James.galbraith

[A Magistrate Judge has just issued a Report and Recommendation recommending that the case be dismissed, on the grounds that the allegations were substantially true.]

The detailed recommendation from Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave (which District Judge Gregory Woods will now consider) came in Flynn v. CNN (S.D.N.Y.). The plaintiffs (the  brother and sister-in-law of the retired Lieutenant General, who served briefly as President Trump's National Security Advisor) prevailed on some issues: The Magistrate Judge concluded that they weren't limited public figures, and that CNN's statements were "of and concerning them." But the Magistrate Judge ultimately concluded that they couldn't show that the statements were substantially false:

The Flynns' tweets and retweets reflect that they meet the dictionary definition of follower in the sense that they have "follow[ed] the opinions" of QAnon. For example, on or about August 21, 2020, Jack tweeted: "Qanon is not violent or conspiracy. We are every day people seeking truth … Qanon's, share and tell your story." By using the word "we," Jack included himself as one who "follows the opinions" of QAnon, and invited others who "share[d]" those opinions to join his comments. The same day, Jack retweeted the image of "Q" over "WHERE WE GO ONE WE GO ALL," and stated, "If this means you believe in the constitution and equal justice under the law then this works for me."

Similarly, on August 20, 2020, Jack tweeted: "There is nothing wrong with QAnon. Just People doing their own research and learning independence of thought to find the truth." He added, "I advocate for the Constitution and Bill of Rights … if Q does too~No harm no foul." In a May 9, 2020 post, Leslie forwarded to Jack a tweet that included both a bold "Q" and "#WWG1WGA." Thus, the Flynns' own statements indicate that it was "substantially true" to state that they "follow[ed] the opinions" of QAnon.

As to the third dictionary definition, "one that imitates another," both Flynns' Twitter feeds include instances in which they retweeted or liked posts featuring "Q" or "QAnon" in the Twitter handle or the text of the post itself. Further, the Flynns do not dispute that they said the phrase, "where we go one we go all." Although they contend that their use was innocuous, the connection between the phrase and QAnon is a matter of public record, with at least one federal court recognizing the "association of this phrase with QAnon." United States v. Languerand, No. 21 Crim. 353 (JDB), 2021 WL 3674731, at *3 n.8 (D.D.C. Aug. 19, 2021) (citing Will Rahn & Dan Patterson, What is the QAnon conspiracy theory?, CBS NEWS (Mar. 29, 2021, 3:36 PM), https:/www.cbsnews.com/news/whatis-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory/). Indeed, the August 21, 2020 tweet that the Flynns include in the AC shows an image of the letter "Q" over the phrase "where we go one we go all," as to which Jack then commented, "this works for me."

Because the Flynns' Twitter feeds contradict their allegation that "Jack did not use QAnon slogans or code language or retweet users because they had a 'Q' in their handle," (the Court need not credit this allegation in determining the plausibility of their claims. Applying at least two of the dictionary definitions of follower, then, the Flynns' own statements show that they followed the opinions of and imitated QAnon such that CNN's statement that they were QAnon followers was substantially true and not defamatory. Having said, in their own words, that QAnon's principles "work for" them, the Flynns cannot turn around and characterize CNN's making the same statement as defamatory.

In opposition to the Motion [to Dismiss], the Flynns cite several cases for the proposition "that words or conduct falsely implying an association or connection between the plaintiff and a violent extremist group, like QAnon, is defamatory." The Court agrees that falsely implying a connection to a violent extremist group can be defamatory — but as set forth above, CNN's statement connecting the Flynns to QAnon is not substantially false. By their own statements, both in the AC and in the Twitter feeds that the Flynns invited the Court to consider, the Flynns connected themselves to QAnon, and therefore, cannot plausibly allege that CNN's statements were substantially false.

Yesterday, Roku told customers that it's unable to strike a deal to bring YouTube and YouTube TV apps to its channel store, citing anti-competitive demands in carriage agreements. These included "asking Roku to create a dedicated search results row for YouTube within the Roku smart TV interface and demanding certain features on Roku that they don't insist on getting from other streaming platforms," reports Axios. Now, a leaked email has surfaced allegedly showing that Google did in fact ask Roku for special search treatment for YouTube, an allegation that Google had previously called "baseless." 9to5Google reports: CNBC reports that an email from a Google executive to Roku called a "dedicated shelf for [YouTube] search results" a "must." The email was sent in 2019, well before the current fight between the two companies went public. Prior to this report, Roku has said on multiple occasions that "Google continues to interfere with Roku's independent search results." Google, in response, has denied those allegations and called them "baseless" while also claiming that it was Roku who decided to renegotiate the contract between the two companies. A previous statement from Google reads: "To be clear, we have never, as they have alleged, made any requests to access user data or interfere with search results. This claim is baseless and false." This email puts the statements of both companies in a new light. It's possible Google did end up dropping this request between when the email was sent in 2019 and when the contract negotiations started, but it's also very possible the company is bending the truth around this request. Whatever the case, Google said that it "never" made such a request, but this email allegedly proves otherwise. ["The email from the Google executive to Roku reads: 'YouTube Position: A dedicated shelf for YT search results is a must,'" reports CNBC.]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or at my website.

On Tuesday, the Washington State attorney general’s office charged Sheriff Ed Troyer, who is white, with two misdemeanors after he lied about being threatened by a Black man just trying to do his job, which was to deliver newspapers in a white suburban neighborhood. Can’t we even deliver papers in peace? 

Troyer—who smells a lot like stand-your-ground murderer George Zimmerman—was charged with one count of false reporting and one count of making a false or misleading statement to a public servant after he stalked Sedrick Altheimer, a Black newspaper carrier in his 20s.

The obvious case of racial profiling took place on Jan. 27 in Tacoma, Washington. Altheimer was just innocently delivering the Tacoma News Tribune newspapers when he noticed a white man in a white SUV tracking him.

After several minutes of being hunted by Troyer, Altheimer did the right thing: He stopped his car and asked Troyer why he was following him. “Is it because I’m Black?” he asked. Troyer then tells him, “My wife is Black.” Altheimer responds, “Congratulations.” Then he asked Troyer if he was a police officer, to which the Pierce County sheriff did not respond or tell the truth and identify himself. Instead, he accused Altheimer of being a “porch pirate” and then called for backup. 

Altheimer would tell the police that he felt afraid, so he got back into his car and started to drive away. Troyer, of course, followed. After a few minutes, Altheimer stopped and the two cars were face-to-face about 50 feet apart, according to police records. 

Troyer then called 911 and told a big fat lie, claiming that Altheimer threatened to kill him. He repeated the lie four times on the phone, which sent the police department into to TV-style high alert, interpreting the moment as an “officer needs help” and escalating things. Over 40 officers arrived on the scene to save Troyer, the tracker, from the scary Black newspaper delivery guy. 

Troyer stayed on the line waiting for the police and continued his lie, saying he “tried to be polite,” but he [Altheimer] says I’m a racist. He wants to kill me so … ”

The first two officers on the scene demanded Altheimer keep his hands on the wheel. 

“He’s following me! Go talk to him. I am working! I’m a Black man in a white neighborhood and I am working,” Altheimer told the officers. 

The Washington Post reports that in April, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee referred the case to the attorney general’s office. 

“The initial reports of these events were very concerning to me, and I had hoped to see some action taken to initiate a criminal investigation at the local level. But, to my knowledge, that has not happened almost three months after the incident,” Inslee said at the time. “So now the state is stepping in.”

At the time of the incident, Troyer told the Post that when he began following Altheimer, he wasn’t aware he was Black, but insists he felt threatened. Today, he says he feels targeted by the attorney general’s investigation, calling it “a blatant and politically motivated anti-cop hit job,” according to The Seattle Times.

“Sheriff Troyer’s statements to witnesses that night—that Mr. Altheimer was trying to kill him and used his vehicle as a weapon—are flags to other officers that they should arrive on the scene ready to use deadly force. There is only one conclusion we can draw from that: Sheriff Troyer intended to do harm to Mr. Altheimer,” The Washington Black Lives Matter Alliance said in a statement demanding Troyer’s resignation. 

If convicted, Troyer could face a sentence for both offenses of up to 364 days in jail and up to a $5,000 fine.

In the months following the night of his alleged threat, Troyer has given conflicting stories to reporters and has since recanted statements he initially gave to officers.  

On the night of the event, after being frisked and questions, Altheimer asked the police, “What happens to him? What happens to a liar?” 

Troyer’s is an elected position, so he can’t be fired or disciplined, essentially giving him free rein to do as he pleases without consequences—at least for the length of his term. 

Troyer’s actions were dangerous and deadly. When race is weaponized by people in power, Black people end up dead.

The sheriff has had months to tell the public what really happened that night and take accountability and he hasn’t. 

Now it’s time for him to go. 

[The Court will hear oral argument in the two cases on November 1.]

The Supreme Court Court acted quickly to grant certiorari before judgment in Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson and United States v. Texas, the two primary challenges to S.B. 8, the controversial Texas abortion law. The order in WWH reads:

WHOLE WOMAN'S HEALTH, ET AL. V. JACKSON, JUDGE, ETC., ET AL.
The petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment is granted. The briefs of the parties, limited to 13,000 words, are to be filed electronically on or before 5 p.m., Wednesday, October 27, 2021. Reply briefs, if any, limited to 6,000 words, are to be filed electronically on or before 5 p.m., Friday, October 29, 2021. Any amicus curiae briefs are to be filed electronically on or before 5 p.m., Wednesday, October 27, 2021. Booklet format briefs prepared in compliance with Rule 33.1 shall be submitted as soon as possible thereafter. The parties are not required to file a joint appendix. The case is set for oral argument on Monday, November 1, 2021

This is an incredibly rapid briefing schedule, and it applies to both cases. The Court's order in United States v. Texas also provides:

the application is treated as a petition for a writ of certiorari before judgment, and the petition is granted limited to the following question: May the United States bring suit in federal court and obtain injunctive or declaratory relief against the State, state court judges, state court clerks, other state officials, or all private parties to prohibit S.B. 8 from being enforced.

This is an important legal question that extends well beyond the issue of abortion. It could, for example, implicate the federal government's ability to challenge state-level Covid policies (as both the Trump Administration and Biden Administration threatened to do, although concerning different sorts of policies).

Of note, in granting United States v. Texas, the Court declined to enjoin S.B. 8 (by lifting the stay entered by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit). Justice Sotomayor dissented from aspect of the order. Her dissent is here (accompanying the order in U.S. v. Texas).

Also of note, the Court did not grant certiorari on the cross-petition filed by Texas asking the Court to consider whether to overrule Roe and Casey. The Court may still address that question in the Dobbs case which will also be argued this term.

[This post has been updated to fill in additional details.]

Threats, intimidation and efforts to protect Donald Trump signal trouble ahead.

Thus far, the justices have not given much comfort to anti-vaxxers. That could change soon.

On October 29, Maine’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention will start enforcing a rule requiring all health care workers in the state to be vaccinated against Covid-19 — unless the Supreme Court intervenes to stop it.

Does v. Mills is the first significant case to reach the justices that places a Covid-19 vaccination requirement against “religious liberty” claims brought by individuals who refuse vaccination. It is unlikely to be the last.

It’s also significant that Does involves a government mandate requiring certain individuals to be vaccinated. Under existing law, private employers have broad authority to require that their workers get vaccinated. The government, however, is subject to constitutional restrictions that do not apply to private companies.

So while Does isn’t likely going to overhaul the reality facing many Americans — one where their employers implemented vaccine mandates voluntarily — it is likely to shape the government’s role. As the first case to reach the justices, Does is also likely to reveal a great deal about how the conservative Court will balance the public’s interest in reducing the spread of Covid-19 against most justices’ belief that people of faith should enjoy broad legal exemptions.

On the one hand, the Court has thus far not shown much sympathy for anti-vaxxers. Last August, for example, Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied a request by a group of students at Indiana University to block that school’s vaccination requirement. The fact that Barrett acted alone suggests there was little, if any, support for these students among her colleagues.

On the other hand, a majority of the justices were extraordinarily sympathetic to religious plaintiffs that sought exemptions from other public health rules intended to slow the spread of Covid-19. Shortly after Barrett joined the Court, giving Republican appointees a 6-3 majority, the Court handed down its landmark decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo (2020). That decision allowed many houses of worship to ignore New York’s occupancy restrictions imposed at the height of the pandemic — radically changing the Court’s approach to religious objectors seeking exemptions from the law in the process.

Does sits at the intersection of these two approaches to the pandemic. The plaintiffs in Does are health care workers who say they oppose abortion on religious grounds and claim that the three Covid-19 vaccines available in the US are either manufactured using cells derived from an aborted fetus or were researched using such cells. Accordingly, they seek an exemption from Maine’s requirement that they be vaccinated.

(The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was produced with lab replications of fetal cells. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were not developed using fetal cell lines, but their manufacturers did use cell lines derived from fetuses to test whether the vaccines worked.)

Maine’s reason for denying the Does plaintiffs an exemption is straightforward. As the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit explained in an opinion rejecting the plaintiffs’ arguments, “Health care facilities are uniquely susceptible to outbreaks of infectious diseases like COVID-19 because medical diagnosis and treatment often require close contact between providers and patients (who often are medically vulnerable).”

And health care workers are also the very people who need to intervene in order to prevent a public health crisis. If Covid-19 spreads like wildfire among these workers because too many people in hospitals and similar settings are unvaccinated — and thus more likely to contract and spread the disease — such an outbreak could disable the very workforce needed to treat Covid-19 patients.

One reason why this case is potentially troubling, moreover, is that if religious exemptions to vaccination are allowed, it will be very difficult to prevent people with political or other nonreligious objections from claiming religious motivations for their opposition to the vaccine.

Few of the major religions in the US teach their adherents not to take the Covid-19 vaccine. The Catholic Church, for example, says that it’s “morally acceptable” to be vaccinated. Pope Francis likened not getting the vaccine to “suicide,” a grave sin. Anti-vax sentiment is more common among white evangelical Protestants, but even there it is a minority view. As of late June, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 58 percent of white evangelicals had received at least one dose of the vaccine.

Nevertheless, at least one pastor appears to be profiting by offering documents to donors claiming that the individual has a religious objection to Covid-19 vaccines — in exchange for a donation. And while the law typically requires someone seeking a religious exemption to have a “sincere” religious belief, courts are ill-equipped to prove sincerity. Many judges will simply have to rely on an individual’s word.

Does, in other words, potentially pits the health of entire communities against the religious beliefs of a few health workers — and against some workers who may not even have sincere objections. It is far from clear which of these interests the Supreme Court will care more about.

Does is likely to come down to Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett

In 1990, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision about religious objectors in Employment Division v. Smith. Religious objectors, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, must follow the same laws everyone else must follow. “To make an individual’s obligation to obey such a law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs,” Scalia warned, risks permitting that individual “by virtue of his beliefs, ‘to become a law unto himself.’”

Instead, people who raise religious objections to a law must obey all “neutral law[s] of general applicability.” The government may not single out a particular religious group for inferior treatment. But so long as a law treats people of all religious beliefs alike, it is constitutional, and everyone must follow it.

Smith sparked an enormous backlash, and many religious conservatives continue to revile it because they believe it provides inadequate legal protections to people of faith. Indeed, just last term the Court heard Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021), which asked the justices to overrule Smith.

Although Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito arguing that Smith should be overruled, a majority of the Court punted on most of the important issues presented by Fulton. Barrett, however, penned a brief concurring opinion explaining that, while she found many of the arguments against Smith “compelling,” she was not yet sure “what should replace Smith.” Her opinion was joined in full by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Yet, while Barrett’s Fulton concurrence left Smith in a bit of a limbo state — and made clear that she and Kavanaugh are the most likely fifth votes in religious liberty cases — Barrett’s uncertain approach was a bit surprising because she and Kavanaugh made deep cuts against Smith earlier in the same term.

Recall that Smith requires religious objectors to follow a “neutral law of general applicability.” In both Roman Catholic Diocese and a related case, Tandon v. Newsom (2021), the Court — with Kavanaugh and Barrett in the majority — ruled that places of worship should be exempt from certain state public health rules imposing limits on how many people may worship at the same time.

“Government regulations are not neutral and generally applicable,” the five most conservative justices wrote in Tandon, “whenever they treat any comparable secular activity more favorably than religious exercise.” But the Court also defined what constitutes “comparable secular activity” very broadly in Tandon and Roman Catholic Diocese.

Prior to those two decisions, the Court permitted anti-Covid regulations to impose occupancy limits on places of worship so long as the same rules were imposed on similar secular institutions. In May 2020, for example, the Court upheld a California rule imposing occupancy limits on houses of worship. As Chief Justice John Roberts explained, the California rule was acceptable because “similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports, and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time.”

But then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Republican appointees gained a supermajority on the Supreme Court. The new majority ruled in Roman Catholic Diocese that places of worship could be exempt from public health rules if different rules apply to businesses — that are nothing like religious institutions — where large crowds of people gather to socialize, chant, and sing, such as “acupuncture facilities, camp grounds, [and] garages.”

Roman Catholic Diocese suggests, in other words, that religious institutions must be subject to the most favorable rules applied to any other institution, even if there are very good policy reasons to treat these institutions differently. Roman Catholic Diocese deemed it irrelevant that public health experts believed that houses of worship — like any other place where large groups of people gather for extended periods of time in an auditorium-like setting — are more likely to host superspreader events than, say, a grocery store.

So what does all of this mean for Maine’s vaccine rules?

Beginning on October 29, Maine will require all health care workers to be fully vaccinated — with one lonely exception. Health care workers who could suffer health consequences if they received the Covid-19 vaccine, such as someone with a severe allergy to the vaccine that might prove fatal, are exempt from the requirement.

The plaintiffs in Does, relying on decisions like Roman Catholic Diocese, claim this singular exemption to the vaccine requirement forces the state to also exempt people with religious objections. “Maine has plainly singled out religious employees who decline vaccination for religious reasons for especially harsh treatment,” the Does plaintiffs claim in a brief to the justices, “… while favoring and accommodating employees declining vaccination for secular, medical reasons.”

It’s worth pausing to consider just what these plaintiffs are arguing. They claim that if the state offers any exemption whatsoever to the vaccine requirement — even an exemption for people who will literally die if they are vaccinated — then it must also provide an exemption to religious objectors.

The First Circuit held that policymakers do not have to make such an impossible choice. Quoting language from Fulton, the First Circuit noted that state policies run afoul of the Constitution when they prohibit “religious conduct while permitting secular conduct that undermines the government’s asserted interests in a similar way.”

But the purpose of Maine’s vaccine mandate is to promote the public health. Requiring health care workers, regardless of their religious beliefs, to become vaccinated advances that goal. By contrast, requiring people who could suffer serious health consequences from vaccination to risk their lives and their health does not. There’s no valid medical rationale for requiring someone to risk a serious allergic reaction or similar consequence.

Will that be enough to convince Kavanaugh or Barrett? The truth is that we don’t know yet.

It should be noted, however, that Does presents the strongest possible case for not allowing religious exemptions to a vaccine mandate. It is, after all, a case about workers on the front lines of a pandemic. The public health consequences of not vaccinating these workers are likely to vastly exceed the consequences of, say, not vaccinating college students or police officers.

In other words, should the Court rule in the plaintiffs’ favor in Does, it’s likely to open up a significant loophole to vaccination requirements.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The UK is paying the price for ‘freedom day,’ say experts.

Last week, the Justice Department obtained its 100th guilty plea in its investigation of the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland opened his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee with a prebuttal of sorts: telling members that the riot constituted an “intolerable assault” on the peaceful transfer of power and that he had “great confidence in the prosecutors” who are investigating and prosecuting people in connection with the day’s events. His remarks come in the context of a vigorous debate — among politicians, judges, and legal commentators — over whether the alleged rioters are being treated too leniently or too harshly.

That question is complicated to answer in the abstract, in part because of the many stages of the criminal process and the corresponding ways in which defendants can be treated comparatively well or poorly. Considerations include the manner in which defendants are brought to court, whether defendants are detained prior to trial (and if so, under what conditions), what defendants are charged with, what sorts of plea deals the department is offering, how aggressive the government’s sentencing recommendations are, and what sentences the defendants ultimately receive from judges.

There is also the critical question of what the benchmark is. The federal criminal justice system is not exactly a wellspring of generosity under ordinary circumstances. Prosecutors can be overly aggressive at every step, the sentencing guidelines are often too punitive and there is a pro-government tilt throughout the courts.

Many members of the public may just now be learning this and, not unreasonably, bristling at some of the treatment that they are reading about without being able to place it in the broader context of a federal system that is generally harsh. For others, however, particularly conservative pundits and politicians, who should theoretically know better, much of the outrage appears performative and opportunistic — part of a broader effort led by Donald Trump to downplay the events of Jan. 6 and, ridiculously, to suggest that it is the charged participants, and conservatives more generally, who are the true victims.

In fact, there are several significant ways in which the Justice Department appears to be treating the Jan. 6 defendants better than most defendants.

To start, the department has taken a relatively generous approach to charging and to negotiations in the plea agreements that it has so far reached. According to an analysis by BuzzFeed’s Zoe Tillman, the “vast majority of guilty pleas — 80 out of 100 — have involved defendants charged solely with misdemeanor crimes from the start,” such as disorderly conduct or “parading, demonstrating, or picketing” in the Capitol, which generally carry maximum terms of six months in prison. Five people were initially “charged with a felony but pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.”

It is hard to square this with the Justice Department’s official charging and plea bargaining policies. Prosecutors are supposed to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offenses” — defined as “those that carry the most substantial guidelines sentence.” And when pleading a case out, they are supposed to include “the most serious readily provable charge” consistent with the facts.

As others have noted, pretty much anyone who entered the Capitol could be charged with more serious crimes than the lowest-level misdemeanors. They include entering or remaining in a restricted building (a misdemeanor with a maximum one-year term) or obstruction of an official proceeding (a felony). These charges subject defendants to the application of the sentencing guidelines and their various enhancements, which can quickly stack up and which can exert an anchoring effect at sentencing, even if the judges ultimately reject the government’s recommendation. A felony conviction also comes with all sorts of serious collateral consequences, including a prohibition on possessing firearms.

The government appears to have reserved more serious charges for cases with overt or particularly potent indicia of the defendants’ intent — like social media messages or, say, taking Vice President Mike Pence’s seat after he fled the building — but it is far from obvious that this approach is necessary. The notion that any “Stop the Steal” participants thought that they might have been allowed in the Capitol on that day strains credulity, and there is no shortage of evidence that could be used to establish that the purpose was to obstruct the congressional certification of the election results. (Some defendants have challenged the obstruction charge on vagueness grounds, but their arguments are not particularly strong.)

Second, prosecutors appear to be accepting pleas even when the defendants are feigning acceptance of responsibility. This is another major prosecutorial no-no, since defendants get a break under the sentencing guidelines for acceptance of responsibility, and they are not supposed to be getting that break if they are not sincere.

One judge recently observed that “many of the defendants pleading guilty do not truly accept responsibility” but are instead “trying to get this out of the way as quickly as possible, stating whatever they have to say … but not changing their attitude.” This particular problem has been apparent since literally the first Jan. 6 sentencing, when a woman avoided prison time after tearfully apologizing in court one day and then the next day went on Fox News to minimize the mayhem of the Capitol riot.

Lastly, regarding the government’s actual sentencing recommendations after a plea is entered, a recent story from the Wall Street Journal reported that Garland “has told other” department officials that “he is concerned that jailing rioters who weren’t hard-core extremists for extensive periods could further radicalize them.” The story went on to say that Garland “has left recommending sentences to the prosecutors directly involved,” but it is hard to believe that the attorney general’s views on the matter would not make their way to line prosecutors — particularly when he is expressing them to other officials and they have been reported in a national newspaper. (Asked about this during his testimony on Thursday, Garland said that his reported comments had been taken from a “different context.”)

The Journal reported that Garland’s concern with the effects of long-term incarceration is “a concern he has expressed more broadly about defendants entering the criminal justice system,” but it was not reflected in Garland’s jurisprudence and has not been matched (yet) by any broader sentencing reform efforts. In fact, prosecutors generally do not concern themselves with the effects of long-term incarceration on recidivism — risks that exist for virtually every federal criminal defendant.

No one is getting the book thrown at them yet, though a judge just issued a 14-month sentence — the longest so far for a Jan. 6 defendant — to a man who had made incendiary remarks on social media during and shortly after the riot (and who also had 17 prior criminal convictions). This is partly a selection issue since, generally speaking, the cases being sentenced right now are the relatively less serious ones, and that is going to start to change.

Meanwhile, some of the most prominent arguments that the Jan. 6 defendants are being treated too harshly have been borderline ridiculous. Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed to the D.C. District Court bench in 2017 after a brief stint as a senior official in Trump’s Justice Department earlier that year, has suggested that the department went easy on violent protestors in the capital in the wake of the George Floyd killing last year and said recently that “the U.S. attorney would have more credibility if it was even-handed in its concern about riots and mobs in this city.”

The particular claim — echoed by right-wing media and members of Congress — is absurd for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that “the U.S. attorney” last year was an entirely different person — who had been hand-picked by then-Attorney General William Barr, who happily pursued some of the department’s most brazenly corrupt objectives and who got into a very public spat with Washington’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, after she complained that the office was not responding aggressively enough to violent protesters at the time.

This is not to say that there are no credible arguments in favor of the department deviating from standard practice toward an overall more forgiving posture. The court system in D.C. could be overloaded otherwise, and prosecutors may want to push these cases through quickly so that they do not go on forever and so that the government can prosecute other crimes. One could also argue that the difference between a low-level felony and a misdemeanor is not that great and that prosecutors would be right to worry about the political volatility of the situation.

The problem is that these arguments are at odds with the “rule of law” ethos — that the Justice Department should treat like cases alike irrespective of who defendants are or what their political affiliation is — that Garland otherwise relies upon so heavily in his public rhetoric, including at the hearing on Thursday, and that is reflected in written department policy itself.

There is a way to bridge this gap. The Justice Department should be forthright about what it is doing and why it is doing it, and Garland should use this opportunity to generate more public, cross-partisan support for reform efforts. Indeed, the rigidity and severity of the department’s charging and plea-bargaining policies are dubious; sentencing guidelines are in need of further reform; and the department ought to be more concerned with the effects of long-term incarceration.

These are concerns that should be addressed seriously and broadly, and that should be applied to every federal defendant — not just the ones who were involved in the shameful events of Jan. 6.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

As of September 2021, there are 42,300 people employed by the coal mining industry. Miners, engineers, geologists, trainers, mechanics, clerks, managers, technicians, and executives. That’s everybody. That number is down about 20% since Donald Trump took office, though—thanks to what’s been called a “boom” in the last few months, it’s down only about 100 people under President Joe Biden. That’s what counts for a boom in the coal industry these days—losing more slowly.

The reason coal has declined so sharply isn’t hard to spot: It is no longer economically viable.  Despite being given vast swaths of federal and state land at minimal cost, despite states failing to collect hundreds of millions in reclamation bonds that are left as a burden when wining companies go bankrupt, and despite the largest mining companies getting to dump billions in debts—including retirement funds and black lung payments to miners—they’re still not competitive. Truthfully, they would not be competitive if the mining companies could lower the cost of coal delivered to power plants to $0. That’s because the cost of maintaining an existing coal-powered generating plant is now higher than the cost of replacing that plant with brand new solar, wind, or natural gas production.

Coal hit an all-time peak in 2008, but thousands of generating units have been switched over to gas over the last decade. Producers in all segments of the country have added solar and wind. And as states across the country have seen coal exit their electrical mix, power prices have actually gone down. While many states did well in 2020 as natural gas prices plummeted in the opening months of the pandemic, states that have improved the renewable component of their production have been less subject to rising prices as gas increased in the fall of 2021.

But not every state has benefited from the shift from coal. In Texas, a rigged market gives companies incentives to keep electrical production skating the edge of demand, driving huge price spikes along with deadly system failures. And in West Virginia, there’s… Joe Manchin.

Campaign Action

Coal mining is an extraction industry. When an extraction industry ends, every person and community dependent on that industry is left with not just nothing, but less than nothing. They’re left carrying the cost in health care for all the people harmed by companies that saw health and safety regulations as an obstacle to be avoided. They’re left with the environmental consequences of an industry that, by its nature, destroys not just forests and streams but entire mountains and valleys. They’re left with an economy hollowed out by a company that, in its final retreat, leaves behind neither a workforce nor conditions that attract a replacement.

What does a community look like when an extraction industry shuts down? Pick any ghost town in the West. That’s what it looks like. 

In 2018, the Sierra Club took a look at the town of Lynch, Kentucky, to see what a mining community was like when the mines left. They found it “hollowed out” and falling to ruin. But Lynch is just one of many such towns. I’ve been there. I’ve seen them. It’s not just that the only industry in town has left, it’s that the industry left behind valleys filled with rubble, streets edged with coal that spilled from passing trucks, a water supply spoiled by acid runoff. I’ve been there. I grew up there. And in my decades as a geologist for a major coal mining company, I helped perpetuate it.

When the mining stops, what’s left are sick people and a failing town; the kind of community where even those who have worked themselves into “middle class respectability” suddenly find that their home is worth nothing, their local schools are bankrupt, and all their debts are as big as ever.

Right now, Joe Manchin is standing in the way of a reconciliation bill that offers West Virginia an off ramp on the road to ruin. And why he’s doing it … that doesn’t even really matter.

 As CNN reports, electrical prices in West Virginia aren’t going down. They’re doing the other thing. While ratepayers in other states are seeing the benefits of increased use of solar and wind, West Virginia residents are paying for bankrupt plants that need hundreds of millions of dollars of maintenance. That includes the Longview plant, which Manchin has touted as the “most efficient coal plant in the country. “As Utility Dive notes, Manchin was at the front of the line last year, urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to help Longview hurry through Chapter 11 — it’s second bankruptcy in a decade.

When it comes to cleaning up those failing mines, West Virginians are supposed to be protected by bonds put up by mining companies to cover the cost of reclamation. However, as The Alliance for Appalachia makes clear, West Virginia is one of a handful of states that allows mining companies to “self-bond.” That is, rather than having to put aside the required funds, or buy an insurance policy, companies can just declare themselves good for the funds. That means that when these companies fold, or even when they reorganize under Chapter 11, they can simply fail to produce the funds. As any of these companies would tell you, that’s not a bug; that’s a feature. Walking away from the hundreds of millions they owe is the plan.

And then there’s black lung. Under Trump — and with the support of Mitch McConnell — the payment that companies make to support black lung funding was drastically reduced. So was mine safety monitoring. With an epidemic of new black lung cases, the fund to support treatment is billions of dollars in the hole. Manchin is aware of this since he supports a bill to provide more funding. But that bill is, at the moment, still sitting in committee. 

Of those 43,200 people employed in coal mining, about 18,000 are in West Virginia. That’s about 1% of the state’s population. But the danger to West Virginia isn’t that, by accelerating the end of coal mining, 18,000 people will be left without a job. The danger is that by dragging out the end of coal mining, 100% of people in West Virginia will pay more for electricity, 100% of people in West Virginia will pick up the tab when companies walk away from unreclaimed mines, 100% of people will end up faced with picking up the medical bills for people left sick and unemployed—and 100% of West Virginians will lose out on the opportunity to take the off-ramp on the road to disaster.

There is an alternative for Manchin. It’s one that was demonstrated ably by the state’s most successful legislator, Robert Byrd. Byrd didn’t fight against federal spending. He made the price of his support seeing that a disproportionate share of that spending went to his state. 

Manchin could do that now. Rather than fighting against the clean energy provisions of the reconciliation bill, Manchin could demand—and get—hundreds of millions, if not billions, of extra dollars channeled into his state. Manchin could demand an unreasonably high payout to his state for new jobs, new technologies, new opportunities. And he could get it.

Instead, he seems dead set on following every inch of the hellbound highway. And we all know where it ends.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Responding to a growing controversy over investing practices, the Federal Reserve announced Thursday a wide-ranging ban on officials owning individual stocks and bonds and limits on other activities as well. The ban includes top policymakers such as those who sit on the Federal Open Market Committee, along with senior staff. Future investments will have to be confined to diversified assets such as mutual funds. Fed officials can no longer have holdings in shares of particular companies, nor can they invest in individual bonds, hold agency securities or derivative contracts. The new rules replace existing regulations that, while somewhat restrictive, still allowed officials such as regional presidents to buy and sell stocks. "These tough new rules raise the bar high in order to assure the public we serve that all of our senior officials maintain a single-minded focus on the public mission of the Federal Reserve," Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said in a statement. Under the new rules, the officials will have to provide 45 days' notice in advance of buying or selling any securities that are still allowed. They also will be required to hold the securities for at least a year, and they cannot buy or sell funds during "heightened financial market stress," a news release announcing the moves said. "I'm hopeful that swift action will allow us to put this behind us and get us back focused on the job ahead," Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic told CNBC during a "Closing Bell" interview.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After every one of his GOP colleagues voted to kill his voting rights bill, there can be no more illusions.

All 50 Senate Republicans joined forces Wednesday to block the voting rights and elections reform bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, that Sen. Joe Manchin and fellow Democrats have spent months crafting on the premise that Manchin would be able to find “10 good people” among the GOP to pass it and save our democratic republic. They filibustered the bill without even having to filibuster it. None of them needed to say a word on the floor to block the bill from advancing. They simply voted “no.”

On Thursday, President Joe Biden vowed that the fight would continue. “We have to keep up the fight and get it done. And I know the moment we’re in. I know the stakes. This is far from over,” Biden said. He was speaking at the 10th-anniversary celebration of the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. “[Republicans are] afraid to even just debate the bills in the U.S. Senate, as they did again yesterday, even on a bill that includes provisions as they’ve traditionally supported,” Biden said Thursday. “It’s unfair. It’s unconscionable. It’s un-American.” That’s fine, as far as it goes.

It’s a better message than what the White House delivered earlier in the week, when a White House official presumably cleared to speak on the the issue dismissed the frustrations of voting rights activists to The Atlantic’s Peter Nichols. “Every constituency has their issue,” the official said. “If you ask immigration folks, they’ll tell you their issue is a life-or-death issue too.” Perhaps because it is, as is the sanctity of our elections when it comes right down to it. They are both issues that the president needs to engage in personally, directly.

Campaign Action

This was the third attempt by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass voting rights in the Senate, the third effort to prove to Manchin (and his partner in obstruction, Kyrsten Sinema) that there are not 10 Republicans who give a good goddamn about “bipartisanship” when it comes to the most critical issues of the day: that Republicans have permanent rule by the minority in sight, and aren’t going to let it go voluntarily.

The vote was 51-49, with Schumer voting no, a procedural vote that allows him to bring the bill to the floor again in the future. Which he vows to do. In a Groundhog Day-worthy statement released Thursday, Schumer bemoaned the Republican obstruction. “Let there be no mistake, Senate Republicans blocking debate yesterday was their implicit endorsement of the horrid new voter suppression and election subversion laws passed in conservative states across the country,” he said. “When they wouldn’t debate, they said these horrid new laws that suppress voters—that subvert our elections—are okay.”

Schumer also promised that Republicans are going to have the opportunity to do the exact same thing again, “as soon as next week,” when he will “bring another proposal to the floor: the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.” This might be an effort to shame one Republican, Lisa Murkowski, who used her work on that bill to justify blocking the Freedom to Vote Act. “I’m committed to ensuring access to voting is equal, fair, and free from discrimination, which is why I’ve been working with Senators Leahy and Manchin in the context of the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. There is nothing more fundamental than the right to vote.”

That was also Murkowski’s excuse for voting against the For the People Act back in June. She said she “absolutely” intended to cosponsor the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, because it is “narrowly focused on voting rights.” However, she has not signed on as a cosponsor to that bill, “but has indicated that she’s looking at it.” Sure. Thus far, there are no Republican cosponsors.

“The reflexive obstruction from Senate Republicans is not—is not—how the Senate is supposed to work,” Schumer said. “The question now before the Senate is how we will find a path forward on protecting our freedoms in the 21st century.” Yes, it is indeed. “The members of this chamber can take inspiration from great patriots of the past who put country over party. Or they can cross their arms and watch as our 240-year-old experiment in democracy falls prey to the specters of authoritarian control,” Schumer concluded.

There are two people to whom he needs to deliver that message directly: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. There are 46 other Senators—the Democrats and the two Independents who caucus with them—who need to deliver that message to them, as well. It’s time to end the filibuster, even if the rule change is limited just to elections-related issues.

There’s also a president who needs to use his bully pulpit to make this happen. President Biden needs to stop considering voting rights a niche concern that just another constituency is clamoring for, and start treating it like the three-alarm fire it is.

How many doomed votes is Schumer going to have before the tactic loses all utility, before it becomes rote and no longer outrageous that Republicans would obstruct voting rights? We’re nearly there, and when that happens, when it’s business as usual for Republicans to openly plot the theft of our elections, pretty much everything is lost.

Twitter is publicly sharing research findings today that show that the platform's algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians and content from right-leaning news outlets more than people and content from the political left. From a report: The research did not identify whether or not the algorithms that run Twitter's Home feed are actually biased toward conservative political content, because the conclusions only show bias in amplification, not what caused it. Rumman Chowdhury, the head of Twitter's machine learning, ethics, transparency and accountability team, called it "the what, not the why" in an interview with Protocol. "We can see that it is happening. We are not entirely sure why it is happening. To be clear, some of it could be user-driven, people's actions on the platform, we are not sure what it is. It's just important that we share this information," Chowdhury said. The META team plans to conduct what she called a "root-cause analysis" to try to discover the "why," and that analysis will likely include creating testable hypotheses about how people use the platform that could help show whether it's the way users interact with Twitter or the algorithm itself that is causing this uneven amplification. Twitter didn't define for itself what news outlets and politicians are "right-leaning" or belong to right-wing political parties, instead using definitions from other researchers outside the company. The study looked at millions of tweets from politicians across seven countries and hundreds of millions of tweets of links from news outlets, not tweets from the outlets themselves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read 52 remaining paragraphs | Comments

If they won't consider the health of the people they interact with, they're too dangerous to serve.

Years before Jon Gruden resigned in disgrace as the Las Vegas Raiders’ head coach over a series of racist, misogynistic and homophobic emails, Chip Kelly faced scrutiny over his record on race during his tenure as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

Running back LeSean McCoy, who was traded from the Eagles to the Buffalo Bills in 2015, told ESPN The Magazine later that year that Kelly was eager to jettison the team’s “good Black players,” adding, “there’s a reason he got rid of all the Black players — the good ones — like that.” McCoy wasn’t the only one to question the racial motives behind Kelly’s roster moves: ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said after McCoy was traded that Kelly’s personnel decisions “leave a few brothers feeling uncomfortable.” Tra Thomas, a former offensive lineman and assistant coach for the Eagles,¹² voiced those same concerns when he asserted that a number of Philadelphia’s players thought there was a “hint of racism” in the locker room under Kelly’s leadership.

The accusations against Kelly — now the coach at UCLA — prompted my own statistical investigation into how race might matter in NFL roster decisions. My analysis of data collected on each player’s racial background from Best Tickets’ Unofficial 2014 NFL Player Census¹³ found that the 10 teams in 2014 who had Black people in the key leadership roles of head coach and/or general manager had significantly more Black players on their rosters than the 22 other NFL teams. No team did more to drive that year’s statistically significant negative correlation¹⁴ between whiter team leadership and having fewer Black players on NFL rosters than Kelly’s Eagles. In fact, the significant differences¹⁵ between the percentage of Black players on the Eagles (50.9 percent) and the rest of the NFL (68.3 percent) were beyond the statistical threshold that the courts and federal bureaucracy generally recognize as potential discrimination.

Meanwhile, the team most responsible for driving the positive correlation between African American general managers having more Black players on their rosters in 2014 was none other than the Raiders. Under the leadership of the team’s African American general manager, Reggie McKenzie, the Raiders (then playing in Oakland) had a higher share of Black players on their roster (79.2 percent) than any other NFL team in 2014. According to data compiled on the racial composition of each NFL team’s roster by ProFootballLogic,¹⁶ the Raiders also had the NFL’s highest percentage of Black players (82.3 percent) in 2016 — the year that McKenzie won executive of the year honors after the team’s impressive 12-win showing. It’s probably not a coincidence, either, that the two teams with the next highest shares of Black players, the Giants and Bills, also had African American GMs. Indeed, the five NFL teams with Black GMs in 2016 had rosters that were, on average, 75.4 percent Black, compared with 67.7 percent for the 27 teams that did not — a statistically significant difference¹⁷ in percent of Black players that we can be confident was not simply due to random variation.

The Raiders’ racial composition was virtually identical in 2017, the year before Gruden began his second stint as the team’s head coach. While there’s no publicly available data on the racial composition of NFL rosters after 2016, my admittedly crude coding¹⁸ of the team’s roster once again found that 82.0 percent of the Raiders’ players were Black in 2017. But the number of Black players on the Raiders sharply declined soon after Gruden became the Raiders’ “de facto football czar.” By the end of the 2018 season, McKenzie had been fired, and Gruden assumed even more control over the Raiders’ personnel decisions. That included changing the roster’s racial composition: My analysis of the team’s rosters found that the share of Black players on the Raiders declined from 82.0 percent in 2017 to 69.0 percent in 2019 and 67.1 percent in 2020 and 67.2 percent in 2021.

To be sure, those notable differences say nothing about the coach’s racial motives in constructing his roster. Some of the changes to the roster’s demographics, after all, could simply be regression to the mean percentage of Black players in the NFL. But, as former NFL receiver Keyshawn Johnson critically said of his former head coach on his ESPN Radio show with Jay Williams and Max Kellerman, “A team is put together by the makeup of a coach. And a coach wants a certain personality.” It’s pretty clear from his emails the type of personality that Gruden preferred on his team; and it’s easy to look back in hindsight with that knowledge and find a persistent pattern of anti-Black bias in the coach’s decisions.

Regardless of his reasons, though, Gruden’s email scandal is yet another reminder of the importance of diversity in leadership positions in the NFL. The 2014 and 2016 data on racial compositions of NFL rosters suggests that even in professional football — an ostensible meritocracy where performance is much more objective and transparent than it is in other professions — race is still a significant factor in personnel decisions. The power imbalance in a league composed primarily of Black players but largely run by white head coaches and general managers means there will always be the potential for implicit and explicit racial biases to affect roster moves.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/summer-olympic-sport-fivethirtyeight-debate-club-79363557

Over his first nine months in office, President Biden has lost support among Americans of all stripes — men and women, Black voters and white voters, Zoomers and Baby Boomers. Even Democrats writ large are more disenchanted. But two groups with whom Biden has lost support stand out: independents and Hispanics. Independents have soured on Biden to the extent that his approval ratings among this group approach the strongly negative ratings they gave then-President Donald Trump at the same point in his presidency, while increased disapproval of Biden among Hispanics could signal they are moving further away from Democrats after they shifted somewhat toward Trump and the GOP last November.

Of course, it’s not that unusual for a president’s approval rating to drop over the course of the first nine months in office. A president’s “honeymoon period” has usually ended by then, as opposition to the president’s agenda coalesces and the new administration’s actions spark criticism. As the chart below shows, most recent presidents have seen their approval ratings fall after their first few months in office, although there have been some notable exceptions.

For instance, Biden, Trump and Barack Obama all experienced clear descents during their first nine months in office, albeit from different starting points: Biden has fallen from the mid-50s to the mid-40s, Obama fell from the mid-to-high 60s to the low 50s, and Trump fell from the mid-40s to the high 30s. But former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush didn’t really follow this pattern. Clinton’s approval rating did decline a few months into his presidency, but in a possible sign of hope for Biden, Clinton’s approval rating ticked back up after hitting the summer doldrums. Meanwhile, in 2001, Bush’s approval rating didn’t change much until it skyrocketed following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a textbook example of the “rally-around-the-flag effect.”

But our hyperpolarized political environment could make it challenging for Biden to regain the support he’s lost since taking office. In fact, while Biden’s approval rating has seemingly stabilized in the mid-to-low 40s, there’s also no indication that his approval rating is about to bounce back. And part of that comes down to Biden’s rough numbers among independents and Hispanics, in addition to his standing on important issues like COVID-19 and the economy.

Perhaps the most obvious place where Biden has lost support is among independents. Across the polls we collected that measured support by party ID, Biden’s approval has dropped from 50 percent among independents in the late spring and early summer, to below 35 percent now, as the chart below details. His slides among Democrats and Republicans haven’t been nearly as sizable.

It’s true that Republicans never gave Biden much of a chance and that most independents lean toward one party, but independents are still more politically malleable than Democrats or Republicans. In that sense, it’s a real problem for Biden that the most moveable group of voters now largely disapproves of the job he is doing as president.

Biden’s sharp decline among independents also seems related to what has often been Americans’ number-one concern since Biden took office: the COVID-19 pandemic. This has surely hurt Biden with most groups of Americans, but independents’ dissatisfaction with Biden’s handling of the pandemic has been particularly pronounced. In early June, almost 60 percent of independents approved of Biden’s response to the coronavirus, but that has now fallen to just below 42 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s coronavirus approval tracker.

Independents are also especially dissatisfied with how Biden is handling the economy. Granted, this week The Economist/YouGov found only 41 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s handling of jobs and the economy, while a brand-new Politico/Morning Consult survey found just 41 percent of registered voters approved of his handling of the economy. But this is a drop from where his numbers stood on these issues in early June, when The Economist/YouGov polling had him 8 percentage points higher and Politico/Morning Consult polling had him 6 points higher. Yet independents have been even more displeased with Biden’s handling of the economy, as their approval on that issue fell from the low 40s in June to around 30 percent more recently.

Garnering support from independents is important because it helps a president achieve overall popularity, but support from the base is vital too — and it’s another spot where Biden is in trouble. While his job approval rating among Democrats remains very high, it has dipped from 90 percent in the early summer to the low 80s now, with signs of deteriorating support among Black and Hispanic Americans, who are more likely to identify as Democratic than white Americans. As the chart below shows, there has been a drop in support for Biden among all three racial and ethnic groups we measured, but the drop among Hispanics — from the high 60s to slightly below 50 percent — marks Biden’s most precipitous decline.

Recent polling suggests that Hispanic approval of Biden’s handling of the pandemic and the economy has fallen sharply. The latest poll from The Economist/YouGov found just 45 percent of Hispanics approved of Biden’s handling of the pandemic, compared with 65 percent in early June. And Politico/Morning Consult’s new survey found Hispanic approval of Biden’s handling of the economy has dropped to 42 percent, compared with 60 percent back in June. Hispanics are also frustrated with how Biden has dealt with immigration — long one of Biden’s weakest issues in the public’s eyes — and although it isn’t the most important issue for Hispanic voters, it is often a highly salient one. Earlier this month, Quinnipiac University found that only 23 percent of Hispanic Americans approved of Biden’s work on immigration, down from 49 percent in late May. Even if that might be on the low end for Biden, the new Politico/Morning Consult survey also found him performing more poorly on the issue among Hispanic voters, as just 40 percent approved, compared with 51 percent in June.

Biden has lost ground among almost every single demographic group over the past few months, but independents and Hispanics stick out as two key groups where Biden’s standing has especially faltered. For Democrats looking ahead to the 2022 midterms, Biden’s overall approval rating is concerning enough, but if Biden is struggling to win independents and Hispanics, that could snuff out any hope Democrats have of holding either chamber of Congress. After all, independents backed Democrats in the 2018 midterms and Biden last November, and even though Republicans made gains with Hispanics in places like Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, Hispanics still largely backed Biden and helped him win in key swing states, like Arizona. But if Republicans can capitalize on Biden’s weakness among these groups, that could be their ticket back to controlling Congress next year.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/buy-limiting-abortion-access-mobilize-democrats-polls-silver-80630624

Before President Biden entered the White House, he had an impressive list of to-dos on his agenda, including but not limited to: passing federal voting rights legislation, restructuring policing following the murder of George Floyd and creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. 

But these three agenda items have another thing in common: None have passed Congress yet. 

Today, Democrats (again) attempted to pass a compromise version of a voting rights bill, and Republicans rejected it (again). Police reform met a similar fate in September. And earlier that month, Democrats faced another setback after the Senate parliamentarian excluded a pathway for citizenship for immigrants from the upcoming reconciliation bill.

Of course, in a highly polarized Congress, it was always likely that not all of Biden’s priorities would pass. But the current failure of these three measures in particular — all of which disproportionately affect people of color — poses a real problem for the Biden administration, especially given that part of his political strategy has been to pass popular legislation. It raises the question: popular for whom?

All three of these bills that failed Congress are at least somewhat popular with American voters, but they’re also the Democrats’ agenda items that most explicitly tackle race. As such, their fate hangs in limbo, in part, because some Democrats — including Biden — have long struggled to meaningfully address race-related issues for fear of alienating white voters. Some reporting already suggests that Black voters in Georgia aren’t pleased with Biden’s presidency, and because polls show his approval rating slipping among key Democratic constituencies, Democrats face a big risk if they don’t deliver on promises they made, particularly those to voters of color. 

For one, we’re already seeing the effects of Biden’s and Congress’s inaction on certain reforms. Polling from the Pew Research Center shows that Biden’s favorability has already dropped with most voting blocs — including Democrats. Among Democrats and those who lean Democratic, Biden’s approval rating fell from 88 percent in July to 75 percent in September. And among Black and Hispanic Americans, there was a steeper decline. Eighty-five percent of Black adults approved of Biden in July, but this fell to only 67 percent by September; during the same timeframe, Biden’s numbers among Hispanic adults tumbled from 72 percent to 56 percent. His support among Asian Americans also dropped from 68 percent to 54 percent. 

Other polls show a similar decline among voters of color. Per an October Morning Consult survey, Biden’s net approval rating among Black voters slipped from 68 percent on Aug. 1 to 43 percent by Oct. 12. And among Hispanic voters, whom Biden was already struggling with, an early October poll from The Economist/YouGov found that a narrow majority (51 percent) saw the president in a favorable light.

To be clear, we don’t know why voters of color and Democrats writ large have begun to see Biden less favorably. His approval numbers began slipping before September, in part because of the spread of the highly contagious delta variant and because of his administration’s handling of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. Other surveys note that Biden’s federal vaccine mandate didn’t go over too well with unvaccinated Black voters, either. But it’s notable that the policies that are now slipping through the cracks are the ones that will have the most obvious impact on people of color, who lean Democratic and have been a reliable source of support for Biden. It’s also too early to know whether voters of color will negatively judge Biden for cutting tuition-free community college from Democrats’ reconciliation bill, but Pew found that making tuition at public colleges and universities free was overwhelmingly popular with Black (86 percent), Hispanic (82 percent) and Asian American (69 percent) voters.

Democrats will blame Republican obstructionism for why legislation on voting rights, immigration and police reform have failed so far. And of course, there is disagreement among Democrats — namely, moderate Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — on how much of Biden’s agenda should pass, including whether to abolish or alter the filibuster so that Democrats can pass more of their priorities. But because Democrats control the White House and Congress, it might be hard for them to persuade voters, particularly voters of color, that the president has done everything in his power to deliver meaningful change since getting into office — a point that Cleve R. Wootson Jr. of The Washington Post argued earlier this month.

On voting rights specifically, there’s a clear racial divide on its importance. According to a July report from Pew, Black (77 percent), Hispanic (63 percent) and Asian Americans (66 percent) were all far more likely than white Americans (51 percent) to label voting a fundamental right rather than a privilege with responsibilities. In June, a separate Morning Consult/Politico poll found that Black Americans (64 percent) were significantly more likely than Hispanic and white Americans (47 percent each) to think restricting voting access was a major threat to American democracy.

Ultimately, the Biden administration’s current failure to pass bills that would help people of color isn’t that surprising, since Democrats have long struggled on how best to address race and racism. But ignoring these issues — or letting them fail completely — could have negative impacts on Democrats in the near- and long-term future. As Wootson Jr. notes, and as we’ve written previously, some voters of color already feel taken for granted by the Biden administration, and further policy failures might give voters of color yet another reason not to turn out for Democrats in the future.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/polls-consistently-show-close-governors-race-virginia-80671465

On Wednesday evening, Donald Trump’s get-around-the-ban surrogate on Twitter, Liz Harrington, issued a statement announcing the formation of the “Trump Media and Technology Group” (TMTG). Most of the attention focused on this missive has been centered around the announcement of something called “TRUTH Social”—also known as yet-another-Trump-focused-Twitter-clone. But that’s not the real point of TMTG. The real point is that this is a scheme through which Trump can collect several hundred million dollars, even if his new social platform never posts a tweet, or a toot, or a fart, or whatever they end up being called.

The truth behind TRUTH Social is right there in the first paragraph of the announcement, which is not focused on the technology behind the platform, or anything that Trump is bringing to the table. Instead, that paragraph is dedicated to explaining how the project has been given “an initial enterprise value of $875 million” and “a cumulative valuation up to $1.7 billion.” Which is amazing, because what it seems to have is nothing more than a credit line and some highly generic code that was hacked within minutes of the beta address becoming known.

No sooner had the first test invites been handed out than someone spoofed Trump’s account and posted, well, as Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli accurately puts it, “a photo of a pig defecating on its own scrotum.” Two hours after it first went up, the whole site came down.

However, it doesn’t matter if the site ever sticks its head above the waste pool again. Because that’s not the point. Donald Trump I’d potentially walking about with $340 million, even if it fails completely. That’s the point.

What Trump is attempting here is something called a SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies. It’s also known as a “reverse merger” or a “blank check company.” It’s a scheme in which some low-value shell company that’s already listed on a stock market “buys” a private company, then relists itself under the name of that new company. In almost all cases, what’s really going on is that the private company is just taking over the empty husk of that shell company—a company that may have existed for no other purpose than to serve as a placeholder for some future SPAC.

Why go through these steps? Because getting listed on a stock exchange generally requires clearing a number of hurdles, including meeting requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission. SPACS can just pop into existence, taking a fast track to a stock listing while dodging almost every qualifying step. 

The whole idea of the SPAC is relatively new, and in the last year they’ve really taken off. In some cases, these schemes have allowed start ups to jump immediately to market, capitalizing on interest in new technology or rising industries. Among others, several small electric car companies made a sudden appearance on NASDAQ last year after taking over the corpses of fading corporations.

But there’s one particular kind of SPAC that’s described in this article from Mergers and Acquisitions. A kind known as the “celebrity SPAC.” 

First, a “celebrity” or another notable person (the “Sponsor”) raises capital by taking an empty holding company (the SPAC) public in an IPO. This SPAC then uses the cash proceeds from the IPO and a large stock issuance to acquire a private company, making it public. 

That’s exactly what’s happening with TMTG. Teenage Mutant Turtle Gropers—sorry, that’s Trump Media and Technology Group—doesn’t have to rival Twitter. It doesn’t even have to threaten whatever “conservative social media platforms” are still limping along out there. It just has to collect investors. Because this:

Unlike IPOs, however, the Sponsor gets a 20% stake, called a “Promote,” and there’s much less regulatory scrutiny. Oh, and this “Sponsor” invests almost nothing in exchange for this 20% stake.

Remember the numbers on how this was being “valued” in Trump’s announcement? That’s right. This is an attempt by Trump to scam between $175 million and $340 million with essentially no investment and no effort. As the article explains, the “sponsor” can walk away with a bundle, “even if the SPAC performs horribly and the share price plummets, while normal investors will lose everything."

Trump already has a good idea how this works, because, as CNBC noted in 2020, former Trump adviser Gary Cohn put together a SPAC worth a potential $600 million (and $120 million directly to Cohn) when it formed a “blank check” holding company whose entire purpose seems to be simply to get people to buy into shares. A SPAC of this variety is nothing more than a exchange-based Ponzi scheme in which the original Ponzi is guaranteed to walk away with a mountain of cash.

TMTG isn’t a social media platform. It’s a scam. Trump does need another social media platform. He needs suckers willing to buy stock. And Trump has always been very, very good at locating suckers.

So while it’s fun to point out that TRUTH Social has some of the most restrictive rules of any platform, including rules that prohibit criticizing TRUTH Social, it doesn’t really matter. The whole platform can be sh#t pigs all the way down. It can collapse under its own incompetence. None of that means a thing. What matters to Trump is that he gets to walk away with a bundle.

Not every SPAC is a scam. They really can be a means of quickly connecting investors to rising companies that aren’t yet at a stage that would allow them to get onto the exchange through more traditional means. But of the $82 billion raised through SPACS in 2020, a large amount is either super speculative investment or an outright scam. Which lead the Harvard Business Review to note last February that the SPAC bubble was looking very fragile. Once it became clear that this was a way to drub investors for ready cash, everyone wanted in.

Trump isn’t being innovative in his technology. He’s not even being innovative in his scam. In a lot of ways, he’s late to the SPAC party. But it’s way past time for the SEC to put some serious restrictions on these backdoor listing schemes and blank check companies. 

Sen. Joe Manchin’s big effort to find “10 good people” in the Republican conference in the Senate will fail Wednesday. The Senate will hold a cloture vote on the Freedom to Vote Act, Manchin’s alternative voting rights and elections reforms bill for which he promised Republicans votes, and Republicans will filibuster it.

That was all but guaranteed when Majority Leader Chuck Schumer scheduled the vote last week, and confirmed Tuesday when Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski announced she would vote against allowing the Senate to even consider the bill.

Campaign Action

Spoiler alert: Murkowski is not really working on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, there will be no Republicans supporting it, and her version of it will likely never see the light of day.

The Freedom to Vote Act is a result of months of work by Senate Democrats, with Manchin, to craft a voting rights bill for him. He stands as the lone Democratic opponent to the For the People Act, the sweeping elections, campaign finance reform, and voting rights bill that passed in the House in early March. Sens. Amy Klobucher (Minnesota), Jeff Merkley (Oregon), Raphael Warnock (Georgia), Alex Padilla (California), Jon Tester (Montana), Tim Kaine (Virginia), and independent Sen. Angus King (Maine) worked with Manchin to craft the new Freedom to Vote Act on the premise that he would work to find the 10 Republican votes to pass it.

He has not. The exercise did result in very good legislation—it’s a bill that President Joe Biden lobbied Senate Democrats for early this week, calling it a “must pass priority.” That’s preaching to the choir because once Manchin was invested, there was no question that every Democrat would support it. The question is how far they’ll go to pass it.

“When we are talking about the fundamental operation of democracy, I have to think a Senate rule will have to be modified or give way,” King told The New York Times. He said he was ready to change the filibuster to pass the bill. But that wasn’t what Biden was talking about, apparently, when he was rallying Democrats. A White House statement about the bill didn’t say anything about filibuster reform or whether it came up in Biden’s discussions with senators. Instead, it said he would endeavor to secure voting rights “through legislation, executive actions, outreach, the bully pulpit and all other means available.”

That’s not to say the White House isn’t aware of the reality of the situation. “If Republicans cannot come forward and stop standing in the way, if they can’t support strengthening, protecting the fundamental right to vote, then Democrats are going to have to determine an alternative path forward,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday. There really isn’t an alternative path to ending the filibuster, even if just for voting rights and elections bills.

It’s not like the Senate hasn’t done that before. For example, they did it 161 times between 1961 and 2014, covering “a wide range of policy areas, including trade (such as the multiple provisions providing the president with fast-track trade authority); foreign policy (including rules for the imposition or waiver of international sanctions); defense matters (such as procedures for closing military bases); the federal budget (including the process for developing and passing the congressional budget resolution); and health care (such as the provisions governing the adoption of proposed cuts in Medicare spending).”

It seems like “saving democracy in the United States” would rank up there with closing military bases as a priority for allowing the Senate to act.

This is a good bill, a very good bill, worthy of adding voting rights and election reform to the filibuster carve-outs, if not ending the legislative filibuster outright (which they may as well do since there is going to be another existential fight over the debt limit in a few months). The analysts at the Brennan Center for Justice have been keeping close track of the state of our republic this year, and it’s not good. “Nineteen states have passed 33 laws making it harder to vote … Republican-controlled legislators try to rig election rules to assure their control at the state and federal level,” they report. “And in both Democrat- and Republican-controlled states across the country, partisans are drawing maps that lock in their party’s control in a way that too often discriminates along racial, ethnic, and partisan lines.”

“The Freedom to Vote Act,” Brennan’s President Michael Waldman writes, “would stop this voter suppression and gerrymandering, cold.”

The bill establishes national voting access standards for federal elections, including mandating early voting, no-excuse absentee voting, and protections for voters with disabilities. It also makes Election Day a holiday. It enacts special protection for election officials to safeguard them from intimidation and harassment and to prevent them from being removed from office by partisan politics. It creates national, uniform rules for counting votes.

The Freedom to Vote Act bans partisan gerrymanders in redistricting, setting uniform, national rules for drawing congressional maps. In addition, it “increases protections for communities of color in the redistricting process and allows for discriminatory or gerrymandered maps to be challenged in court quickly and fixed.” If it was passed this year, the worst of the gerrymanders Republicans are drawing up right now would be stopped.

Manchin—and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema—could emerge as heroes Wednesday. They could erase a whole lot of ill will they’ve created for themselves in the fight over Biden’s economic and family agenda in the reconciliation and infrastructure bills they’ve been monkey-wrenching for months. They could also secure their continued relevancy as lawmakers, giving Democrats a fairer shot at retaining and growing their majority next year.  And Manchin could erase the stigma, to a degree anyway, of having been made to the look the fool time and time again by Republicans.

Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: www.patreon.com/editorialcartoons Or: https://ko-fi.com/nickanderson Sign up for my free newsletter at: nickanderson.substack.com

Senate Democrats are searching for an elusive plan C on elections and ethics reform after facing yet another setback Wednesday.

In a 49-51 vote, the Senate failed to move forward on Democrats' latest elections reform bill, which amounted to an intraparty compromise between Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and a group of seven Democratic senators. While Manchin spent weeks seeking GOP input, in the end no Republicans voted to begin consideration of the legislation, effectively killing the bill in the Senate.

Democrats privately hoped that if they gave Manchin the time to reach out to Republicans and he received no buy-in, he might be more open to shifting from his dug-in position against nixing the legislative filibuster or creating an exception to the rule for voting rights. But so far, there's no public evidence that the West Virginia Democrat will change his mind, and Democrats seem to have no other options.

“The next steps are unclear, but the first step was to get the Democrats unified on the voting rights bill,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii.) “We are rapidly running out of time as gerrymandering and voter suppression is happening as we speak and as we dither. Unless we restore the Senate’s ability to make laws, this situation will be dire.”

For months, Democrats have vowed that “failure is not an option” when it comes to enacting their party’s sweeping legislation. But with Senate Republicans unanimously opposed and no indication that the party has the votes to toss the legislative filibuster or change Senate rules, the prospects of Democrats enacting the bill grow slimmer by the day.

“If we can’t get Republicans to join us and we can’t convince our own colleagues to change the rules, there’s not a lot of other great options on the table,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “We’re going to need to keep pushing, we’re going to need to keep up the public drumbeat, we’re going to need to recruit more activists. But our procedural pathways are certainly narrow.”

The latest bill — which is significantly scaled down from an original version that Manchin did not support — creates some federally mandated voting rules, such as requiring states to offer early voting options and expand access to mail ballots. It would also ban partisan gerrymandering, require far more politically active groups to disclose their donors and include more transparency requirements for online advertising.

Democrats view the legislation as existential, and argue that it’s necessary to counter laws in GOP-led states that added voting restrictions. Republicans, however, say the legislation is nothing more than an attempt to federalize the U.S. election system.

"The fundamental problem is the Democrats think Washington ought to run elections and Republicans believe the states ought to run elections,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

"That's the gulf that separates us and I don't see us bridging that gulf.”

The Senate in June failed to start debate on a broader elections and ethics reform bill, which passed the House in March but all Republicans opposed. In addition to the defeated vote Wednesday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate will hold a vote next week on a separate bill named after the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), which would restore a requirement that certain jurisdictions receive approval from the Justice Department or D.C. District Court before changing voting laws. That bill is also short of the 10 GOP votes needed to break a filibuster.

While Schumer vowed that "the fight to protect our democracy is far from over," he didn’t detail how Democrats would ultimately overcome opposition from Republicans. Invoking the Reconstruction era in his speech, Schumer said the majority of the Senate was still willing then to move forward on civil rights legislation, despite opposition from the minority.

"If expanding basic freedoms meant going it alone, that was something they were willing to do," Schumer said. "Today, we feel the same way."

Schumer has repeatedly said all options are on the table on voting rights, but he's never specifically endorsed a change to Senate rules.

“There are two possible next steps: one is negotiations, for the Republicans to say OK, here's what we'll go along with, here's what we need, here's what we want,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who helped negotiate the intraparty compromise. “The other is to modify the rules in such a way that we can pass the bill.”

While Democrats are pushing for swift passage, the deadline for some of the provisions in the expansive proposed legislation — notably many of the congressional redistricting provisions — may have already passed in some of the most consequential states. Passing a law with new requirements now would likely ensure intense legal battles that could tie up maps for years.

The bill contains an entire title on redistricting reform that lays out criteria for how states can go about drawing new district boundaries, including a ban on “favoring or disfavoring” a political party. The bill does allow for the new requirements to kick in for districts after enactment, “regardless of the date of enactment by the State of the congressional redistricting plan.” But some states, including Texas, have already instituted new maps, or are on the verge of doing so.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chair of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, acknowledged the window to act on gerrymandering “is getting close” to closing and “that’s why we need to act quickly.”

"We don't have unlimited amount of time to fix this,” added Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.).

Wednesday’s failed vote is guaranteed to renew calls from progressives to ax the legislative filibuster. Several Democrats said they expected the caucus to at some point have a discussion about rule changes, noting that the bill is a top priority for the party.

“We have to pass it,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who worked on the unsuccessful intraparty compromise. “Our voters expect us to pass it. If we do not protect people’s right to vote, our voters will not just blame Republicans, they’ll say you have the majority, why didn’t you protect our right to vote?’”

And activists are increasingly agitating for Biden to do more to overhaul elections policy.

“He’s made clear that he supports voting reform, but that is simply not enough,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP, said in an email shortly after the vote. “His inaction on voting rights will define not just his presidency but the future trajectory of this country. We need him to bring this over the finish line.”

Peter Doocy isn’t just a Fox News disinformation peddler. He’s a hereditary Fox News disinformation peddler and, perhaps, the most pathetic failson being publicly promoted by the network. Tucker Carlson is dangerous. Junior Doocy can only try to be so dangerous, but he’s so bad at his job that mostly he just makes White House press secretary Jen Psaki look really, really good.

And so it went on Tuesday when Doocy tried to press Psaki on COVID-19 vaccine mandates for police—his argument being that so many police would resign that it would compromise public safety. This led to a series of body blows and one indelible moment when Psaki asked Doocy, “What was the number-one cause of death among police officers last year, do you know?”

Then she waited. 

Silence from Doocy.

“COVID-19.”

That was something of an understatement, actually. COVID-19 wasn’t just the leading cause of death for police officers on duty last year, it is also the leading cause of death for police officers on duty this year, and in both cases it is more than four times as common as the No. 2 cause of death.

Psaki also offered up a litany of statistics showing the effectiveness of vaccine mandates, and the degree to which the claim that large numbers of officers will quit has been overstated. “If you look at Seattle as an example, which I know has been in some of the reporting, 92% of the police force is vaccinated, as are 93% of firefighters. Ninety-nine percent of Seattle’s 11,000 employees have submitted vaccine verification or an exemption request.”

Doocy bravely/foolishly plowed on. “Public safety, though. All these other problems: Terror, murder, robberies, kidnappings. Is there any concern that if police forces shrink or if the size of the ready military force shrinks, that the United States or localities may not be equipped properly to deal with that?“ 

“Peter, more than 700,000 people have died of COVID. Again, it was the number-one cause of death among police departments and police officers. It’s something that we should take seriously. Departments are trying to save people in their departments, people who work for them, we support that effort, and there’s been success across the country in that regard.”

Terror? The U.S. is currently experiencing about a 9/11’s worth of COVID-19 deaths every two days. Murder? A year’s worth of homicide deaths from COVID-19 about every 12 days, at the current rate. Kidnapping? Abduction by strangers is extremely rare—you’d have to go to the state level to express the frequency of COVID-19 deaths relative to that.

Doocy and Fox News aren’t worried about public safety. Their opposition to public health measures around the coronavirus pandemic show that. They’re not worried about the reduction of police forces or they’d be worried about the hundreds of officers the virus has killed. Doocy and Fox News are concerned about the appearance of supporting police, using it here as a tool to attack efforts to end the pandemic. His angling for a “White House doesn’t care if police quit en masse” headline is clownishly obvious here, and it relies on Fox News viewers to fail to notice that evidence does not at present exist of large numbers of police resignations, and that evidence does exist of COVID-19’s deadly impact on police departments. Lucky for him, Fox viewers can be relied on to fail to notice those things, but this exchange is deeply unlikely to expand the audience for the Fox message on vaccinations.

On our weekly podcast about politics, Daily Kos The Brief, we’re in the middle of our new series spotlighting great organizations doing on the ground organizing in key 2022 battleground states. We are urging you to donate to these organizations. $20 today to these organizations will do more to help us win next year than $1,000 to a campaign weeks before the vote. These are the groups registering and educating voters long before campaigns even exist. These are dollars that will be spent directly engaging voters one on one, in a way that expensive, ineffective TV ads never will. And make no mistake—those late dollars to campaigns? It’s money pissed away on TV ads. So donate to these ground-campaign organizations or one in your neck of the woods. Make it a recurring donation! It’ll be the best political dollar you’ve ever donated. 

We’ve done episodes on Virginia, Michigan, and North Carolina. Today, we’re doing Pennsylvania. And oh man, does it get any more critical than Pennsylvania? Just like Republicans cannot plausibly win without Florida or Texas, Democrats’ chances in both the Senate and the 2024 presidential election are severely compromised if we can’t win the Keystone state. 

Donald Trump won the state by just over 44,000 votes in 2016, a margin of 0.7%. Joe Biden won the state by  80,555 votes in 2020, or 1.2%. But here’s the crazy thing—Trump got 407.000 more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016! That’s an increase of over 15%! In any conventional year, that would’ve been more than enough to secure victory. Yet Democrats turned out an eye-watering 532,000 more votes in 2020. Over half a million! On the plus side, we won! On the cautionary side, there are many first-time voters in that total. Will they turn out in 2022 when the stakes aren’t as obvious as in 2020? 

On the same note, will Trump’s army turn out for the midterms? They haven’t before. But we can’t assume they’ll similarly stay home next year. And the stakes are enormous: Any hope of a Kyrsten Sinema/Joe Manchin-proof Senate runs through this open seat. We must pick it up. And we need a governor and a state legislature that will ensure free and fair elections. Maybe even make it easier for people to vote! While Republicans have comfortable margins in the current legislature, that resulted from an extreme 2010 gerrymander when they had the trifecta (perhaps the most aggressive in the entire country). The governorship is a D Democratic open seat, and we must hold it. And the legislature will have new, fairer maps since Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf can veto any legislative map and kick it to the courts.

Today, our guest is Jamie Perrapato, Executive Director of Turn PA Blue, an organization dedicated to flipping the Pennsylvania state legislature by training and mobilizing grassroots groups and volunteers to support candidates in Southeastern PA and beyond.

And remember, early morning to grassroots on-the-ground organizers are the best political donations you will ever make. So please donate to Turn PA Blue, and the rest of our fundraising slate today.

President Joe Biden is going to have a busy Tuesday as mediator between House Democratic factions—the progressives who are fighting for his full agenda versus the Sabotage Squad of Blue Dogs and New Democrats who are lending the Republicans a hand in watering down his vision. At issue is the reconciliation bill that includes what the White House calls Biden's human infrastructure plans; a still-ambitious plan to expand health care and educational access, family security, and tackle climate change. The conservative Democrats are operating under the irrational but powerful delusion that giving in to Republican demands will keep Republicans from attacking them in 2022 campaigns. They believe that either not doing some of those things or doing those things poorly is the ticket.

Biden has thus far proven to be less a standard-bearer for his own plan than a referee, which is part of why we are now in what feels like the 180th infrastructure week. On Monday, the first meeting Biden held was Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the Congressional Progressive Caucus leader. That's who his first Tuesday meeting is with as well. The Washington State Democrat has been his most effective ally thus far, preserving his vision for the Build Back Better plan against the crew that he is meeting with afterward: “moderates including Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), the leader of the New Democrat Coalition, and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.).”

Those are the Sabotage Squad members who have already reneged on an agreement reached months ago by the White House, Democratic leadership, and rank-and-file members to link up the hard infrastructure plan negotiated by conservative Democrats and Republicans in the Senate with the reconciliation bill containing all the good stuff, which can be passed with just Democratic votes. If one doesn't pass, neither does the second. Conservative Democrats have proven a couple of times already how necessary that linkage is by trying to break the deal, amply demonstrating that they are untrustworthy.

That's reinforced by the antics of their counterparts in the Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Biden also talked with Manchin Tuesday after Manchin let his end game—and duplicity—out of the bag.

“Trust me,” Manchin is saying as he interminably drags out negotiations in the full expectation that it will kill the reconciliation bill. “Just pass my bill and sure, I’ll go along with reconciliation.” Here’s his latest maneuver in making sure that the reconciliation bill never sees completion: carbon emissions.

Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota has been negotiating with Manchin for months and months on a plan to help utilities shift from fossil fuel-based power generation to clean, renewable sources. After stringing those negotiations along, Manchin just pulled the rug out from under Smith. "He told me last week he just didn't think he could get there on the clean electricity program," Smith told CNN. “But rolling back the CEPP—which is a foundation of the President's action plan—that's a huge concession. The question on my mind is what are we going to do instead?”

“We have to continue to have these conversations and I can't point to anything specific that he's offered,” Smith said of Manchin. Since he’s not offering anything, one potential solution Democrats have returned to is the idea of a carbon tax, charging polluters for the greenhouse gas they emit. Manchin nixed that Tuesday just as soon as it arose as a possibility. “[T]he carbon tax is not on the board at all right now,” he told reporters Tuesday.

Another option is increasing a clean energy tax credit that Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden is crafting in his committee. “The bill produced by the Finance Committee is going to be responsible for 73% of the emission reductions in the next 10 years,” Wyden told CNN. But that tax credit isn’t likely to be enough to meet the carbon emissions targets necessary to, you know, save the planet.

Manchin has no interest in saving the planet—even less interest than he has in improving the lives of his constituents. That’s true of any Democrat working to help him in his sabotage of Biden’s plans. (Looking at you, Sen. Jon Tester.)