved in this debate.

Universal Coverage Vs Market

What Virginia’s poorest citizens want from health care reform

Democrats generally continue to support the Affordable Care Act , but would like to fix its flaws and generally improve the law. Democrats want to empower states to use innovation waivers to create their own approaches to healthcare reform that are as good asor better thanthe current system. Many Democrats also support fixing the ACA’s “family glitch” by basing affordability calculations for employer-sponsored coverage on family premiums rather than employee-only premiums, and most also support expanding premium subsidies to higher income ranges in order to soften the subsidy cliff.

But increasingly, Democrats are also getting behind the idea of a transition to some sort of universal coverage system. All of the Democrats who ran for the 2020 presidential nomination were in favor of universal coverage, although they had differing opinions on whether we should transition entirely to a single-payer system or use a combination of government-run and private health coverage .

Biden’s healthcare proposal also calls for an end to surprise balance billing, premium-free coverage under the public option for people who are caught in the Medicaid coverage gap , and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.

The Republican Party has not rolled out a new healthcare platform for 2020, and is instead utilizing the same platform they had in 2016. So in general, their approach can be expected to be the same as it has been for the past several years.

Recommended Reading: Are Any Other Republicans Running For President

Paging Cooler Heads Can We Meet Somewhere In The Middle Please

The solution to healthcare reform isnt easy, but it lies somewhere in the middle of these extreme ideologies. GOP leadership has been working on swaying members of its own party, but perhaps a different approach one that includes leftwing support would fare better in the long run. The ACA was passed without conservative support, and now, seven years later, the country is on the brink of a healthcare overhaul once more. Unless politicians work toward reaching middle ground, its unlikely that reform will be effective regardless of whos in charge.

Premium Subsidies And Affordability

The ACA’s premium subsidies were designed to keep health insurance affordable for people who buy their own coverage in the individual market. Premiums for individual market plans increased alarmingly in 2017 and 2018, although they were much more stable in 2019 and 2020, and rate changes for 2021 appear to be mostly modest. But premiums for people who aren’t eligible for premium subsidies can still amount to a substantial portion of their income.

The individual market is a very small segment of the population, however, and rate increases have been much more muted across the full population .

Democrats have proposed various strategies for making coverage and care affordable. Joe Biden’s healthcare proposal includes larger premium subsidies that would be based on the cost of a benchmark gold plan and based on having people pay only 8.5% of their income for that plan . Biden’s proposal would also eliminate the ACA’s income cap for premium subsidy eligibility and provide subsidies to anyone who would otherwise have to pay more than 8.5% of their income for a benchmark gold plan. This would eliminate the “subsidy cliff” that currently exists for some enrollees.

The 2020 Democratic Party platform calls for a “public option” health plan that would compete with private health insurance carriers in an effort to bring down prices, and lowering the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60.

Recommended Reading: Which Republicans Voted Against The Budget Resolution

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dipulb3 · 4 years

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Analysis: How Dr. Seuss explains Biden's big win on Covid bill

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-how-dr-seuss-explains-bidens-big-win-on-covid-bill/

Analysis: How Dr. Seuss explains Biden's big win on Covid bill

That stress on cultural complaints reflects the shifting source of motivation inside the GOP coalition, with fewer voters responding to the warnings against “big government” once central to the party’s appeal and more viscerally responding to alarms that Democrats intend to transform “our country,” as former President Donald Trump often calls it, into something culturally unrecognizable.

Rahm Emanuel lived through both of those earlier fights as a top White House side to Clinton and Obama’s chief of staff. Compared with the gyrations required to pass those economic plans, he told me, the changes that Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other moderates demanded this time were “a nip and tuck. It’s not even plastic surgery.” The modest changes, he says, shows that compared with those earlier periods, the Democratic congressional caucus today is “much more ideologically cohesive.”

Some Democratic strategists warn that the cumulative price tag of the Biden agenda might still trigger a backlash, particularly if interest rates and/or inflation rise, as some economists warn. But for now it’s clear that Democratic moderates are displaying less fear of being tagged with the “big government” label from the right than their counterparts did during the early months of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. That could help Biden consolidate his party for another expensive proposal he’s likely to unveil soon: a broader, infrastructure-centered, economic recovery plan whose price tag will also likely reach the trillion-dollar level.

“I think it’s very clear that on economic issues, the voters … want them to pass stuff and take action, and there’s not a lot of opposition out there,” says Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch. “So Biden’s got running room.”

Why it’s different this time

As in the famous Sherlock Holmes story, the most revealing dynamic in the legislative debate over the Covid plan may have been “the dog that didn’t bark”: in this case, the absence of a grassroots conservative uprising against the plan, even though its price tag vastly exceeded the Clinton and Obama proposals that ignited more resistance. Polls have consistently found significant majorities of Americans support the Covid relief plan, with Gourevitch’s firm releasing one survey last week that showed it winning support from more than two-thirds of adults, including a plurality of Republicans.

Democratic Rep. Ron Kind, who represents a rural-flavored western Wisconsin district that Trump carried by almost 5 percentage points last November, told me he felt no hesitation about backing the Covid bill. Calls coming into his office, Kind told me, have been “10 to one positive. … The reaction has been amazing: overwhelming support.”

Likewise, Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, who also holds a seat in a blue-collar district Trump won by more than 4 points, says that among his colleagues in swing districts, “Teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing, pearl-clutching: All of those were absent in this.”

Changed circumstances partly explain the GOP’s inability to stir serious resistance to the plan. Obama’s economic recovery package was buffeted by the broader public anger over financial institutions’ role in triggering the 2008 housing crisis and severe recession. This time, despite Trump’s frequent efforts to blame the virus on China, Americans seem much more inclined to view the outbreak as a kind of natural disaster that demands a collective response.

“In ’09 there was so much anger in the air, the big fat cats being bailed out … and people were looking for blood and who do we hold accountable,” Kind says. “And that’s not as easy to do when you’ve got a global pandemic.”

Different, too, is the breadth of the pain the virus has inflicted. Clinton’s economic plan followed a relatively mild recession; and while Obama’s responded to a much more serious downturn, the housing crisis still spared most homeowners while crushing others. The small-government “tea party” movement that helped power the huge GOP gains in the 2010 election began with a television rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, who asked, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

By contrast, the coronavirus outbreak has touched virtually all Americans: Even those who haven’t faced illness in their families, or disruption to their incomes, have seen the routines of daily life disintegrate.

In his central Pennsylvania district, Cartwright says, “you would struggle to find somebody who wasn’t affected by this pandemic negatively in some way.”

That includes local Republican officials in cities and towns, Kind notes, who are eager for the bill’s assistance — despite congressional Republican attempts to tag its aid for local governments as a bailout to poorly run Democratic cities and states. “The [congressional] Republicans are overplaying their hand by trying to make this more partisan than it is back home,” he says. One Republican police chief in his district, Kind says, even told him that by opposing the local aid, Republicans “are the ones who are really defunding law enforcement and our first responders.”

Yet just as important as the changed circumstances may be the evolving priorities of the GOP voter base.

“Donald Trump may have shifted the GOP coalition to a more economically populist position or revealed that there’s just less appetite for spending discipline on the right than there was before,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me in an email.

If anything, questions about whether to increase or shrink government are now more likely to divide than unite Republican voters, notes Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. Though Republican partisans still generally recoil at higher taxes and oppose programs they view as transfer payments for the poor, a recent poll of Trump voters that Olsen supervised, for instance, found substantial support among them for spending on Social Security and Medicare (entitlements that benefit the predominantly White senior population).

“I think it’s pretty clear that in the modern Republican Party, spending control for its own sake is a minority taste, not a majority taste, and that partly explains why there hasn’t been this massive uprising at a $1.9 trillion bill,” Olsen says.

GOP anxiety about way of life widespread

As concerns about big government recede, anxiety about America’s changing identity in an era of growing racial and religious diversity has emerged as the core unifying principle of the GOP coalition. A February poll from Echelon Insights, Anderson’s firm, offers one measure of that shift. Asked their top priorities, Republican voters identified illegal immigration, lack of support for the police, liberal bias in media and general moral decline among their top five concerns; high taxes was the sole economic issue that cracked the list.

Olsen’s national survey of Trump voters, conducted in January, found them crackling with the sense that they are culturally and demographically besieged. In that poll, roughly 9 in 10 Trump voters agreed with a series of stark propositions: that America is losing faith in the ideas that make the country great, that Christianity is under attack in the US and that discrimination against Whites “will increase a lot” in years ahead. Overwhelming majorities rejected the idea that Whites have any intrinsic advantage in American society or that Hispanic and Asian immigrants face discrimination. In the recent national American Enterprise Institute survey supervised by Cox, three-fourths of Republicans asserted that discrimination against Whites was as big a problem as bias against minorities.

Olsen argues that racial resentment is overstated as a unifying principle for Trump supporters, instead portraying the common thread as a more general “sense that the American way of life is under attack.” Cox, along with many other political scientists and opinion analysts, disagrees: They argue the claim that Whites face discrimination has been the best predictor of not only support for Trump but also of the belief that the “American way of life” is under such threat that anti-democratic means, including violence, are justified to protect it.

Either way, whether these cultural anxieties are motivated primarily by racial resentment or not, what’s clear is they are burning brighter for GOP voters now than hostility to “big government.” “As conservative White Protestants moved from operating at the periphery of Republican politics to becoming the most critical part of the GOP base, their manifest cultural concerns, which have always incredibly important to these voters, have overshadowed the GOP’s traditional economic agenda,” says Cox.

House Republicans effectively acknowledged that shift by devoting so much attention to the controversy over Dr. Seuss — the National Republican Congressional Committee offered copies of his books to donors — while Democrats were passing a spending bill that towered over anything they had approved under Clinton or Obama. Other Republicans, meanwhile, tried to portray Biden’s use of the word “Neanderthal” to criticize GOP governor rollbacks of Covid restrictions as a slur on Republican voters, like Hillary Clinton’s description of some Trump backers as “deplorables.” While congressional Republicans called the Covid plan “socialist” or charged it was stuffed with Democratic pet projects, they hardly pressed that case with as much enthusiasm as these cultural attacks: “It doesn’t seem like they are even really trying” to discredit the package, says Gourevitch, in a verdict privately echoed by some Republicans.

Next up: Big spending on infrastructure

That half-hearted resistance seems likely to encourage Democrats to go big on the next stage of Biden’s economic agenda: the “Build Back Better” long-term growth proposal that will include a substantial infrastructure investment. Though the White House has not decided when to introduce the proposal, it will almost certainly include infrastructure spending in the range of about $300 billion annually, for a cumulative price tag over 10 years in the trillions.

Yet both inside the White House and Congress, Democrats are showing little hesitation about proposing that much new spending immediately after a package this big. Both Kind and Cartwright, holding districts that stretch deep into Trump country, say they would enthusiastically support a big infrastructure plan.

“I’d be very comfortable with it,” Cartwright says. “I have been serving in the US House since January 2013 and the whole time I have been saying out loud we need a big, big infrastructure package. It’s not just that the folks around here who build things for a living will benefit, it’s that the entire American economy will benefit.”

Steve Ricchetti, the White House counselor to Biden, told me the administration expects broad support for the infrastructure package when the President eventually unveils it.

“I believe there will be wide, deep bipartisan support for infrastructure because the need is so great,” he says. “I believe there’s a prospect for securing bipartisan support in Congress for this, but I am certain there will be bipartisan support throughout the country for this: governors, mayors, local officials whose economies are dependent on infrastructure investment, digital, energy, transportation, water. The business community will be enormously supportive of this; it’s an engine for the recovery.”

The open question for Biden, as he finalizes his next proposals, is whether there’s a cumulative weight of proposed spending that awakens the slumbering conservative recoil against “big government.” Both Clinton and Obama saw the grassroots backlashes against their agendas intensify when they followed their initial economic plans with other expensive proposals, particularly their efforts to overhaul the health care system. Each of those dynamics culminated in crushing losses for them in the first midterm after their election.

Compared with the Clinton or Obama experience, Democrats unquestionably feel they have more runway to advance new programs today, largely because the GOP coalition no longer seems as energized by opposition to spending. But if the political limits on new spending seem relaxed, that doesn’t ensure they have been eliminated. It’s possible Americans will accept trillions in spending beyond the Covid plan, but it’s also possible Biden and fellow Democrats might trigger a circuit breaker in public opinion if they go too far — particularly if inflation and interest rates rise from all the economic stimulus as even some Democratic economists have warned. Demands from moderates such as Manchin to find offsetting tax revenues for some or all of the infrastructure plan could also stir more conservative opposition.

The problem is that both the cost of the federal response and the underlying disruption to society from the pandemic are so unprecedented that no one can confidently predict how much more spending Biden can add to his tab without provoking the backlash he has conspicuously avoided so far. Even Emanuel, who rarely expresses doubt, acknowledges, “I’m not even sure I can give you an educated guess on that.”

The safest bet is that so long as the GOP remains fixated on cultural and racial grievance, Democrats will feel confident pushing forward the most aggressive expansion of government’s role in the economy since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society during the 1960s.

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orbemnews · 4 years

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On immigration, Biden seeks a new approach to an old deadlock That choice reflects another big change from the past: While Bush and Obama both engaged in extended bipartisan negotiations that ultimately failed to produce a law, congressional Democrats and immigration advocates appear unlikely to enlist in such an elongated effort again. Congressional Democrats and immigrant advocacy groups seem content deferring initially as Biden seeks Republican support for change. But it’s clear that both groups have only limited patience for that approach if Republicans don’t quickly show signs of interest. “My goal is to see if there are some legitimate players on the Republican side who want to invest a little capital and are serious,” Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who’s the legislation’s chief Senate sponsor, told me. “If the answer to that is yes, I would take weeks with them. I am not going to take months with them.” The Democratic skepticism about pursuing lengthy negotiations with Republicans underscores the challenge Biden will face squaring his immigration goals with his promise to promote “unity” and find more common ground across party lines. On immigration, as on most of his other priorities, his promise to work with Republicans collides with the liberal tilt of his own proposals, a Republican Party that has moved to the right even since his tenure as Obama’s vice president, and a Democratic base highly dubious that meaningful cooperation is possible with that modern GOP — and thus eager to use special legislative tools to move forward without it whenever possible. “In the past, George W. Bush and Barack Obama sought bipartisan support for comprehensive immigration reform: The problem is it allowed Republicans to demand way too much in the sausage-making and, in the end, still kill off immigration reform,” says longtime immigration lobbyist Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of the advocacy group America’s Voice. “Biden is presenting a bill that unifies and inspires the entire Democratic coalition. In effect, he’s saying, ‘Work with me in good faith, Republicans, to get to 60 votes, and if you don’t’ — and most of us assume they will not — ‘we’ll find a way to get something done with our 51 votes.’ ” But Biden and the immigration advocates face a challenge that will shadow almost all aspects of his legislative agenda: The threat to freeze out Republicans and pass immigration legislation solely with Democratic votes works only if every Senate Democrat is willing to vote to end the filibuster — or to legalize millions of the undocumented through the special budget “reconciliation” process that allows bills to clear the upper chamber with 51 votes (including a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris). And it won’t be easy to convince every Democrat that allowing millions of undocumented immigrants to legally enter the workforce is a defensible idea while millions of other Americans are out of work amid the disruption created by the coronavirus pandemic. Assuming that all Democrats will unite around a reconciliation strategy, says one top business lobbyist who asked to remain anonymous while discussing the group’s internal calculations, is a combination of “wishful thinking and bluster.” Or, as Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, puts it: On immigration reform, “there’s a big difference between hope and experience.” How Biden’s strategy differs Biden’s early moves on immigration mark a clear reversal of the policies under Trump, who moved in almost every way possible to restrict both undocumented and legal immigration. But Biden’s posture also constitutes a departure from the tactics employed by Bush and Obama, who engaged in exhaustive bipartisan negotiations seeking a comprehensive overhaul. That process was led by the late Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, and John McCain, an Arizona Republican, under Bush in 2006 and the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” under Obama in 2013. Each time the negotiations produced a broad immigration bill that cleared the Senate with bipartisan support (though with notably fewer Republican senators supporting the package the second time). But while advocates believed they also had majority support in the House, the GOP leadership that controlled the chamber in both 2006 and 2013 refused to bring the bill to a vote, killing it. While Bush and Obama largely employed similar strategies, Biden has quickly indicated he intends to pursue a very different approach. Bush and Obama, for different reasons, did not seriously pursue immigration reform until their second terms; Biden revealed the outline of his immigration bill on his first day in office. That signals a very different level of commitment. “I am hopeful that we can do more than less, because I never had a president who put his back into it,” says Menendez, who arrived in the Senate just as the 2006 effort unfolded. Also different: While Bush and Obama pursued the “three-legged stool” of legalization for the undocumented (a Democratic priority), guaranteeing future flows of temporary workers (key for business) and tougher enforcement (a Republican emphasis), the plan Biden released offers relatively little on the latter two. As Sharry notes, that partly reflects a big shift in strategy: Democrats in effect are telling Republicans and their allies in the business community that any bill will reflect their concerns only if they produce GOP votes for the overall package, including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. But it also reflects a conviction among immigration experts in both parties that Trump already implemented almost every element of the right’s hardline enforcement wish list without stabilizing the system. “Over the last four years the world has skewed dramatically to the right on the question of enforcement — the wall, we have enough Border Patrol [agents] to put hands across the border almost, and [more] ICE agents, and the ‘stay in Mexico’ policy, the list is endless,” says Menendez. “On the enforcement side, that’s all we’ve had for the last four years. It’s a recognition that there has been a lot of enforcement out there; and second, a recognition there are better ways to do enforcement.” Even some Republican immigration experts second that conclusion. Biden underscored the message from his legislative proposal by releasing on his first day new enforcement guidance for the federal immigration agencies to pause most deportations (except for people considered the greatest threats) for his first 100 days, while repealing Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority nations and freezing construction of his predecessor’s border wall. That marks another sharp departure from Obama’s approach. During his first two years, Obama ratcheted up immigration enforcement and deportations. His goal was to make congressional Republicans more comfortable voting to legalize the undocumented by proving he would ensure border security — or at least to deny them the excuse that they could not vote for legalization until the border was secured. After two years of tough enforcement, Obama went to El Paso, Texas, in 2011 and declared, “We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done.” And yet, even after Obama’s enforcement offensive, legalization still failed because not enough Republicans — especially in the House — supported it, while immigrant advocates bitterly labeled him the “deporter in chief.” Conflicting view from Republicans After the bruising President Donald Trump years, Democrats and immigrant advocates are even more dubious that more than a handful of congressional Republicans will support legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented, no matter the concessions offered to them on temporary workers and/or border security. As Trump has increased the GOP’s reliance on the non-college-educated, non-urban and evangelical Christian White voters most uneasy about the way the nation is changing demographically and culturally, hostility to immigration in all forms has become one of the strongest threads binding the party. At the grassroots, polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute has found overwhelming support among Republicans for Trump’s travel ban on majority-Muslim countries, his border wall and reducing legal immigration; nearly half of Republican voters even supported his policy of separating parents and children on the border (which did prove a bridge too far for some GOP elected officials). Almost three-fifths of Republicans in a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll endorsed the harshly worded sentiment that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background”; agreement was even greater among Republicans who rely primarily on Fox News for information. In Congress, most Republicans endorsed Trump’s aggressive measures to restrict immigration — such as declaring a national emergency to redirect money toward his border wall after Congress refused to appropriate it or slashing refugee admission levels — and almost three-fourths of Senate Republicans supported legislation to cut legal immigration in half, though that Trump-backed bill ultimately failed. All of this reflects the party’s retreat under Trump to the parts of the country least touched by demographic change: After November’s Democratic gains in Arizona, Colorado and Georgia, Republicans, rather remarkably, hold just four of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states with the highest share of foreign-born residents. Already in Biden’s first week, prominent Republicans — including House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, who has shifted sharply to the right after helping to negotiate the 2013 Senate deal — have denounced the new President’s plan as a “blanket amnesty” and a threat to American workers forced from their jobs during the pandemic. Fox and other conservative media outlets are already touting the alleged threat of new “caravans” of migrants making their way toward the Southern border. Ken Paxton, the Republican Texas attorney general, a frequent antagonist on immigration issues during Obama’s presidency, is suing to block Biden’s deportation freeze and won an early round Tuesday when a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the pause. And, of course, the risk of denunciation from Trump looms over any congressional Republican considering cooperation with Democrats on legislation that legalizes any population of undocumented immigrants. Possible options Against that daunting backdrop, immigration advocates are already gaming out how they will proceed if, as they expect, the attempts by Biden and Democratic senators such as Menendez fail to win the 10 Republican votes they would need to break a filibuster against legislation to legalize all or some of the undocumented. One option is to seek legislation addressing only a portion of that population, starting with the roughly 2.1 million “Dreamers,” young people brought to the US as children by their parents. The House passed legislation in 2019 (with every Democrat voting yes) legalizing those undocumented young people, along with another roughly 300,000 immigrants here on so-called Temporary Protected Status, which covers migrants whose homelands are considered unsafe because of armed conflict or natural disasters. Even with a much narrower Democratic majority, advocates consider it highly likely the House would pass such legislation again. But while the Dreamers enjoy generally broad public support, finding 10 Republican votes for such standalone legislation in the Senate still would be difficult, since less than half of GOP voters back legalization for them. The same would be true for another undocumented population advocates might hope to legalize through standalone legislation: long-term farmworkers, who were also granted a pathway to citizenship in a separate bill the House approved in 2019. Democrats wouldn’t need 10 Republican votes for immigration legislation (or any of their other priorities) if the Senate majority voted to end the filibuster — but it does not appear they have the votes (or the inclination) to do that yet. That’s why immigration advocates are scouring the legislative rules to determine whether they can include a pathway to citizenship within the special “reconciliation” process. Established by the 1974 Budget Act, reconciliation allows legislation with an impact on the federal budget to clear both chambers with just a majority vote, thus bypassing the filibuster. The assumption among immigrant advocates is that Biden, despite his outreach, won’t win support from enough Senate Republicans to break a filibuster on his $1.9 trillion coronavirus “rescue” blueprint — much less the larger economic “recovery” package he says is coming in February — and will be forced to utilize reconciliation to pass those plans. They hope to convince congressional Democrats to include legalization for at least some of the undocumented in any reconciliation bill. Menendez, at least, appears open to that possibility. “I am certainly spending a lot of my staff’s time thinking about what is eligible for reconciliation,” he told me. Ideally, immigrant advocates would hope to legalize as many as about 7 million of the estimated 11 million undocumented through a reconciliation bill: the Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status populations, as well as farmworkers and perhaps 5 million undocumented immigrants working in occupations deemed “essential” during the pandemic. (Those categories overlap somewhat.) But such an ambitious plan might struggle to win even majority support in Congress because too many centrist Democrats, especially in the Senate, could balk at legalizing such a huge swath of people through that expedited process. If Democrats do use reconciliation as their vehicle, Chishti predicts, they are likely to define the population of “essential” workers eligible for legalization much more narrowly than advocates prefer — probably about 1 million people truly at the “front lines” of the pandemic, such as nurses and those in meatpacking plants. “If Covid is the dominant backdrop for the next year, then you have to get reconciliation for things that are reasonably close to Covid — so essential workers has a certain resonance in [that] context,” he says. “There is a reasonable argument that you can’t be essential and not protected from deportation.” Using the reconciliation tool likely would not only prevent Democrats from legalizing most of the undocumented, but both the rules and politics of the process would also almost certainly exclude major changes in the legal immigration system. And that could also represent another major opportunity cost. US needs more young people The efforts by Trump and congressional Republicans over the past four years to slash legal immigration collided with a clear economic imperative facing the US: the need for more working-age people to grow the nation’s labor market and consumer base. As William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, recently calculated, the US from 2010 to 2020 appeared on track to record the slowest population growth in percentage terms for any decade in American history. That’s occurring even as the number of seniors — who will require federal spending on Social Security and Medicare — is still rapidly increasing with the retirement of the baby boom. While unemployment is very high now, once the economy recovers from the pandemic, Frey notes, America will need more working-age adults to help pay the taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare for the growing number of seniors. And with fertility rates low, more immigration is the only realistic path to rejuvenating America’s working-age population. The irony is that means an increasingly non-White and foreign-born workforce will pay the taxes to support the retirement of the preponderantly White older population that has responded most ardently to Trump’s xenophobic messaging. “The projections show we are going to be dealing with lower population growth and an aging population, and the only way we are going to be able to keep our labor force growing and vital is through immigration,” Frey told me. “Immigrants and their kids are younger than the general population and we’re going to have to have a steady stream of that to counter the aging of the rest of the population.” The unlikelihood of progress on legal immigration is another reason why reconciliation represents an imperfect option for immigrant advocates and their Democratic allies. But after the disappointments of the Bush and Obama breakdowns, and the searing immigration wars of the Trump years, they appear more than ready to take what they can get in the legislative process. And they look less likely than in the past to slog through lengthy negotiations if the GOP balks — and the business groups that support reform can’t move enough of those congressional Republicans to “yes.” “My focus is to get a deal of some sort: I am not looking to bypass [bipartisan negotiations] and go to reconciliation,” Menendez says. “But I don’t intend to go home with nothing in my hand.” This story has been updated to reflect that a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s pause on deportations. Source link Orbem News #approach #Biden #Bidenseeksnewapproachtoolddeadlock-CNNPolitics #deadlock #Immigration #Onimmigration #Politics #Seeks

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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What Republicans Are Against The Healthcare Bill

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-republicans-are-against-the-healthcare-bill/

What Republicans Are Against The Healthcare Bill

Schumer: ‘we Can Work Together Our Country Demands It’

20 Republicans Vote Against GOP Healthcare Bill | MTP Daily | MSNBC

Until the end, passage on the Health Care Freedom Act, also dubbed the skinny repeal, was never certain. Even Republicans who voted for it disliked the bill.

The skinny bill as policy is a disaster. The skinny bill as a replacement for Obamacare is a fraud. The skinny bill is a vehicle to getting conference to find a replacement, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said at a Thursday evening news conference hours before the vote alongside fellow Republicans McCain, Ron Johnson and Bill Cassidy, before the details were released.

The skinny repeal was far from Republicans campaign promise of also rolling back Medicaid expansion, insurance subsidies, Obamacare taxes, and insurance regulations.

Many Republicans who did vote for it said they were holding their nose to vote for it just to advance the process into negotiations with the House of Representatives.

The legislation included a repeal of the individual mandate to purchase insurance, a repeal of the employer mandate to provide insurance, a one-year defunding of Planned Parenthood, a provision giving states more flexibility to opt out of insurance regulations, and a three-year repeal of the medical device tax. It also would have increased the amount that people can contribute to Health Savings Accounts.

Leigh Ann Caldwell is an NBC News correspondent.

Obamacare Repeal Fails: Three Gop Senators Rebel In 49

WASHINGTON Obamacare stays. For now.

Senate Republicans failed to pass a pared-down Obamacare repeal bill early Friday on a vote of 49-51 that saw three of their own dramatically break ranks.

Three Republican senators John McCain, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and all Democrats voted against the bill, dealing a stinging defeat to Republicans and President Donald Trump who made repeal of Obamacare a cornerstone their campaigns.

The late-night debate capped the GOP’s months-long effort to fulfill a seven-year promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

3 Republicans and 48 Democrats let the American people down. As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!

Donald J. Trump

The Senate has tried to pass multiple versions of repeal: repeal and replace, a straight repeal and Friday’s bare-bones repeal, but none garnered the support of 50 Republicans.

An emotional Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said after the 1:40 a.m. vote went down that Republicans remained committed to repealing the Obama-era health law.

When Did Obamacare Start

The timeline of key events leading up to the passage of the Obamacare law began in 2009. Here is a list of those events, along with key provisions that went into place after the law was enacted.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and a group of Democrats from the House of Representatives reveal their plan for overhauling the health-care system. Its called H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act.

;Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, a leading supporter of health-care reform, dies and puts the Senate Democrats 60-seat supermajority required to pass a piece of legislation at risk.

;Democrat Paul Kirk is appointed interim senator from Massachusetts, which temporarily restores the Democrats filibuster-proof 60th vote.

;In the House of Representatives, 219 Democrats and one Republican vote for the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and 39 Democrats and 176 Republicans vote against it.

In the Senate, 60 Democrats vote for the Senates version of the bill, called Americas Healthy Future Act, whose lead author is senator Max Baucus of California. Thirty-nine Republicans vote against the bill, and one Republican senator, Jim Bunning, does not vote.

Don’t Miss: Why Does Donald Trump Wear Red Ties

Changes Required By The Affordable Care Act In 2011

A provision goes into effect to protect patients choice of doctors. Specifics include allowing plan members to pick any participating primary care provider, prohibiting insurers from requiring prior authorization before a woman sees an obstetrician/gynecologist , and ensuring access to emergency care.

Young adults can stay on their parents insurance until age 26, even if they are not full-time students. This extension applies to all new plans.

All new health insurance policies must cover preventive care and pay a portion of all preventive care visits.

A provision goes into effect that eliminates lifetime limits on coverage for members.

Annual limits or maximum payouts by a health insurance company are now restricted by the ACA.

The ACA prohibits rescission when a claim is filed, except in the case of fraud or misrepresentation by the consumer.

Insurance companies must now provide a process for customers to make an appeal if there is a problem with their coverage. ;

NOTE: In January,;2011:;eHealth publishes 11 guides on the top;child-only health insurance coverage;that examined differences in implementation in numerous states.

Senate Gop Blocks 9/11 First Responders Health Plan Bill

Senate Republicans on Thursday morning filibustered legislation to monitor and treat first responders and emergency workers who suffered illnesses related to 9/11.

A vote to quash the filibuster failed by a vote of 57 to 42, three votes short of the necessary threshold. As a result, the proposal is unlikely to pass this year.

The bill would provide funding for a health program to treat first responders, construction and cleanup workers and residents who inhaled toxic particles after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.

The $7.4 billion cost of the legislation over 10 years is paid for by a provision that would prevent foreign multinational corporations from using tax havens to avoid taxes on U.S. income.

Harry Mason ReidWhite House says ball is in Congress’s court on voting rights, abortionBiden grapples with twin crisesFive takeaways from Biden’s week of chaos in AfghanistanMORE blasted Republicans after the vote.

Republicans denied adequate health care to the heroes who developed illnesses from rushing into burning buildings on 9/11. Yet they will stop at nothing to give tax breaks to millionaires and CEOs, even though they will explode our deficit and fail to create jobs. That tells you everything you need to know about their priorities, Reid said in a statement.

Schumer said some of the police officers and firefighters who rushed to the flaming towers have already been diagnosed with cancers.

This story was updated at 12:29 p.m.

Read Also: Democrat And Republican Switch Platforms

Six Ways Trump Has Sabotaged The Affordable Care Act

Donald Trumps first term represents an extraordinary development in what political scientists have called the administrative or unilateral presidency: how presidents seek to transform domestic policy through executive initiatives without congressional approval. Aggressive, partisan, multifaceted administrative presidencies have been especially evident since Reagan with presidents of both parties participating. Trump has in multiple ways taken this trend to new levels as his efforts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act vividly illustrate.

Republicans Tout Health Care Bill Alternative

“I’ve read the majority of this bill,” said Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., a physician. “I’ve got a diagnosis: It’s legislative malpractice.”

Price motioned to a tall stack of white copy paper bound with a yellow rope piled atop the podium and above the blue sign that read “Health Care Freedom” — the theme of the Republicans’ message today.

Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., told the crowd, “Republicans have better ideas to give you more choices, more freedom in health care, access for everybody. We’re going to fight for those ideas.”

Amid cheers, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., said, “We have an alternative: H.R. 3400.”

Republicans were joined by other notable public figures, including actor Jon Voight and radio host Mark Levin.

“I’m so deeply proud to be among you brave, concerned, patriotic American citizens,” Voight said. “The biggest vote in the U.S., the biggest voice in the U.S. is your voice, the voice of the American people.”

Among the faces in the crowd were young people who took off work, parents with their teenage children and senior citizens.

Schwartz of Americans for Prosperity described today’s rally as “very organic.” Seven buses carrying 350 people traveled to Washington, D.C., from parts of Maryland. Hundreds more, he said, carpooled behind.

“We want reform, but not the heap of junk that’s in this bill,” Schwartz said.

He expects that message will resonate with moderates and Blue Dog conservative Democrats who might still be on the fence about support for the House plan.

You May Like: What Is The Lapel Pin Republicans Are Wearing

Board Of Governors Professor School Of Public Affairs & Administration

The Trump administrations efforts to sabotage the ACA and their consequences receive detailed attention in a recently released Brookings book, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism. For present purposes, I highlight six major sabotage initiatives which emerged in the wake of congressional failure to repeal and replace the ACA.

1. Reduce outreach and opportunities for enrollment in the ACAs insurance exchanges. Established to offer health insurance to individuals and small business, the exchanges have provided coverage to some 10 million people annually. The Obama administration had vigorously promoted the ACA in part to attract healthy, younger people to the exchanges to help keep premiums down. The Trump administration sharply reduced support for advertising and exchange navigators while reducing the annual enrollment period to about half the number of days.

2. Cut ACA subsidies to insurance companies offering coverage on the exchanges. ACA proponents saw insurance company participation on the exchanges as central to fostering enrollee choice and to fueling competition that would lower premiums. The law therefore provided various subsidies to insurance companies to reduce their risks of losing money if they participated on the exchanges. The Trump administration joined congressional Republicans in reneging on these financial commitments.

Treating The Terminally Ill

GOP Senators Return Home To Backlash Against Healthcare Bill | AM Joy | MSNBC

The party opposes euthanasia and assisted suicide, as well as any non-consensual withholding of treatment for any reason. They believe that health care efforts should instead be focused on research to treat terminally ill patients, as well as pain relief and care of these patients, so that the rest of their lives are more comfortable.

Also Check: Senate Partisan Breakdown

House Democrats Approve Health Bill Seeking Contrast With Trumps Obamacare Assault

The vote was aimed at shoring up Democratic support in swing districts that fueled the party’s House takeover in 2018.

06/29/2020 06:50 PM EDT

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House Democrats on Monday approved a major expansion of Obamacare, underscoring the health care laws central role in their campaign pitch and drawing sharp contrast with President Donald Trumps efforts to eliminate the entire law.

Two Republicans New Jersey’s Jeff Van Drew, formerly a Democrat, and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania joined virtually every Democrat in supporting the bill, which would expand the laws subsidies for private health insurance, encourage hold-out red states to expand Medicaid and reverse Trump administration policies seen as undermining the Affordable Care Act. The Democrats bill, which will likely be shunned by the Republican-controlled Senate, also contains pieces of the partys, including a requirement for the government to negotiate prices.

Progressive lawmakers who have pushed sweeping Medicare for All legislation largely backed the more moderate health bill, which is aimed at shoring up Democrats support in swing districts that were pivotal to the party retaking control of the House in the 2018 midterms. The vote comes shortly after Trumps Justice Department urged the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare in a case later this fall, despite warnings from some Republicans that voters would punish the party in November.

Just one Democrat voted against the bill.

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Endangered Republicans Back Senate Democrats’ Bill Opposing Obamacare Lawsuit

Five Republicans facing tough reelections crossed party lines in a vote highlighting Trump’s challenge to the health care law.

10/01/2020 03:17 PM EDT

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Senate Democrats’ largely symbolic bid to cut off the Trump administration’s support for a Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare failed as expected Thursday, but several Republicans facing tough reelections crossed party lines to back the measure.

Sens. Martha McSally of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, who are trying to reassure voters about their defense of insurance protections for preexisting conditions, backed the Democrats’ measure. Another Republican, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who opposed Obamacare repeal efforts three years ago, also supported the bill.

But the bill fell 51-43, short of the 60 votes needed to advance.

Democrats through an unusual procedural maneuver seized control of the Senate agenda to force a challenging vote for Republicans ahead of a Supreme Court case that threatens Obamacare’s survival. Democrats have sought to highlight the case’s risk to health care coverage and insurance protections for tens of millions of Americans as Republicans rush to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat with President Donald Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. The court is slated to hear arguments in the lawsuit on Nov. 10, one week after Election Day.

The North Carolina Democratic Party charged that Tillis’ measure was inadequate.

Recommended Reading: Did Trump Say Republicans Are Stupid

Reagan Assaults The System

Conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan, soon after his election in 1981, launched an assault on the federal health care system, announcing plans to consolidate all 26 of the health services programs into two block grants, one for health services, the other for preventive health. He also announced plans to slash spending on health by 25 percent. The president’s announcement set off a battle in Congress, with conservatives in both parties taking up Reagan’s charge. In the Senate, Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican from Utah, and Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican, led the president’s battle to disassemble the federal health care programs. In the House, Republican Representatives Edward R. Madigan of Illinois, James T. Broyhill of North Carolina, and William E. Dannemeyer of California played key leadership roles for the Reagan agenda.

With a few concessions to Democrats, conservative Republicans, backed by many conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, passed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981. It reduced funding for all health services programs, collapsed funding for many categorical grant programs into block grants to states, and increased local and state governance over remaining programs. The concessions to congressional Democrats came only after last-minute lobbying by a group of Republican governors.

Premium Subsidies And Affordability

The individual market is a very small segment of the population, however, and rate increases have been much more muted across the full population .

Don’t Miss: Impeachment Polls In Swing States

Trump Tells Republicans To Get Back On Healthcare Bill

By Susan Cornwell

5 Min Read

WASHINGTON – U.S. President Donald Trump and members of his administration on Sunday goaded Republican senators to stick with trying to pass a healthcare bill, after the lawmakers failed spectacularly last week to muster the votes to end Obamacare.

For the second day running, the Republican president tweeted his impatience with Congress inability to deliver on his partys seven-year promise to replace the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obamas signature healthcare bill commonly known as Obamacare. Members of his administration took to the airwaves to try to compel lawmakers to take action.

But it was unclear whether the White House admonishments would have any impact on Capitol Hill, where Republicans who control both houses signaled last week that it was time to move on to other issues.

Republicans zeal to repeal and replace Obamacare was met with both intra-party divisions between moderates and conservatives and also the increasing approval of a law that raised the number of insured Americans by 20 million.

Polling indicates a majority of Americans are ready to move on from healthcare at this point. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Saturday, 64 percent of 1,136 people surveyed on Friday and Saturday said they wanted to keep Obamacare, either entirely as is or after fixing problem areas. That is up from 54 percent in January.

But Price also told NBC he would implement Obamacare because it is the law of the land.

Watch Sen John Mccain Cast ‘no’ Vote On ‘skinny’ Repeal

It isn’t clear what comes next, but the collapse of some insurance markets around the country serve as an incentive for Republicans and Democrats to hold hearings and fix the problems with health care.

Most Republicans never embraced the different iterations of legislation they crafted, nor the process by which it was constructed. Even on the last-ditch effort at a bare-bones bill, Republicans couldnt reach agreement. Over the past two days, many rejected a plan that would have partially repealed and replaced Obamacare and a measure that would have just repealed it. The repeal vote was the same bill that passed the Senate and the House in 2015 when former President Barack Obama vetoed it.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, stood against every version of the legislation even in the face of immense pressure. The Trump administration threatened to withhold federal resources from Alaska because of her opposition, according to the Alaska Daily News. Murkowski herself said the next day in response to the report that she would not characterize it as a “threat.”

“I sat there with Senator McCain. I think both of us recognize that its very hard to disappoint your colleagues,” Murkowski told NBC News after the vote. “And I know that there is disappointment because it was the three votes that Senator McCain, Senator Collins, and I cast that did not allow this bill to move forward. And that is difficult.”

“John McCain is a hero and has courage and does the right thing,” Schumer said.

Also Check: Latest Republican Polls By State

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paulbenedictblog · 4 years

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Cnn news Coronavirus government response updates: Top Trump officials clash over CDC response

Cnn news

As practically about all 50 states reopen in some measure this week despite a rock climbing U.S. demise toll, a pair of of President Donald Trump's advisers are publicly struggling with over who's responsible inner the administration for issues within the authorities's response to COVID-19.

Tensions between the White Residence and the Centers for Disease Help an eye fixed on and Prevention accumulate risen to the ground, with one top Trump White Residence legitimate blaming the company, and a Cupboard legitimate calling his comments' "unsuitable and scandalous."

Trump additionally said Monday he's been taking the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, unproven to treat COVID-19, for the final week-and-a-half of, despite most contemporary FDA warnings against its widespread consume.

Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC Files Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special protection of the unconventional coronavirus with the corpulent ABC Files team of workers, in conjunction with the most modern data, context and diagnosis.

Listed below are Monday's most basic inclinations in Washington:

Trump says he's be taking hydroxychloroquine, says there is 'demise on each sides' of reopening debate

Trump, Pence and and first girl Melania Trump decide half in a governors' video teleconference on COVID-19 response at 4 p.m.

$3T relief invoice in conjunction with negate payments to Americans heads to Senate, GOP calling it 'unnecessary on arrival'

Trump: 'With or with out a vaccine, we're support,' sets purpose for vaccine for 'Operation Warp Velocity' by January 2021

Or no longer it is miles the minimize-off date for public companies to recall whether or no longer to attain paycheck protection loans

Trump says he's been taking hydroxychloroquine for a week and a half of: 'What construct or no longer it is miles critical to lose?'

Trump said within the final minutes of an tournament with restaurant executives he's been taking the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, unproven to treat COVID-19, announcing that despite the indisputable truth that he's had no signs, he requested the White Residence physician to prescribe it.

"I requested him, 'What construct you're thinking that? He said, 'Neatly in inform for you it.' I said, 'Yeah I would take care of it. I would decide to come to a decision it.'

"A mode of of us to come to a decision it a form of frontline workers are taking hydroxychloroquine, a form of entrance," Trump claimed. "So I'm taking the zinc and the hydroxy. And all I'm able to clarify you is, to this level I appear to be enough."

Notably, despite the indisputable truth that the FDA warns against its consume out of doorways of a medical institution setting, the company is allowing frontline workers to consume hydroxychloroquine as section of managed, medical trials.

Dr. William W. O'Neill, main one of the most wonderful compare of the drug's consume as a potential preventative treatment, has said safe compare are basic to procure out the treatment's potential.

The randomized, double-blinded watch he's overseeing is a 3,000-discipline eye at Henry Ford Clinic in Detroit at whether or no longer hydroxychloroquine prevents entrance-line workers from contracting the COVID-19 virus.

The president said he's got "a form of certain letters" offering actual suggestions of the drug and insisted Monday, even supposing or no longer it is no longer effective, "you're no longer going to salvage sick or die."

"And it seems to build up an impact -- and doubtless it does, doubtless it doesn't -- but when it doesn't, you're no longer going to salvage sick or die. That is a, a capsule that's been weak for a actually long time for 30, 40 years on the malaria and or lupus to, and even on arthritis I enlighten from what I note, so or no longer it has been heavily tested when it comes to," Trump said.

The president knowledgeable newshounds that he was as soon as "valid waiting to eye your eyes illuminate when I said this," adding he has been taking it for approximately a week and a half of -- "and I'm quiet right here. I'm quiet right here can you repeat to you."

"On daily foundation I decide a capsule each day. At some level, I hobble to cease. What I’d decide to construct is I would decide to build up the treatment and/or the vaccine. And that will occur, I feel, very soon," he added.

The FDA final month specifically warned of basic aspect results of taking hydroxychloroquine "out of doorways of a medical institution setting or a medical trial due to risk of heart rhythm issues," despite the indisputable truth that touted by the White Residence.

Restaurant executives press Trump to elongate minimize-off date for spending PPP loans from contemporary 8 to 24 weeks, Trump suggests areas no longer reopening take care of Los Angeles accumulate 'demise need'

At a gathering with restaurant executives Monday afternoon, representatives banded collectively to name on the Trump administration to elongate the spending minimize-off date of the loans from the paycheck protection program to 24 weeks, from the contemporary eight weeks allowed.

President Trump regarded vastly greatly surprised to hear the owners were in agreement that an extension was but again essential to them than additional tax deductibility -- a measure the president regarded to push.

"Mr. President, the payroll protection program would be a godsend, if shall we accumulate one commerce. If shall we lengthen the time that we need that now we want to exhaust the proceeds into many communities this day. The eight week length is merely no longer enough time," one restaurant proprietor said, sooner than he was as soon as met largely with agreement.

"Deductibility is amazing, nonetheless or no longer it is practically take care of now we want to fabricate the home first," every other government knowledgeable the president.

Showing to no longer note that every person of the executives were section on a coalition, Trump requested if all of them talked about the 24-weeks goalpost beforehand.

"That's what is amazing about this just restaurant coalition. This didn't exist seven weeks ago. Restaurant owners didn't consult with every other. Ever. And we were bringing of us collectively," one proprietor said, as they nodded collectively.

Trump known as the build a question to "particularly practical" despite the indisputable truth that the commerce would want congressional approval.

Whereas extending the timeline to consume PPP funds clearly was as soon as top priority for the restauranteurs, Trump kept pushing an belief to let companies be ready to fully deduct any money they exhaust with drinking locations for catering, industry meals, and other entertainment charges.

As he continues his ramp to reopen, the president requested every other representative if it was as soon as actual that Los Angeles will likely be closed "til the end of August, is that a truth?"

He replied, "That is an valid build a question to. I'm in Napa Valley, but I'm no longer in fact certain about Los Angeles. I'm sorry."

"Yeah. That is the mayor needs to construct that," Trump followed up shortly. "That is a demise need. Because there is demise on each sides, , that's undoubtedly no longer valid a one come aspect road."

In the leaders' first public tournament collectively in over a week, since two White Residence staffers tested certain for coronavirus, Trump requested Vice President Mike Pence which two states accumulate no longer launched reopening plans -- but Pence didn't name them.

"There's two that are we build a question to of them to be releasing plans very soon. I hobble to salvage that to you sooner than we consult with the governors," Pence replied.

Requested what he thinks of the CDC's performance, amid disagreements in his occupy Cupboard on the anxiety, Trump said the company has "labored in fact laborious."

"I'll roar, they on the foundation, they had no test, and one of the most tests had a notify. Very early on, but that was as soon as shortly remedied and now now we accumulate doubtless the greatest tests wherever on this planet. I feel we give ourselves a form of that credit score," Trump said. "Now we accumulate doubtless the greatest trying out on this planet. Now we accumulate doubtless the greatest ventilators and distribution and the most ventilators on this planet. Or no longer it is no longer even shut."

Vice President Mike Pence addressed the infighting more straight but blamed the "arcane trying out machine" the Trump administration has insisted they inherited.

"Let me roar I feel, I feel Peter Navarro, his level was as soon as that the CDC and our public health labs on the teach level were operating with an arcane trying out machine, and it was as soon as one of the most causes why early on we brought within the total commercial labs around the country the president created a consortium of these commercial labs, Pence said. "And we reinvented trying out in The US."

Earlier than their name with the nations' governors, Trump additionally said, touting trying out on the afternoon tournament, "We made a form of governors eye actual."

Administration infighting over CDC's performance

The first shot was as soon as fired by White Residence commerce adviser Peter Navarro.

"The CDC, which in fact had the most relied on stamp around the enviornment in this home, in fact let the country down with the trying out," Navarro said Sunday. "Not only did they retain the trying out inner the bureaucracy, they had a wicked test and that space us support."

Neatly being and Human Products and services Secretary Alex Azar, within the period in-between, has doubled down on his protection of the company he oversees after at the birth, announcing on Sunday, "I construct no longer mediate the CDC let this country down. I mediate the CDC serves a actually noteworthy public health role."

Requested about Navarro's comments on Fox Files again Monday morning, Azar didn't mince phrases.

"Neatly the comments in relation to CDC are unsuitable and scandalous. The CDC had had one error which was as soon as in scaling up the manufacturing of the test that they had developed. There was as soon as a contamination that did no longer affect the the accuracy of the test, valid ended in inconclusive results. They fastened it inner weeks and got it out," Azar said. "That was as soon as by no come going to be the backbone of trying out within the U.S."

After ousted vaccine chief Rick Realizing regarded on the CBS Files program "60 Minutes" Sunday, repeating worthy of the claims he knowledgeable Congress that delays by the federal authorities inhibited its response and that he was as soon as retaliated against for no longer pushing hydroxchloroquine, President Trump tweeted that "This total Whistleblower racket wants to be checked out very carefully."

CDC releases stark funeral suggestions and detailed steering on contact tracing

On the identical day President Trump tweeted "REOPEN OUR COUNTRY," the CDC is tweeting some stark advice on funerals.

The CDC warns the events accumulate spread the virus in some conditions and recommends households decide into consideration such steps as virtual products and services and rethinking cultural traditions that would accumulate touching the deceased or sharing meals.

"For the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, decide into consideration expressing care in systems that construct no longer accumulate personal interactions," the CDC states.

Earlier Monday, the CDC issued 56-net page steering for contact tracing, which health specialists roar is major to slowing the spread.

ABC Files' Anne Flaherty

Trump expresses strengthen for Australia's effort for world probe of China on virus

Because the Trump administration looks to shut out others in its come to reopen, Chinese President Xi Jinping known as on the enviornment to to rally within the support of the World Neatly being Group Monday, even asserting a $2 billion donation to globally fight coronavirus, speaking within the WHO's first virtual assembly amid the pandemic.

President Trump is expected to realize an announcement on WHO funding at some level this week.

Monday morning, he expressed his strengthen for an Australian-led effort calling for the World Neatly being Group to manual an just overview of the origins of the coronavirus, which additionally has the strengthen of the overall EU nations.

"We are with them!" the president tweeted in acknowledge to a data article linking to the initiative.

It seems to be an expression of strengthen and no longer an announcement that the U.S. is formally signing on to the proposal, provided that Australia is calling for this world probe via the WHO.

The president has moved to slit support off U.S. funding to the WHO and has sought to shift blame to the enviornment health group for safeguarding up the virus in collusion with China.

ABC Files' Jordyn Phelps

Pence's Monday beneficial properties a joint tournament with POTUS

President Trump and Vice President Pence were preserving their distance from every other over ever since the vp's press secretary tested certain for COVID-19 -- 10 days ago now, despite the indisputable truth that the CDC recommends 14 days in quarantine.

But Monday, in step with the vp's time table, each are scheduled to support a teleconference with governors from the Topic Room at 4 p.m.

Trump said final Thursday of Pence: "I miss him."

ABC Files' Jordyn Phelps

Trump to focus on with Ford plant in Michigan Thursday

President Trump plans to dart to Ypsilanti, Michigan, on Thursday to focus on with a Ford plant manufacturing ventilators, White Residence deputy press secretary Judd Deere tweeted Sunday night.

The president plans to tour the plant that's making ventilators and PPE via a collaboration between Ford and Traditional Electric, in step with a White Residence legitimate. He'll accumulate remarks there, too, the legitimate said.

The time out suits the mildew of his most contemporary trips to the political battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania, where he visited a facility producing masks and a medical equipment distribution center, respectively.

ABC Files' Ben Gittleson

White Residence economist says they're in 'wait-and-behold' mode on whether or no longer more relief funding compulsory, Federal Reserve Chair says corpulent recovery might possibly doubtless well no longer some till end of 2021

White Residence economist Kevin Hassett said Monday morning that the White Residence is in a "wait-and-behold" mode as as to if or no longer additional stimulus packages will likely be compulsory within the months ahead, at the same time as he said the administration stands ready to come to a decision "very actual motion" down the road if compulsory.

"What steadily is the roughly thing that would decide you out of wait-and-behold mode? Neatly if the packages that are a should wish to salvage of us to the opposite aspect with out going bankrupt take care of the PPP, the mainstream lending program ran out of money, then unnecessary to claim we'd crawl in magnificent now," he knowledgeable newshounds.

Hassett said on the reward, the overview of the administration is there might possibly be quiet enough money left in packages to augment the financial system. He was as soon as cautious no longer to give a real timeline of when it might possibly per chance doubtless doubtless be determined if more is compulsory but said they'll be carefully observing to eye the progress the financial system makes within the arrival weeks into June.

"If the financial system recovers slower than we build a question to of, or no longer it is that you just might possibly doubtless well doubtless name to mind we'll wish to build some extra money in there and we stand ready to focus on that with Congress but magnificent now we predict you could quiet video show the information and behold what are the burn rates of those things," he knowledgeable CNBC, and adding that the administration is seeing certain signs as they video show that incoming data.

Federal Reserve Chair Powell's knowledgeable CBS Sunday that the uncertainty around the direction of the virus might possibly doubtless well push a corpulent recovery to the end of subsequent 300 and sixty five days -- but Hassett indicated this morning improved economic performance is to attain as companies launch to reopen.

Despite the indisputable truth that White Residence agrees more stimulus funding is in inform, he said he "doubt[s] that within the end the product is going to eye worthy take care of what speaker Pelosi build out final week."

Whereas President Trump has urged he'd decide to eye unfavorable hobby rates, Hassett was as soon as careful no longer to straight add his occupy advice but said, "doubtless the Fed might possibly doubtless well no longer wish to construct worthy more on hobby rates" if the financial system reveals signs of a certain rebound within the months ahead.

When requested about Powell's overview that the unemployment might possibly doubtless well dip to 25 p.c, Hassett didn't order the estimate.

Powell said Sunday that whereas he expected the U.S. financial system to enhance, the direction of would decide time -- potentially till the end of 2021.

"This financial system will enhance; it might possibly per chance doubtless well decide a whereas," he knowledgeable "60 Minutes." "It might possibly doubtless well decide a timeframe, it might possibly per chance doubtless well stretch via the end of subsequent 300 and sixty five days, we construct no longer in fact know."

ABC Files' Jordyn Phelps

What to perceive regarding the coronavirus:

How it began and the correct technique to present yourself with protection: Coronavirus outlined

What to construct must you are going to build up signs: Coronavirus signs

Tracking the spread within the U.S. and worldwide: Coronavirus draw

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dipulb3 · 4 years

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On immigration, Biden seeks a new approach to an old deadlock

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/on-immigration-biden-seeks-a-new-approach-to-an-old-deadlock/

On immigration, Biden seeks a new approach to an old deadlock

That choice reflects another big change from the past: While Bush and Obama both engaged in extended bipartisan negotiations that ultimately failed to produce a law, congressional Democrats and immigration advocates appear unlikely to enlist in such an elongated effort again.

Congressional Democrats and immigrant advocacy groups seem content deferring initially as Biden seeks Republican support for change. But it’s clear that both groups have only limited patience for that approach if Republicans don’t quickly show signs of interest.

“My goal is to see if there are some legitimate players on the Republican side who want to invest a little capital and are serious,” Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat who’s the legislation’s chief Senate sponsor, told me. “If the answer to that is yes, I would take weeks with them. I am not going to take months with them.”

The Democratic skepticism about pursuing lengthy negotiations with Republicans underscores the challenge Biden will face squaring his immigration goals with his promise to promote “unity” and find more common ground across party lines. On immigration, as on most of his other priorities, his promise to work with Republicans collides with the liberal tilt of his own proposals, a Republican Party that has moved to the right even since his tenure as Obama’s vice president, and a Democratic base highly dubious that meaningful cooperation is possible with that modern GOP — and thus eager to use special legislative tools to move forward without it whenever possible.

“In the past, George W. Bush and Barack Obama sought bipartisan support for comprehensive immigration reform: The problem is it allowed Republicans to demand way too much in the sausage-making and, in the end, still kill off immigration reform,” says longtime immigration lobbyist Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of the advocacy group America’s Voice. “Biden is presenting a bill that unifies and inspires the entire Democratic coalition. In effect, he’s saying, ‘Work with me in good faith, Republicans, to get to 60 votes, and if you don’t’ — and most of us assume they will not — ‘we’ll find a way to get something done with our 51 votes.’ ”

But Biden and the immigration advocates face a challenge that will shadow almost all aspects of his legislative agenda: The threat to freeze out Republicans and pass immigration legislation solely with Democratic votes works only if every Senate Democrat is willing to vote to end the filibuster — or to legalize millions of the undocumented through the special budget “reconciliation” process that allows bills to clear the upper chamber with 51 votes (including a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris).

And it won’t be easy to convince every Democrat that allowing millions of undocumented immigrants to legally enter the workforce is a defensible idea while millions of other Americans are out of work amid the disruption created by the coronavirus pandemic. Assuming that all Democrats will unite around a reconciliation strategy, says one top business lobbyist who asked to remain anonymous while discussing the group’s internal calculations, is a combination of “wishful thinking and bluster.”

Or, as Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, puts it: On immigration reform, “there’s a big difference between hope and experience.”

How Biden’s strategy differs

Biden’s early moves on immigration mark a clear reversal of the policies under Trump, who moved in almost every way possible to restrict both undocumented and legal immigration. But Biden’s posture also constitutes a departure from the tactics employed by Bush and Obama, who engaged in exhaustive bipartisan negotiations seeking a comprehensive overhaul.

That process was led by the late Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, and John McCain, an Arizona Republican, under Bush in 2006 and the bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” under Obama in 2013. Each time the negotiations produced a broad immigration bill that cleared the Senate with bipartisan support (though with notably fewer Republican senators supporting the package the second time). But while advocates believed they also had majority support in the House, the GOP leadership that controlled the chamber in both 2006 and 2013 refused to bring the bill to a vote, killing it.

While Bush and Obama largely employed similar strategies, Biden has quickly indicated he intends to pursue a very different approach.

Bush and Obama, for different reasons, did not seriously pursue immigration reform until their second terms; Biden revealed the outline of his immigration bill on his first day in office. That signals a very different level of commitment.

“I am hopeful that we can do more than less, because I never had a president who put his back into it,” says Menendez, who arrived in the Senate just as the 2006 effort unfolded.

Also different: While Bush and Obama pursued the “three-legged stool” of legalization for the undocumented (a Democratic priority), guaranteeing future flows of temporary workers (key for business) and tougher enforcement (a Republican emphasis), the plan Biden released offers relatively little on the latter two.

As Sharry notes, that partly reflects a big shift in strategy: Democrats in effect are telling Republicans and their allies in the business community that any bill will reflect their concerns only if they produce GOP votes for the overall package, including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. But it also reflects a conviction among immigration experts in both parties that Trump already implemented almost every element of the right’s hardline enforcement wish list without stabilizing the system.

“Over the last four years the world has skewed dramatically to the right on the question of enforcement — the wall, we have enough Border Patrol [agents] to put hands across the border almost, and [more] ICE agents, and the ‘stay in Mexico’ policy, the list is endless,” says Menendez. “On the enforcement side, that’s all we’ve had for the last four years. It’s a recognition that there has been a lot of enforcement out there; and second, a recognition there are better ways to do enforcement.”

Even some Republican immigration experts second that conclusion.

Biden underscored the message from his legislative proposal by releasing on his first day new enforcement guidance for the federal immigration agencies to pause most deportations (except for people considered the greatest threats) for his first 100 days, while repealing Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority nations and freezing construction of his predecessor’s border wall.

That marks another sharp departure from Obama’s approach. During his first two years, Obama ratcheted up immigration enforcement and deportations. His goal was to make congressional Republicans more comfortable voting to legalize the undocumented by proving he would ensure border security — or at least to deny them the excuse that they could not vote for legalization until the border was secured. After two years of tough enforcement, Obama went to El Paso, Texas, in 2011 and declared, “We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done.”

And yet, even after Obama’s enforcement offensive, legalization still failed because not enough Republicans — especially in the House — supported it, while immigrant advocates bitterly labeled him the “deporter in chief.”

Conflicting view from Republicans

After the bruising President Donald Trump years, Democrats and immigrant advocates are even more dubious that more than a handful of congressional Republicans will support legislation that includes a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented, no matter the concessions offered to them on temporary workers and/or border security.

As Trump has increased the GOP’s reliance on the non-college-educated, non-urban and evangelical Christian White voters most uneasy about the way the nation is changing demographically and culturally, hostility to immigration in all forms has become one of the strongest threads binding the party.

At the grassroots, polling by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute has found overwhelming support among Republicans for Trump’s travel ban on majority-Muslim countries, his border wall and reducing legal immigration; nearly half of Republican voters even supported his policy of separating parents and children on the border (which did prove a bridge too far for some GOP elected officials). Almost three-fifths of Republicans in a recent Public Religion Research Institute poll endorsed the harshly worded sentiment that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background”; agreement was even greater among Republicans who rely primarily on Fox News for information.

In Congress, most Republicans endorsed Trump’s aggressive measures to restrict immigration — such as declaring a national emergency to redirect money toward his border wall after Congress refused to appropriate it or slashing refugee admission levels — and almost three-fourths of Senate Republicans supported legislation to cut legal immigration in half, though that Trump-backed bill ultimately failed.

All of this reflects the party’s retreat under Trump to the parts of the country least touched by demographic change: After November’s Democratic gains in Arizona, Colorado and Georgia, Republicans, rather remarkably, hold just four of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states with the highest share of foreign-born residents.

Already in Biden’s first week, prominent Republicans — including House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio, who has shifted sharply to the right after helping to negotiate the 2013 Senate deal — have denounced the new President’s plan as a “blanket amnesty” and a threat to American workers forced from their jobs during the pandemic.

Fox and other conservative media outlets are already touting the alleged threat of new “caravans” of migrants making their way toward the Southern border. Ken Paxton, the Republican Texas attorney general, a frequent antagonist on immigration issues during Obama’s presidency, is suing to block Biden’s deportation freeze and won an early round Tuesday when a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the pause. And, of course, the risk of denunciation from Trump looms over any congressional Republican considering cooperation with Democrats on legislation that legalizes any population of undocumented immigrants.

Possible options

Against that daunting backdrop, immigration advocates are already gaming out how they will proceed if, as they expect, the attempts by Biden and Democratic senators such as Menendez fail to win the 10 Republican votes they would need to break a filibuster against legislation to legalize all or some of the undocumented.

One option is to seek legislation addressing only a portion of that population, starting with the roughly 2.1 million “Dreamers,” young people brought to the US as children by their parents. The House passed legislation in 2019 (with every Democrat voting yes) legalizing those undocumented young people, along with another roughly 300,000 immigrants here on so-called Temporary Protected Status, which covers migrants whose homelands are considered unsafe because of armed conflict or natural disasters.

Even with a much narrower Democratic majority, advocates consider it highly likely the House would pass such legislation again. But while the Dreamers enjoy generally broad public support, finding 10 Republican votes for such standalone legislation in the Senate still would be difficult, since less than half of GOP voters back legalization for them. The same would be true for another undocumented population advocates might hope to legalize through standalone legislation: long-term farmworkers, who were also granted a pathway to citizenship in a separate bill the House approved in 2019.

Democrats wouldn’t need 10 Republican votes for immigration legislation (or any of their other priorities) if the Senate majority voted to end the filibuster — but it does not appear they have the votes (or the inclination) to do that yet.

That’s why immigration advocates are scouring the legislative rules to determine whether they can include a pathway to citizenship within the special “reconciliation” process. Established by the 1974 Budget Act, reconciliation allows legislation with an impact on the federal budget to clear both chambers with just a majority vote, thus bypassing the filibuster.

The assumption among immigrant advocates is that Biden, despite his outreach, won’t win support from enough Senate Republicans to break a filibuster on his $1.9 trillion coronavirus “rescue” blueprint — much less the larger economic “recovery” package he says is coming in February — and will be forced to utilize reconciliation to pass those plans. They hope to convince congressional Democrats to include legalization for at least some of the undocumented in any reconciliation bill.

Menendez, at least, appears open to that possibility. “I am certainly spending a lot of my staff’s time thinking about what is eligible for reconciliation,” he told me.

Ideally, immigrant advocates would hope to legalize as many as about 7 million of the estimated 11 million undocumented through a reconciliation bill: the Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status populations, as well as farmworkers and perhaps 5 million undocumented immigrants working in occupations deemed “essential” during the pandemic. (Those categories overlap somewhat.)

But such an ambitious plan might struggle to win even majority support in Congress because too many centrist Democrats, especially in the Senate, could balk at legalizing such a huge swath of people through that expedited process. If Democrats do use reconciliation as their vehicle, Chishti predicts, they are likely to define the population of “essential” workers eligible for legalization much more narrowly than advocates prefer — probably about 1 million people truly at the “front lines” of the pandemic, such as nurses and those in meatpacking plants.

“If Covid is the dominant backdrop for the next year, then you have to get reconciliation for things that are reasonably close to Covid — so essential workers has a certain resonance in [that] context,” he says. “There is a reasonable argument that you can’t be essential and not protected from deportation.”

Using the reconciliation tool likely would not only prevent Democrats from legalizing most of the undocumented, but both the rules and politics of the process would also almost certainly exclude major changes in the legal immigration system. And that could also represent another major opportunity cost.

US needs more young people

The efforts by Trump and congressional Republicans over the past four years to slash legal immigration collided with a clear economic imperative facing the US: the need for more working-age people to grow the nation’s labor market and consumer base. As William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, recently calculated, the US from 2010 to 2020 appeared on track to record the slowest population growth in percentage terms for any decade in American history. That’s occurring even as the number of seniors — who will require federal spending on Social Security and Medicare — is still rapidly increasing with the retirement of the baby boom.

While unemployment is very high now, once the economy recovers from the pandemic, Frey notes, America will need more working-age adults to help pay the taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare for the growing number of seniors. And with fertility rates low, more immigration is the only realistic path to rejuvenating America’s working-age population. The irony is that means an increasingly non-White and foreign-born workforce will pay the taxes to support the retirement of the preponderantly White older population that has responded most ardently to Trump’s xenophobic messaging.

“The projections show we are going to be dealing with lower population growth and an aging population, and the only way we are going to be able to keep our labor force growing and vital is through immigration,” Frey told me. “Immigrants and their kids are younger than the general population and we’re going to have to have a steady stream of that to counter the aging of the rest of the population.”

The unlikelihood of progress on legal immigration is another reason why reconciliation represents an imperfect option for immigrant advocates and their Democratic allies. But after the disappointments of the Bush and Obama breakdowns, and the searing immigration wars of the Trump years, they appear more than ready to take what they can get in the legislative process. And they look less likely than in the past to slog through lengthy negotiations if the GOP balks — and the business groups that support reform can’t move enough of those congressional Republicans to “yes.”

“My focus is to get a deal of some sort: I am not looking to bypass [bipartisan negotiations] and go to reconciliation,” Menendez says. “But I don’t intend to go home with nothing in my hand.”

This story has been updated to reflect that a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s pause on deportations.

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