James.galbraith

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PayPal has announced that it plans to acquire Curv, a cryptocurrency startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel. TechCrunch reports: Curv is a cryptocurrency security company that helps you store your crypto assets securely. The company operates a cloud-based service that lets you access your crypto wallets without any hardware device. Curv also lets you set up sophisticated policies so that the new intern cannot withdraw crypto assets without some sort of approval chain. Similarly, you can create allow lists so that regular transactions can go through more easily. Behind the scenes, Curv uses multi-party computation to handle private keys. When you create a wallet, cryptographic secrets are generated on your device and on Curv's servers. Whenever you're trying to initiate a transaction, multiple secrets are used to generate a full public and private key. Secrets are rotated regularly and you can't do anything with just one secret. If somebody steals an unsecured laptop, a hacker cannot access crypto funds with the information stored on this device alone. PayPal says that the Curv team will join the cryptocurrency group within PayPal. Terms of the deal are undisclosed and the transaction should close at some point during the first half of 2021. Calcalist reported that PayPal was paying between $200 million and $300 million for the acquisition. A person close to the company says that the transaction was under $200 million. I guess we'll find out what happened exactly in the next earnings release.

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Sen. Manchin’s suggestion for changing the filibuster: “Make them stand there and talk.”

On Sunday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a longtime defender of the filibuster, signaled that he might nevertheless be open to filibuster reforms that could make it easier for Democrats to advance their legislative agenda.

In a series of television interviews, Manchin emphasized his support for the filibuster rule, which effectively imposes a 60-vote threshold for most legislative action in the Senate. But he told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd that “if you want to make [filibustering] a little bit more painful — make them stand there and talk — I’m willing to look at any way we can.”

He also reiterated that same point elsewhere on Sunday, telling Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday that “[the filibuster] should be painful if you want to use it.”

That may not sound like a big deal, but it is: As Politico reporter Andrew Desiderio pointed out on Twitter Sunday, what Manchin appears to be describing is a throwback to the “talking filibuster,” which would likely pose a much more surmountable obstacle to the narrow Democratic Senate majority.

As Desiderio explained, under a “talking filibuster,” any “member of the minority party can filibuster as long as he/she stays put on the floor.” But once a member finishes speaking, the filibuster would end, and “there’d be a vote at a simple majority threshold” of 50 votes, instead of the existing 60-vote threshold required to end a filibuster.

That’s a big change, because there’s currently no actual filibustering required to filibuster in the Senate, at least not in the conventional sense. As Vox explained back in 2015, the modern filibuster doesn’t require a senator talking on the floor for hours on end to delay a bill.

Instead, today’s filibuster is a straightforward move to reject unanimous consent on a bill that the minority can wield painlessly: According to former Vox writer Ezra Klein, “Today’s filibusters simply paralyze the Senate until the majority either finds 60 votes to proceed or gives up and moves on to another piece of business.”

If that rule were changed, though — say, by going back to the talking filibuster of yore — filibusters might only paralyze the Senate until the minority runs out of members willing to hold the floor.

Support for the talking filibuster isn’t really a new position for Manchin either, as Desiderio points out: In 2011, Manchin backed a similar, unsuccessful measure that would have “required that Senators who wish to filibuster a bill must actually take the floor and make remarks.”

As things stand, the filibuster doesn’t affect all Senate business — judicial nominations, for example, are only subject to a simple 50-vote majority, as are Cabinet appointments — but it does limit most legislation. The one notable exception to that rule is the budget reconciliation process, which Democrats are on the verge of using to pass a $1.9 trillion stimulus package into law this week. But reconciliation is also an arcane, limited process that would be incompatible with many Democratic priorities under current congressional rules.

Despite being the very thing that imposes a 60-vote threshold on much Senate business, the filibuster itself isn’t subject to the same threshold. If the current Democratic caucus majority in the Senate — with its 50 votes, plus Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker — wanted to eliminate the filibuster altogether, it could do so.

It won’t, unless Manchin and other moderates have a dramatic change of heart — but Manchin’s comments are a reminder that Democrats could still use their majority to find a way around the filibuster if their members aren’t willing to end it outright.

Filibuster changes could pave the way for a bold Democratic legislative agenda

Obviously, Manchin’s comments Sunday aren’t a definite commitment to do something about the filibuster — but they’re still extremely good news for Democrats, who appear as if they will soon face a string of futile fights to win over 10 Republican votes for priorities like voting rights and a minimum wage increase.

Specifically, Manchin’s change in tone, though slight, comes as Senate Democrats prepare for a fight over a voting rights package recently passed by the House of Representatives, and as high-profile party leaders begin to get behind ditching the filibuster.

In an interview this week, for example, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told the Guardian that “there’s no way under the sun that in 2021 that we are going to allow the filibuster to be used to deny voting rights.”

“Here we are talking about the Voting Rights Act [late Rep. John Lewis] worked so hard for and that’s named in his honor and they’re going to filibuster it to death?” Clyburn said. “That ain’t gonna happen.”

As a member of the House rather than the Senate, Clyburn himself has no say over the fate of the filibuster, but he’s still an influential, longtime leader in Congress. And he’s not alone in arguing for change: Just this past week, several Senate Democrats indicated they would also be open to abolishing the filibuster to clear the way for priorities like voting rights.

Despite some movement within the Democratic caucus, the path to filibuster elimination — or even reform — still isn’t exactly clear. Democrats would need all 50 members of their majority to make it happen, and Manchin’s comments Sunday confirm that he’s still in the “hard no” camp on abolishing the filibuster, as is Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema, who has staked out an aggressively pro-filibuster position.

If the Democratic Senate majority does decide to take action though, there are lots of things they could do short of blowing up the filibuster for good. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser wrote last month, with just 50 votes and Harris to break the tie, Democrats could limit which bills are subject to the filibuster, make it harder to filibuster a bill in the first place, or reduce the cloture threshold in the Senate.

On Meet the Press Sunday, Manchin indicated some willingness to consider that first option, in addition to a talking filibuster, telling Todd he might be open “to a reconciliation” style approach for passing bills if Democrats are met with repeated refusals from Manchin’s “Republican friends” to work together.

According to some Democrats, such as Clyburn, changing the filibuster is vital to the future not just of the Biden administration’s legislative agenda, but to the Democratic Party’s ability to compete in future elections.

“If Manchin and Sinema enjoy being in the majority,” Clyburn told the Guardian, “They had better figure out a way to get around the filibuster when it comes to voting and civil rights.”

Progressives push President Biden to go even bigger.

"The new Google Pay app came out of beta this week, and it marks the first step in a major upheaval in the Google Pay service," writes Ars Technica, complaining "Google is killing one perfectly fine service and replacing it with a worse, less functional service." The fun, confusing wrinkle here is that the new and old services are both called "Google Pay...." The old Google Pay service that has been around for years is dying. The app will be shut down in the U.S. on April 5... - If you want to continue using New Google Pay, you'll have to go find and download a totally new app. - NFC tap-and-pay functionality won't really change once you set up the new app, but the New Google Pay app won't use your Google account for P2P payments anymore. You'll be required to make a new account. - You won't be able to send any money to your new contacts until they download the new app and make a new account, too. - On top of all that, the Google Pay website will be stripped of all payment functionality in the U.S. on April 5, and New Google Pay won't support doing anything from the web. You won't be able to transfer money, view payment activity, or see your balance from a browser. - In addition to less convenient access and forcing users to remake their accounts, New Google Pay is also enticing users to switch with new fees for transfers to debit cards. Old Google Pay did this for free, but New Google Pay now has "a fee of 1.5% or $.31 (whichever is higher), when you transfer out money with a debit card..." The worst part of it all is that, like the move from Google Music to YouTube Music, there is no reward at the end of this transition. Besides sending out an email, Google also created a support page and a notice at the top of pay.google.com, Ars Technica reports. But they call it "yet anothre annoying transition... an occurrence that's getting more frequent and more annoying in recent years, thanks to similar Google shutdowns of Google Play Music, Cloud Print, Inbox, Works with Nest, the ongoing Hangouts situation, and many others."

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Thelasko shares a new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NPR reports on the key findings: As several states face criticism for lifting coronavirus-related public health restrictions, a study published Friday confirms that state-imposed mask mandates and on-premises dining restrictions help slow the spread of COVID-19. The study, published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, looked at the impact of state-issued mask mandates and on-premises dining on county-level COVID-19 cases and deaths between March 1 and Dec. 31. It found that mask mandates were associated with "statistically significant" decreases in daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation. In contrast, allowing on-premises dining was associated with an increase in daily cases 41 to 100 days after reopening, and an increase in daily death growth rates after 61 to 100 days. "Policies that require universal mask use and restrict any on-premises restaurant dining are important components of a comprehensive strategy to reduce exposure to and transmission of SARS-CoV-2," the study authors wrote. "Such efforts are increasingly important given the emergence of highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants in the United States." The study says its analysis did not differentiate between indoor and outdoor dining.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sure, the federal government gave your family thousands of dollars. But aren't you mad about some tiny and unimportant provision in the bill?

Student loan forgiveness just got a big political boost in the stimulus package.

Tucked into the $1.9 trillion stimulus package is a provision that makes forgiven student debt tax-free. It ups the pressure for President Joe Biden to cancel student debt, but it is also a big deal for many borrowers regardless.

The provision, added to the Covid-19 relief bill by Senate Democrats and championed by Sens. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), says that anyone whose student loans are discharged through 2025 won’t face tax consequences. Debt cancellation is usually treated as taxable income, so without this, if someone were to have some or all of their student debt forgiven, it would be accompanied by a tax bill.

While student debt forgiveness used to be a pretty fringe idea, it’s become much more mainstream in recent years as student debt in America has grown. Currently, some 45 million borrowers owe $1.7 trillion in student loans.

Biden has backed Congress forgiving $10,000 in student loan debt per individual. However, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Warren, and progressive Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Alma Adams (D-NC), and Maxine Waters (D-CA) have urged the president to cancel $50,000 using executive action. Biden has said he doesn’t believe he has the authority to cancel student debt.

One big question in the background has been whether, if some forgiveness happened, people would face taxes. The stimulus package moves that hurdle out of the way.

While the political impetus to get this tax provision into the relief bill may have been broad-based forgiveness, this is a fix that many policy experts have long been advocating for and believe needs to be made permanent. Many student loan borrowers are on income-driven repayment plans, where they make payments on their loans based on their incomes and then after 20 or 25 years, those loans are forgiven. Not many borrowers have hit that 20- or 25-year limit yet, but when they do, without making forgiveness tax-free, they’ll be taxed.

“Primarily, this was aimed at making a fix that was essentially aimed at knocking down that potential barrier to administrative action on broader debt cancellation … but it has spillover effects that are important,” said Jessica Thompson, associate vice president at the Institute for College Access & Success. “It’s just the right policy.”

The current tax treatment on student loan forgiveness doesn’t really make sense

Tax liability for forgiven student debt has been determined in an awkward, uneven way. In some circumstances, the IRS considers forgiven loans taxable income; in others, it does not.

Loans forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which forgives debt after people make 10 years of payments while working in certain public service jobs, are not considered taxable. However, loans forgiven under income-driven repayment are. Not a lot of people have qualified for forgiveness under those types of programs yet, because the programs haven’t been around for long enough, but as more people do start to qualify, the tax issue is looming.

“We’re still in the very beginning of folks coming into that forgiveness period,” Thompson said. “But there are over 8 million people in these plans now, so that number is just going to grow and grow and grow. We’re going to start seeing examples of people getting tax bills.”

It’s not hard to see why that would be a problem: Many of the people spending two decades on paying back loans are not high-income. “They are people whose balances have been growing because they don’t even make enough to cover their interest payments,” Thompson said.

The Obama and Trump administrations both found ways to make sure loans discharged for people who went to colleges that committed fraud or closed weren’t taxed. It’s likely the Biden administration would have taken similar action, but now with the stimulus bill, this makes the tax guidance much clearer.

The new proposed rule builds on a tax provision included in the 2017 tax bill that Republicans passed, which scrapped tax liability for student debt forgiven because of disability or death. That also expires at the end of 2025. Many experts hope that set a precedent for making all student loan forgiveness tax-free to become permanent law.

This removes a roadblock — and gives Biden a nudge

Prior to the tax fix, some experts believed the federal government could find some workarounds on making forgiveness tax-free if it wanted to, though there was hardly widespread agreement on the matter. Now Democrats have shut down this part of the wider student debt debate.

President Biden has been adamant that he’s not interested in canceling student debt on his own through executive action and would like for Congress to forgive $10,000 of debt. If Congress were to act, this new provision would apply. But many Democrats are also using it to urge Biden to act on his own and cancel up to $50,000 in student loans.

Both Menendez and Warren made clear after the Covid-19 relief bill passed that the point is to smooth the path for Biden to take action.

The student debt forgiveness debate isn’t going away, and the pressure on the White House to do something is building.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Sunday doubled down in defending himself against calls for his resignation, saying that quitting would be “antidemocratic.”

His comments during a news briefing came after two more women came forward over the weekend to accuse him of inappropriate behavior.

“I’m not going to resign because of allegations,” he told reporters on a conference call. “The premise of resigning because of allegations is actually antidemocratic. We’ve always done the exact opposite — the system is based on due process and the credibility of the allegations.”

Cuomo said on Wednesday that he had no intention of resigning and will instead allow an investigation overseen by state Attorney General Tish James to play out.

The governor has faced mounting pressure in recent days from Republicans and members of his own party. He has described calls for his resignation as thinly veiled opportunism.

“I have a news flash for you: There is politics in politics,” he said on Sunday. “And, look, I have political differences with people. I have political differences with Republicans. I have political differences with Sen. [Alessandra] Biaggi and Democrats. But they don’t override the people’s will. They don’t override elections. They don’t get to hear an allegation and make a determination on the allegation.”

Biaggi, who represents portions of the Bronx and Westchester County in the New York state Senate, has been among Cuomo’s sharpest critics.

After he spoke on Sunday, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic majority leader of the New York State Senate, directly called on him to resign “for the good of the state.”

Cuomo’s insistence on due process contrasts significantly with his tone shortly after a 2018 New Yorker article detailed former Attorney General Eric Scheiderman’s alleged mistreatment of women in his personal life. At the time, the governor urged him to step down “for the good of the office,” which he did soon thereafter.

“My personal opinion is that, given the damning pattern of facts and corroboration laid out in the article, I do not believe it is possible for Eric Schneiderman to continue as Attorney General,” Cuomo said.

On Sunday, Cuomo specifically denied an account by Karen Hinton, a former press aide to the governor. In an article published Saturday by The Washington Post, Hinton said that in 2000, Cuomo, who was then secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, hugged her in a hotel room in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. Hinton later worked as a spokesperson for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — whom Cuomo detests — and the governor portrayed her as a “longtime political adversary.”

The comments also came a day after The Wall Street Journal detailed allegations from a former policy aide, Ana Liss, that Cuomo “asked her if she had a boyfriend, called her sweetheart, touched her on her lower back at a reception and once kissed her hand when she rose from her desk.”

Cuomo’s comments Sunday were preceded by a statement from NAACP New York Conference President Hazel Dukes — one of Cuomo’s few public defenders in recent days — saying that demands for the governor’s resignation were “premature.”

“Only a full, fair hearing of the facts will determine whether or not the Governor should resign. It should not be a decision made following the beat of a political drum,” Dukes said in a statement issued via the state Democratic Committee, which Cuomo effectively controls.

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From lower carbon emissions to fewer potholes, there are a number of benefits to building a layer of plastic into roads. From a report: On a road into New Delhi, countless cars a day speed over tonnes of plastic bags, bottle tops and discarded polystyrene cups. In a single kilometre, a driver covers one tonne of plastic waste. But far from being an unpleasant journey through a sea of litter, this road is smooth and well-maintained -- in fact the plastic that each driver passes over isn't visible to the naked eye. It is simply a part of the road. This road, stretching from New Delhi to nearby Meerut, was laid using a system developed by Rajagopalan Vasudevan, a professor of chemistry at the Thiagarajar College of Engineering in India, which replaces 10% of a road's bitumen with repurposed plastic waste. India has been leading the world in experimenting with plastic-tar roads since the early 2000s. But a growing number of countries are beginning to follow suit. From Ghana to the Netherlands, building plastic into roads and pathways is helping to save carbon emissions, keep plastic from the oceans and landfill, and improve the life-expectancy of the average road. By 2040, there is set to be 1.3 billion tonnes of plastic in the environment globally. India alone already generates more than 3.3 million tonnes of plastic a year -- which was one of the motivators behind Vasudevan's system for incorporating waste into roads. It has the benefit of being a very simple process, requiring little high-tech machinery. First, the shredded plastic waste is scattered onto an aggregate of crushed stones and sand before being heated to about 170C -- hot enough to melt the waste. The melted plastics then coat the aggregate in a thin layer. Then heated bitumen is added on top, which helps to solidify the aggregate, and the mixture is complete. Many different types of plastics can be added to the mix: carrier bags, disposable cups, hard-to-recycle multi-layer films and polyethylene and polypropylene foams have all found their way into India's roads, and they don't have to be sorted or cleaned before shredding.

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Georgia’s GOP-controlled legislature is taking extraordinary steps in an attempt to curtail voting access and prevent future election losses following the 2020 election.

CNN reports the state House “passed a bill this week that includes several measures that restrict voting access, including a ban on automatic voter registration, a limit on Sunday early voting days and ballot drop boxes, and a number of restrictions and ID requirements for absentee voting.”

Voting after Sunday church services, known colloquially as “souls to the polls,” is a tradition in Black communities across the country. Georgia Republicans are proposing new restrictions on weekend voting that could severely curtail it in the state. https://t.co/CS2RDepRDt

— NYT National News (@NYTNational) March 7, 2021

Today also marked the 56th commemoration of “Bloody Sunday,” in which civil rights activists marching for voting rights were brutally assaulted by state troopers in Selma, Alabama. President Biden marked the date by signing an executive order to promote voting access and calling on the Senate to pass the For the People Act, a comprehensive voting, elections and ethics bill that passed the House on Wednesday.

The legacy of Selma is that while nothing can stop free people from exercising their most sacred power as citizens, there are those who will do anything they can to take that power away. As we reflect on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, we must stay focused on the work ahead. pic.twitter.com/DDn1LFfqmi

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 7, 2021

Stacey Abrams and her voting rights organization Fair Fight also spoke out about the need to protect voting rights both nationally and in the Peach State.

On #BloodySunday, we commemorate the indomitable foot soldiers +leaders who met hatred on that bridge. We honor their fight when we demand justice, exercise our power & refuse to turn back. Yesterday, we rescued America for a time. Next, we make it permanent with #HR1/SR1 & #HR4.

— Stacey Abrams (@staceyabrams) March 7, 2021

GEORGIANS: Tomorrow, the Georgia Senate will vote on #SB241, a dangerous voter suppression bill that would harm voters and cost taxpayers more than $28 MILLION in the next election cycle alone. Here's what you can do NOW (thread): #gapol pic.twitter.com/00SIEEwM1J

— Fair Fight (@fairfightaction) March 7, 2021

Watch an MSNBC segment on the Georgia GOP’s voter suppression efforts below.

The House GOP’s No. 3 leader recently urged Republicans to make clear they’re not the party of white supremacy. Two days later, one of their members spoke at a conference organized by a known white nationalist.

The whiplash between Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) plea and Rep. Paul Gosar’s (R-Ariz.) public speech underscores just how tough it is for GOP leaders to rein in members who cater to the extreme wings of the party. As Republicans increasingly grapple with how — or even whether — to exorcise the most radical elements from their party, their leaders’ jobs won’t get any easier.

The House GOP has so far confronted no large-scale blowback from Gosar’s speech to the America First Political Action Conference, or from other incidents that link a few of its members to far-right imagery or rhetoric.

But some fear that if the conference — which just ushered in a historically diverse freshman class — doesn’t stomp out those political brush fires now, there’s a risk they will spread and engulf the party. Democrats are already trying to make QAnon, the far-reaching conspiracy theory labeled as a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI, the face of the GOP ahead of the midterms.

“I think the organization that [Gosar] spoke to is one that has expressed views that are clearly racist … This is not the kind of an organization or an event that other members of Congress should be participating in,” said Cheney, the House GOP Conference chair who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump.

“I've been very clear about the extent to which we have to stand against white supremacists, stand against anti-Semitism,” added Cheney. “And that should not be part of our public discourse.”

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise, the top two GOP leaders, have been silent on Gosar thus far, though both have condemned racism and bigotry in all forms. Said McCarthy spokesperson Mark Bednar: "There is absolutely no place for racism in our discourse or society."

Other Republicans privately said they were disturbed by Gosar’s appearance at the white nationalist conference and are concerned that it tacitly signals the embrace of extremist groups that have no place in the GOP. Only some were publicly willing to call out Gosar's attendance at the event.

“From what I understand of what AFPAC is and what it stands for, it is unbecoming of a member of Congress to speak or attend the conference,” said Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), the head of the Republican Study Committee, the largest caucus in the House GOP conference.

The episode comes as most Republicans also voted, but failed, to keep freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in her committee assignments after she circulated conspiracy theories and endorsed social media posts calling for violence against Democrats.

Now, Republicans are questioning whether the embrace of far-right groups by federal lawmakers is giving power to organizations that had previously been stifled on the national stage.

“It's always been lurking in the shadows. And then they have a convention. ... It is completely nuts,” one GOP lawmaker said of the AFPAC event, where organizer Nick Fuentes called for protection of “the white demographic core” and pushed other racist rhetoric.

“It's really disgusting, nefarious stuff," this Republican lawmaker added. "And this is the stuff you have to just actively beat back.”

The GOP’s rightward drift toward extremism has been years in the making, but the violent insurrection on Jan. 6 — when white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and QAnon believers stormed the Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win — has only amplified a bitter internal debate about the direction of the party.

Democrats argue that moves like Gosar's speech prove that extremists are winning the battle for the GOP's soul.

“The idea that a sitting member of Congress would go and show his support and solidarity for racist white nationalists is an outrage,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the lead impeachment manager during Trump's second impeachment trial, which ended in his acquittal of inciting the Jan. 6 attack.

“But it is a terrible statement about the moral deterioration of the Republican Party. I would hope that the Republican caucus would immediately take action against members who are consorting with white nationalists,” he added.

That's not to say House Republican leaders haven't vocally condemned white supremacy, anti-Semitism and other racist beliefs. Gosar himself denounced “white racism” and later tried to distance himself from AFPAC. But the Arizonan also told the Washington Post that he was seeking to cultivate relationships with new voters.

GOP leaders have dismissed accusations that Republicans are increasingly tolerant of far-right ideologies in an effort to not alienate voters, particularly those brought to into the party's fold under Trump.

Yet the former president has winked at the QAnon movement and refused to denounce white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys during the first presidential debate last year. Instead, Trump said the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by,” which the group has turned into a slogan. He also said there were "very fine people on both sides" of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

“I think most people are going out of their way to distance themselves from the extremists,” said another GOP lawmaker. “But some people are embracing it. And other people may be not paying enough attention to what they’re doing.”

“We all need to pay more attention to the things we say and do, and where we say and do them,” this Republican lawmaker added.

McCarthy (R-Calif.), who wants to unite the party in his drive to win back the House, has recently claimed to not know what QAnon is and routinely mispronounces its name. He also did little to stop Greene from winning her runoff race even after POLITICO uncovered a string of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic Facebook videos she made.

And Scalise (R-La.), who survived a 2017 assassination attempt when a radicalized left-wing gunman opened fire on GOP members playing baseball, has called out Democrats for failing to condemn violence during Black Lives Matter protests over the summer that responded to police brutality against unarmed Black people.

“We’ve been very vocal speaking out against white supremacy, any kind of bigotry, or hatred,” Scalise said. “I think it’s important that you call it out wherever you see it. Not only on the opposite side of the aisle, but on your own.”

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has gone further, making clear that far-right extremists such as Greene have no place in the party. “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country,” McConnell said last month.

This year isn't the first time House GOP leaders have faced problematic right-wing members in their ranks. Former Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) — who also spoke at AFPAC last week — espoused white nationalist views and other controversial beliefs during his time in office, but it took years for Republican leaders to punish him by kicking him off his committees. When King finally lost his primary in 2020, party leaders sighed with relief.

Today there is a growing cohort of members who could create King-like headaches for GOP leaders. Aside from Greene and Gosar, freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has associated with far-right gun groups; freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) has faced scrutiny for past social media posts about Adolf Hitler, which he later said were a mistake; and Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) were ringleaders of the effort to challenge the election certification in Congress.

Investigators are looking into what role, if any, lawmakers played in the Jan. 6 riots. Boebert has been criticized for live-tweeting Speaker Nancy Pelosi's whereabouts during the siege; she also denied giving Capitol tours to anyone other than her family ahead of the riots.

Notably, Republicans' internal discussions over how to handle far-right ideology come as they criticize Democrats for failing to loudly denounce some of their own members' controversial remarks — particularly Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), whose comments on Israel were met with a resolution from her party denouncing hate speech.

“In our political discourse, there are things that should be beyond the bounds,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.). "And ideology of hate is beyond the bounds, whether it's on the left or the right."

Since the start of the pandemic in the U.S., COVID-19 cases and deaths have been severely underreported nationwide. State officials have repeatedly been found to underreport cases in attempts to downplay the severity of the virus’s condition in their state. New York, the state that was the first to be severely impacted by COVID-19, has consistently been questioned for reporting significantly lower COVID-19 deaths than official numbers indicate.

Following the release of a report in January by New York’s attorney general, accusations that Gov. Andrew Cuomo undercounted COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes by thousands led to investigations into the state’s death count. Weeks later, senior aides to Cuomo then admitted that they rewrote reports to conceal the number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes that were counted by state health officials, The New York Times reported. By June of 2020, more than 9,000 nursing home residents had been killed by the virus, a number that had not been released or made public because top aides had written it out.

By lowering the count Cuomo’s response to the pandemic looks stronger than it actually was. The edited report was published in July and didn’t garner much attention until the attorney general’s report in January found an undercount of more than 50% in nursing homes. The report concluded that New York was the state with the highest number of COVID-19-related nursing home deaths.

While Cuomo’s administration has reported the total death count in the state, the issue was for months it didn’t specify those who lived in nursing homes and died in hospitals as nursing home deaths. The reason the administration gave for this was that data may not have been accurate at the time, however hours within the attorney general’s report, the Department of Health released the full number of nursing home deaths, a number advocates and lawmakers were requesting for months.

"While early versions of the report included out of facility deaths, the COVID task force was not satisfied that the data had been verified against hospital data and so the final report used only data for in facility deaths, which was disclosed in the report," Gary Holmes, spokesman for the state Health Department, said in a statement.

According to The New York Times, the intervention took place around the same time as  Cuomo was beginning to write his book on pandemic achievements. Aides allegedly began concealing the numbers amid criticism of how Cuomo was handling nursing home cases. Since the start of the novel coronavirus pandemic, nursing homes and assisted living facilities across the nation have been the most vulnerable due to a lack of supplies, insufficient health care, inability to social distance, and dearth of testing. Calls to better support these facilities have been ongoing since early 2020 when Cuomo issued an order that prevented nursing homes from turning away people discharged from hospitals after receiving COVID-19 treatment.

According to the Times, those involved in altering the report included the governor’s top aide Melissa DeRosa, the head of the state’s Department of Financial Services Linda Lacewell, and Cuomo’s former top adviser Jim Malatras. None of the individuals had public health experience and began concealing the numbers months before the report according to documents and interviews with six people with direct knowledge of the discussions, the Times reported.

According to an audio recording of a private meeting with Democratic lawmakers, DeRosa apologized for withholding information on nursing home data, the New York Post reported.

In her apology, she said: “basically, we froze” out of fear that the numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors and Donald Trump. Referring to Trump she added:  “He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”

“Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.”

But while DeRosa credits fears of involvement from the Justice Department, the Times reported that the undercounting began months before. Additionally, no apology was addressed or made to the grieving family members of over 13,000 seniors who passed as a result of COVID-19, many of which who were not accounted for in the state nursing home death count.

This new development in the investigation into Cuomo’s administration handling of the virus follows growing calls for his resignation after at least three women accused him of sexual harassment. Additionally, it sheds light on the ongoing issues vulnerable communities face and how government officials try to downplay them in order to uphold reputations.

"This is criminal," Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim of Queens, wrote on Twitter. "The Gov’s top advisors pushed state health officials to strip a public report of the data showing more nursing home deaths. The changes Cuomo’s aides made to the report reveal that they had the fuller accounting of NH deaths as early as the summer of 2020."

Sen. Tina Smith, the first-term Democrat from Minnesota, became the most recent Senate convert to ending the filibuster. "I believe that the filibuster should be abolished in all cases, not just for any particular piece of legislation," Smith told the Star Tribune. "We have already abolished the filibuster for judicial nominations and the Supreme Court, and to me this is a very important step that we need to take in order to make sure that the Senate can function and can do the work that we need to do."

That work includes passing the key elections and democratic reforms passed in the House this week: H.R. 1, For the People Act, and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Smith joins her Minnesota colleague Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Rules Committee, who has spoken out more strongly than ever on abolishing this obstacle to democracy. She told the Star Tribune Thursday night that "something has to change or we're going to be just in this quagmire of not being able to advance legislation." She's going to have hearings on the For the People Act democracy reform bill in her committee as soon as next week and will bring the bill to the floor.

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"I've acknowledged there's different ways you could" reform the filibuster, Klobuchar said. "You can get rid of it, which I support. You can change the numbers needed, which is something that we had talked about in early days, you know, have less numbers, not to get to 60. You can require what we call a talking filibuster, where you have to actually be there and object and speak the whole time." Any of those reforms could help, and might be necessary to get the two most vocally recalcitrant Democrats—Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—on board. Each of them has made statements harkening to the need for the minority to have a voice and for the traditions of bipartisanship to prevail.

Sinema says the filibuster should be maintained to "fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans." That's simply not happening. What's happening is one Republican refuses to give unanimous consent for the Senate to move forward on a bill, and then gets to go on his or her merry way, not having to actually provide justification for their opposition to the bill. There's no debate. There's no consideration. There's no compromise. There's Republican obstruction and its easy for them, painless. At the very least, they need to be forced to go back to the tradition, grand or not, of having to stand on the floor for hours on end justifying their position. They have got to be made to work for this.

Better still, abolish the damn thing once and for all. But what if Republicans take the Senate back? Sen. Smith has been thinking about that. She explained in a Facebook post how her thinking evolved and how when she came to the Senate, she "started out believing that we should keep the filibuster." That changed in her actual experience there.  "I kept thinking about what would happen, what would stop a conservative president and a conservative Congress from doing terrible damage, for example, to women's health care without the filibuster," Smith said. "But the more I've thought about this, the more I realized that the filibuster has long been the enemy of progress."

Even Sen. Jon Tester, the Democrat from Montana who thinks that a $15/hour minimum wage is too much, is considering a change to the filibuster. "We’ve got to figure out whether leadership on both sides wants to have obstruction, or if they want to come together and try to get some things done," Tester told The Washington Post.

"It will be a Democratic Party Armageddon in 2022 if we sit here on our butts and say, 'Oh, we're sorry, we're not as determined to get our agenda passed as Republicans were,'" Sen. Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat spearheading filibuster reform efforts, told the Post. He's right. With the Supreme Court seemingly ready to gut the remains of the Voting Rights Act and 43 states considering some 253 voter restriction bills, it could be Armageddon for Democrats. If the elections reforms passed by the House don't become law, Democratic voters will be blocked from the polls. If President Biden's critical agenda to address the pandemic, economic inequality, climate change, immigration—everything!—is stymied, Democratic voters won't want to go to the polls in 2022.

Biden sure as hell recognizes that. That's why the former longtime member of the Senate is open to filibuster reform. "One thing that is nonnegotiable is him delivering for the American people," Emmy Ruiz, the White House political director, told the Post. "The number one priority here is to get this agenda, this bold agenda, passed through Congress." Another White House official said the "'strategy is adjusting every single day,' reiterating Biden’s position that the filibuster is not sacrosanct while the agenda is."

For his part, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is not showing his cards. "The bottom line is we’re going to come together as a caucus and figure out a way to get the bold action that the American people demand," Schumer has said. "We will put bills on the floor. We're not going to be the legislative graveyard." There's only one way to achieve that: either make the filibuster so painful Republicans abandon it, or simply end it.

Across the nation, a number of Republican governors are rushing to drop mask mandates and end social distancing guidelines. It almost seems as if they’re both convinced that President Biden will provide competent federal distribution of vaccines that will overcome even their most determined efforts to engage in abuse of the public trust. Or they simply want to screw things up and prevent schools, the economy, and the nation from returning to anything like “normal.” The harm being done by these policies, along with Republican resistance to the vaccine, means that some states aren’t just likely to suffer unnecessarily, but could remain hotbeds of coronavirus activity, kicking out dangerous variants, long after this whole mess should have been over.

In other words: If governors like Greg Abbott would just hold their damn horses for a few weeks, and white Republicans would stop checking in with QAnon long enough to get a jab, this thing could be over. Their shouts of “freedom!” are making the whole pandemic both worse and longer.

Fresh evidence of this comes in the form of a new CDC report issued on Friday. That report drives home the facts that: “Mandating masks was associated with a decrease in daily COVID-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days of implementation.” States that put mask mandates in place and kept them in place, have been rewarded with lower cases of COVID-19, lower hospitalizations, and a lower rate of deaths. On the other hand: “Allowing on-premises restaurant dining was associated with an increase in daily COVID-19 case growth rates 41–100 days after implementation and an increase in daily death growth rates 61–100 days after implementation.”

Now, guess which way Republicans have been moving.

At their base, there’s nothing really new in this report. It’s been understood from early in the pandemic that in-restaurant dining was one of the activities that was most likely to spread the disease. After all, packing people into close quarters in a situation where opening their mouths much of the time seems like a perfect formula for exchanging a virus in wholesale quantities. It’s understandable that restaurant and bar owners have been upset about the restrictions—especially since owning a restaurant is often a extremely risky proposition in the best of times. But populating restaurants to the level necessary to keep them profitable, and at the same time keeping them safe, may be simply impossible.

At the same time, it’s been well understood from the beginning that mask wearing is one of the best ways to reduce transmission of COVID-19. Republicans may shout about early statements from Dr. Anthony Fauci, or claim that transmission of the virus through aerosol means masks are ineffective, but … they’re just wrong. Despite “experts” that claim masks don’t stop viruses, but can somehow block transmission of infinitely smaller oxygen molecules, the CDC, World Health Organization, and every serious academic study has demonstrated the effectiveness of masks. 

The new CDC report gives that effectiveness a big fat underline. In states that issued mask mandates, it took less than three weeks to find an associated decrease in daily COVID-19 cases. This same drop could be seen in counties and localities that implemented mask mandates even when the state government refused to take action. 

What is new is the the extended confirmation of just how strong the effect can be from these simple actions. A mask mandate profoundly affected the rate of growth of COVID-19 for the better. Opening restaurants for on-site dining profoundly affected that rate of growth for the worse. On the chart below, the “reference period” represents the 20 days immediately following a mask mandate (left) or opening restaurants for on-site dining (right).

Notice that the effect here may be even greater than it seems at first. The mask mandate charts show that these were, on average, issued at a time when the rate growth of COVID-19 was increasing. In other words, governors put these mandates in place when things were bad and getting worse. Even so, the mask mandate rapidly turned the situation around, cutting the rate of growth to levels well below the point of implementation.

On the other hand, note that in-restaurant dining was usually implemented at a point when cases were declining. This is exactly the situation many states are seeing today, where governors are responding to a decline over a period of a few weeks by opening the doors on restaurants and bars. Though the effect was not immediate, a few weeks of reopening restaurants was enough to reverse the decline in case counts and send COVID-19 numbers back into a growth cycle.

One last time, the conclusion to the report:

“Community mitigation measures can help reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. In this study, mask mandates were associated with reductions in COVID-19 case and death growth rates within 20 days, whereas allowing on-premises dining at restaurants was associated with increases in COVID-19 case and death growth rates after 40 days.”

All of which is why this is exactly the wrong time to end mask mandates and open restaurants. These are just two factors in a larger set of issues. Still, they are two factors which we know have a sizable impact on the course of COVID-19 infections. And a quick look at the CDC chart shows one thing very clearly—COVID-19 deaths track very closely to higher rates of infection. 

As of a Tuesday press conference, President Biden indicated that enough vaccine will be available to vaccinate every American adult by the end of May. That’s just 12 weeks, or 87 days, away. Even if Republicans are still reluctant to get vaccinated, the nation can cross that boundary with COVID-19 numbers trending downward, or it can happen during a desperate fight to put down a fourth wave of cases.

Controlling COVID-19 is within our grasp. We can get there, even if some Republican governors are failing to deploy a full third of their vaccine. Even if some Republican governors are sending vaccines to their white supporters first, leaving Black and Latino neighborhoods facing a huge shortage. Even if white Republicans spurn the vaccine out of some brainless QAnon-inspired conspiracy theory. We can get there because President Biden is securing vaccine in such quantities that states, even Republican-run states, are going to succeed in spite of themselves. But we can get there better, more safely, more quickly, if everyone will just sit the #$@% down and keep their masks on another few weeks.

Now … who wants to be the last American to die from COVID-19, so that Greg Abbott can throw up a distraction to his disastrous handling of energy policy?

Republicans are laying claim to an unlikely mantle: the party of women’s sports.

Eager to find a winning culture war issue, former President Donald Trump and other GOP leaders are increasingly touting themselves as champions of women in sports by pushing back against President Joe Biden's efforts to expand transgender rights.

The effort — which critics call transphobic and likely to backfire — extends from the roughly 20 Republican-controlled states where legislators are advancing bills to keep transgender women from participating in interscholastic sports, to Trump himself, who told attendees this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida that it was “so important” to “protect women’s sports.”

“This issue will help [the] GOP win midterms,” said Stephen Miller, the former Trump White House aide who helped advise the former president on his CPAC speech.

Some Republicans say touting the issue will unite two key elements of a winning electoral coalition: the party’s socially conservative base, which mostly rejects the expansion of gay and transgender rights, and more moderate voters in the suburbs, who are less reliable GOP supporters but may revolt against what they see as Democratic overreach.

“It’s a cross-cutting issue,” Miller added. “Biden’s activist staff are clearly making him embrace policies that alienate non-ideological voters.”

But Republicans’ claim as defenders of women’s sports is a tenuous one, at best. For the duration of Trump’s presidency, he was largely at odds with women athletes at the collegiate and professional levels, with most championship teams refusing to visit the White House in protest of his policies and personal treatment of women. And just last month, former appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), who introduced a bill last September to prohibit transgender women from competing in gender-segregated sports, sold her stake in Atlanta’s WNBA franchise after the players on the team openly campaigned for the Democrat who defeated her, now-Sen. Raphael Warnock, in a special election in January.

“If Republicans are thoughtfully talking about this — by being supportive of transgender Americans while identifying an equity issue — it could be attractive to more moderate suburban voters. But if it’s introduced cruelly or as a way to ‘shame the libs,’ this isn’t going to be helpful,” said veteran GOP strategist Rob Stutzman.

Several prominent Republican officials and potential 2024 hopefuls have already begun testing messages around women’s sports. Some claim transgender women enjoy performance advantages over their cisgender teammates and competitors, and could thus cause the latter group to lose out on scholarships and collegiate opportunities. Currently, the National Collegiate Athletic Association requires transgender women to undergo 12 months of treatment to suppress testosterone before they are permitted to compete with other women.

Others claim trans-inclusive sports policies are an infringement on women’s rights or a violation of Title IX, the 1972 federal law that paved the way for women’s equality in sports and education.

“Across the sporting world, the game is being rigged against women and in favor of biological men,” former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who is widely expected to launch a 2024 presidential bid, wrote in a National Review op-ed last month.

Haley accused Biden of “paving the way for a federal mandate that all schools receiving federal funding let biological men play on women’s sports teams” after he signed an executive order to curtail discrimination against LGBTQ people in healthcare, housing and schools at the beginning of his term. “The order was framed as a matter of transgender rights. But really, it was an attack on women’s rights.”

The issue has been percolating at the state level since early 2020, when several Republican-led states began pushing for bills to limit or ban the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports. But the recent attention is part of a sharper focus on cultural issues that conservatives believe could resonate with the swing-state suburbanites whose support the GOP hemorrhaged last fall.

“This is the wedge issue that will bring suburban women back to the polls and increase their support for Republicans, and Republicans would be foolish not to lean into it,” said Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, a socially conservative group that has been privately urging Republicans to take on the subject since last year.

“I hear from mothers all the time who are getting up at the crack of dawn to take their daughters to swim practice or attending all-weekend track meets, and they do not want biological men competing on their daughters’ teams. They know that it would be detrimental to their daughters’ abilities to achieve scholarships and recognition,” Nance added.

Much of the GOP rhetoric surrounding women’s sports can be traced to Biden’s efforts on LGTBQ issues during his first weeks as president and the recent House passage of the Equality Act, which would expand anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans. In addition to taking executive action, Biden recently directed his administration to withdraw government support for a lawsuit against the state of Connecticut that seeks to block transgender athletes from competing in girls’ high school sports.

Proponents of the House bill and Biden’s actions dismissed conservative efforts to use women’s sports as a cudgel against Democrats as cruel and unlikely to yield the results Republicans desire in next year’s midterm elections.

“If Republicans want to earn the votes of suburban women, the issue that’s going to do it for them is being effective on issues that folks are having to confront at the dinner table. This is not that issue,” said Kate Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign.

Oakley also cited the Connecticut court case as a reason to reject GOP “fear-mongering” around women’s sports, noting that Selina Soule, the lead plaintiff in the case, is now a track athlete at the College of Charleston. Oakley also pointed to recent instances in which Republican state legislators who have backed bills to ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports have struggled to identify cases in their own states where an issue arose over a transgender athlete.

“This is an issue that’s completely manufactured,” Oakley said. “There are certainly folks who have daughters who are truly college-bound — and then there are parents who, let’s be honest, think that their daughters are. The time has passed for these arguments, and they’re going to fall apart really quickly.”

But conservative operatives who are hoping that Republicans will maintain a focus on women’s sports in the coming months claimed that they are simply adopting an approach first used by their political opponents.

“This is what Democrats do so well that Republicans don’t,” said Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, a group that launched anti-transgender ads about women’s sports during the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial race and 2020 general election. “They bring up the statistic of violence against transgender people — and you look at the numbers, and it’s, like, 40 people.” (An HRC report published last November identified at least 37 instances in which transgender or gender non-confirming people were killed in 2020).

One potential roadblock for Republicans who have latched onto women’s sports as a new wedge issue — from Haley and Trump to Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley — is that a growing number of GOP voters support nondiscrimination laws and protections for LGBTQ Americans. For example, a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute last year found that 61 percent of Republicans supported nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans, up 5 percentage points from the year prior.

Republicans aren't unanimously behind the strategy. Two sources familiar with the matter said Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel was part of a coalition of Trump advisers who encouraged the former president not to wade into transgender issues during his reelection campaign. And in response to a POLITICO inquiry over whether the RNC has any plans for messaging around women’s sports, spokesperson Mandi Merritt offered no indication that the committee would join Republican lawmakers and governors in their criticism of trans-inclusive sports policies.

“Republicans are proud to have doubled our LGBT support over the last four years, and we will continue to grow our big tent by supporting measures that promote fairness and effectively balance protections for LGBT Americans and those with deeply held religious beliefs,” Merritt said in an emailed statement.

Meanwhile, Stutzman warned that current figures who are talking about transgender issues — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who hung a sign outside her Capitol Hill office last week that read, “There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. Trust the science!” — have failed to introduce “a nuanced perspective” and run the risk of making the GOP appear generally transphobic.

“Every once in a while there’s an issue that has people frustrated even outside of the culture wars, and I think there is probably political grounds to be gained in the suburbs if Republicans across the spectrum can approach this correctly,” he said.

The topic already appears to be gaining attention among GOP candidates who are looking to make inroads with suburban voters while also burnishing their conservative credentials. In a fundraising email sent to her supporters this week, Ohio Senate candidate Jane Timken, a staunch Trump supporter and former state GOP chair, accused Democrats of pursuing “a mission to create a completely UNFAIR playing field for young girls and women.”

The White House hopes this will help end the “forever wars.” Some critics aren’t so sure replacing the laws will.

President Joe Biden is backing a new congressional effort to replace the legal authorizations that presidents since George W. Bush have relied on to conduct wars and counterterrorism operations in the Middle East and beyond — a signal that Biden is willing to curb his own extensive powers in the name of returning more war authority to Congress.

Several past presidential administrations have relied on two authorizations for the use of military force — known as AUMFs — to carry out military operations from Iraq to Afghanistan to Somalia to Syria. The 2001 version greenlit the fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11, and the 2002 iteration gave Bush Congress’s blessing to invade Iraq — a measure then-Senator Biden voted for.

Since then, Republican and Democratic administrations have broadly interpreted those authorizations as giving the US permission to, among other things, hunt down terrorists around the world, including assassinating Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. However, presidents still said they still held the ultimate authority to wield the military as needed in their role as commander in chief.

Concerned about the ever-widening use of force based on these authorizations, lawmakers from both parties have for years wanted to repeal the current AUMFs and replace them with updated and more limited versions, but rarely received enough congressional or White House support.

Earlier this week, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) introduced a bill that would repeal the 2002 AUMF and a 1991 measure that paved the road to war with Iraq. “Congress has a responsibility to not only vote to authorize new military action, but to repeal old authorizations that are no longer necessary,” Kaine said in a statement.

That announcement came days after the US bombed a facility in eastern Syria used by Iranian-backed militias to smuggle weapons, an operation designed as retaliation for those militants’ attacks on US and allied personnel in Iraq. The move angered a bipartisan group of senators and representatives because Biden didn’t seek congressional approval for those strikes — though he didn’t invoke the 2001 or 2002 AUMFs.

Now Biden, according to his team, agrees the AUMFs behind decades of war should go.

“We are committed to working with Congress to ensure that the authorizations for the use of military force currently on the books are replaced with a narrow and specific framework that will ensure we can protect Americans from terrorist threats while ending the forever wars,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a Friday statement to Politico later posted to Twitter.

Psaki specifically named Kaine as “a leader on questions of war powers” who “has helped build a strong bipartisan coalition that understands the importance of Congress’s constitutional prerogatives.”

Biden’s team had sent signals in recent weeks that it would support such action. During his January secretary of state confirmation hearing, Tony Blinken told lawmakers that “it’s long past time we revisit these [AUMFs] and review them. In many instances, they have been cited and used in countries and against groups that were not part of the original authorization.”

But Biden’s stance doesn’t mean new AUMFs will soon come into place, or that America’s “forever wars” will end. In fact, it’s possible whatever measures Congress and the White House agree to — if they agree at all — won’t change much.

Even a well-crafted AUMF cannot stop the president from using military force

Experts and activists cite two main concerns about what comes next after the White House’s announcement.

First, it’s unclear that a new authorization will actually limit what Biden might want the military to do in the region.

If a new AUMF “is truly narrowly crafted and contains a sunset clause, then it could be a really important step in the right direction,” said Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School. “But if it simply formalizes the forever war by creating a set of rules for using force in the Middle East in perpetuity, it’s not clear that’s an improvement.”

The new measure, then, must be written in a way that truly limits the president’s ability to interpret the law expansively. Back in January, four experts wrote in Just Security about how to do precisely that — namely that the authorization should end after no more than three years; specify the group the US is fighting against and for what purpose; and explicitly say that America isn’t authorized to strike any other organizations or other countries than those specifically named.

It’s still too early to tell, though, whether those or other criteria will guide the drafting of a 2021 AUMF. However, some would prefer Biden didn’t consider them at all and instead pushed for a complete repeal of the laws.

“Repealing the AUMFs only to replace them is not an end to forever wars,” said Stephen Miles, executive director of the progressive group Win Without War. “Going to war is supposed to be hard, and it is solely Congress’s constitutional decision. No genuine process should preordain that a new war authorization is necessary.”

Second, as mentioned above, Biden didn’t cite previous AUMFs for his Syria strike. He leaned on his Article II powers in the Constitution, which names the president as the commander in chief, thereby giving him ultimate authority over all military matters.

“I directed this military action consistent with my responsibility to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad and in furtherance of United States national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive,” he wrote to congressional leaders in a letter last week.

This means a more specific, limited AUMF might not necessarily lead Biden to always seek Congress’s approval for a military attack. He might still feel legally justified in launching an operation if he feels such a move is needed.

The White House’s announcement, therefore, hasn’t ended a roiling debate about war powers. If anything, Biden’s stance has kicked it into overdrive.

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Hovertext:
Best Westphalian Sovereignty joke all week.

Today's News:

By Maxwell Yezpitelok  Published: March 05th, 2021 

Trumpist Republican politicians like Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz appear to be mimicking their role model’s ability to send comforting signals out to white nationalists while managing to keep them at arm’s length for the sake of plausible deniability. He showed how it’s done this past weekend at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual convention in Orlando.

A cluster of young white nationalists attending the simultaneous America First Political Action Committee convention—organized by notorious “Groyper Army” leader Nicholas Fuentes—invaded the CPAC gathering, where Fuentes has been banned, on Saturday. They managed to find Gaetz, who took photos with one of the group’s leaders—an outspoken neo-Nazi who uses the nom de plume “Speckzo”—and briefly conversed with them, apparently acknowledging his familiarity with Fuentes.

The video of the interaction shows one of the Groypers asking Gaetz if he was familiar with Fuentes. Gaetz made an indistinct reply while walking away with an aide, pointing a raised index finger in the direction of the young men.

Gaetz has a history of such dalliances with far-right extremists. In 2018, he invited notorious white nationalist Chuck Johnson to the State of the Union address, giving Johnson one of his tickets to the event. Gaetz claimed disingenuously that Johnson had just happened to drop by his office the day before to discuss their mutual political interests—which Johnson claimed were marijuana, bitcoin, Trump, and animal welfare—and a spare ticket had become available.

In 2019, Gaetz hired a white nationalist named Darren Beattie to work in his office as a speechwriter. Beattie had been previously fired from the Trump administration after his connections to white-nationalist organizations was exposed. Beattie later was appointed by Trump to an international commission that oversees preservation of Holocaust-related historical sites, much to the dismay of the Anti-Defamation League. Gaetz later ran into trouble with House ethics rules for using taxpayer funds for Beattie’s salary.

Fuentes himself had attempted to enter the CPAC convention hall on Saturday with a group of fellow “Groypers,” but was turned away by organizer and security. “CPAC sucks. It’s gay,” Fuentes told the people who had gathered to watch the confrontation. “We made our point. Masks don’t work. CPAC is gay. They’re not conservative.”

As Twitter user Sarlacc Attack posted afterward, a number of the Groypers posted photos and videos from their excursion on Telegram. One of the most prolific of these is the man who uses the “Speckzo” pseudonym, who posted photos of himself with both Gaetz and Fuentes.

“Speckzo,” whose identity is currently unknown but who has boasted on social media that he lives in New York and makes $100,000 annually from his online video rants, is noteworthy for openly embracing Nazism, denying the Holocaust, and expressing sympathy for Adolf Hitler. He also has said he considers electoral democracy a failure, blaming women’s suffrage and allowing poor people to vote, adding that he considers monarchy the best political system. In one of his online rants, he also defended the enslavement of Black people, claiming they were better off under the system of slavery.

“Speckzo” also managed to get a selfie portrait of himself with Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, who addressed the America First crowd on Saturday, a day after sharing a panel at CPAC.

Fuentes’ “Groyper Army” has been intimately involved in the extremist right’s efforts to keep Trump in the presidency. Fuentes—who vowed to “destroy the GOP” if it failed to defend Trump adequately—spoke at both pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rallies in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14 and on Dec. 12, accompanied by his followers, and was present on Jan. 6 at the pro-Trump rally preceding the attack on the U.S. Capitol. A member of the “Groyper Army,” 22-year-old Riley Williams of Pennsylvania, faces multiple charges for her role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, and is believed to have stolen a laptop computer from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.

Gaetz no doubt will claim he had no idea who he was posing with on Saturday and brush off the association. But the problematic aspect of the selfies he took is less who he associates with, but instead the kind of people who seek out his approval.

With more than 20 anti-trans laws in the works across the nation, we take some comfort in the knowledge that many won’t pass out of the state House, much less the state Senate. And even if they do, we reason that with a Democrat as governor, the bills aren’t likely to become law. This means, for example, that vehemently exclusionary measures to bar transgender youth from participating on the sports teams that align with their gender identity won't become law. Or that physicians who provide gender-affirming healthcare to transgender youth won't become literal criminals. But, as is the case with the anti-trans bill gaining speed in Mississippi, comfort isn’t always available.

On Wednesday, the Mississippi House passed SB 2536, and as Daily Kos covered at the time, the state Senate passed the bill in February. The bill, which would bar transgender girls and women from participating in girls’ sports teams at both primary and secondary education levels, is headed to the governor. What’s extra concerning about this? Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, has signaled support for the measure in a March 4 tweet. And once one state adopts legislation, a disturbing precedent takes hold.

The Mississippi bill, which just passed in the House with an 81-28 vote, would first require public schools and universities in the state to designate teams as male, female, or co-ed. The bill would prevent transgender girls and women from joining girls’ teams. 

How would sex be determined? According to the bill, if one’s sex were disputed, the student-athlete would undergo an evaluation by a physician in which the medical professional would evaluate the person’s internal and reproductive anatomy as well as genetic makeup.

In a statement to ABC News, Republican state Sen. Angela Hill, who sponsored the bill, claimed that this was all about protecting [cisgender] girls in sports. She told the outlet: “If we do not move to protect female sports from biological males who have an unfair physiological advantage, we will eventually no longer have female sports.” It’s almost like women and girls only have value to the Republican party when they can be used as pawns to push an agenda.

Last month, Hill claimed she has “had numerous coaches across the state call me and believe that they feel there’s a need for a policy in Mississippi because they are beginning to have some concerns of having to deal with this,” though she did not offer specific numbers or examples of this actually happening in her state.

Reeves, like a number of Republicans, spoke out about trans-inclusive practices in sports after President Joe Biden’s recent executive order banning discrimination based on gender, including in school sports.

And, most recently, on March 4, Reeves tweeted the following about the bill approaching his desk.

Among other things, “transgenderism” is an anti-trans buzzword, as is the decision to refer to trans girls as “biological males.” The fact that this particular tweet quote tweets The Daily Wire is just the icing on the cake.

What Reeves (and so many others, of course) continue to refuse to accept is that transgender girls are girls. Cisgender girls are girls. Both are girls! That is it. President of the Human Rights Campaign Alphonso Davis expressed a similar sentiment in a statement, saying in part, “Mississippi is so determined to be on the wrong side of history that it is defying the evidence in favor of discrimination. There is simply no justification for banning transgender girls and women from participating in athletics other than discrimination.”

Now, if Reeves does sign the bill into law, that would be the biggest step forward in the anti-trans march in 2021, but not ever. For example, in 2020, Idaho actually passed an anti-trans sports bill, but that law was actually suspended by a federal district court almost immediately. Thankfully, that law has yet to be enacted. But keep in mind, this slew of anti-trans legislation is not only damaging and exclusionary, to begin with, but it’s also being pushed and sucking up valuable time during a literal global pandemic.

Legislators really do have better things to be up in arms about—like taking care of their constituents and the real problems before them, like unemployment and food and housing insecurity, and not fanning the flames of unfounded hysteria. 

linuxwrangler shares a report from PetaPixel: A programmer who goes by the name Turtius has managed to install and run a Minecraft server on a Canon SL2 DSLR camera. Turtius was working on reverse-engineering Canon's network processor when he decided to try and see if it could be done. [You can view it in action here on YouTube]. It is important to note that the camera is just the server, not the client. The game itself is running on the computer, the "world" that is displayed in-game is simply connected to the camera. Theoretically, others could connect to the camera's network and join this same Minecraft server via their own computer. [...] The SL2 does seem to be at the limits of its capability, however, as Turtius says that it can barely make photos and videos in this state and sometimes will crash. He believes that if the camera processor were a bit more powerful, custom world generation could be supported. "It's avrcraft," Turtius explains on Reddit. "It's fully running on the camera. I reverse-engineered the network module used by Canon which just so happens to expose Unix-like sockets and integrated avrcraft with Magic Lantern. It's running a custom implementation provided by Canon's operating system and using custom code to interact with the stuff provided by Canon on a lower level." You can find the full source code here on GitHub. Just be warned that you could brick your camera if you try this yourself.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By Carly Tennes  Published: March 03rd, 2021 

One week after his first drop, Q was already quoting scripture. “The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing,” Q posted on the imageboard site 4chan. The line was from Psalm 23, possibly the most well-known of the 150 psalms, and a beacon of hope for Christians going through challenging times. Is it any wonder that the fringe conspiracy theory QAnon has attracted true believers in every sense of the word?

QAnon revolves around the baseless belief that former President Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against a global cabal of Democratic elites who are Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles. Much of the lore comes from online posts, called “drops,” written by an anonymous person known as “Q” who claims to have insider knowledge. As the QAnon movement has become more culturally significant — QAnon believers were among those who took part in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building — surveys have attempted to identify just how many Americans believe in this conspiracy. While that picture is still murky, it’s become increasingly apparent that this movement has attracted a significant number of white evangelical Christians, which could have implications for the movement’s future. Evangelicals, after all, played an important role in shoring up the Tea Party’s growth and influence.

In its January 2021 American Perspectives Survey, the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life asked a random sample of more than 2,000 Americans to rate the accuracy of a series of statements. One of those statements was about the core tenet of QAnon: “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” Of the respondents who rated that statement as “mostly” or “completely” accurate, 27 percent were white evangelical Christians. Depending on how you define it, evangelical Christians make up about a quarter or less of the U.S. population, so they’re at least slightly overrepresented in the QAnon contingent. Looking at the data another way, 31 percent of white evangelical Republicans rated the statement as “mostly” or “completely” accurate. Either way you slice it, there’s significant overlap between Q followers and evangelicals.

[Related: QAnon Isn’t Going To Take Over Congress In 2020. But It’s Found A Home In The GOP.]

Another survey, conducted in October 2020 by Denison University political science professor Paul Djupe and colleagues, looked at a representative sample of more than 1,700 Americans and found that 50 percent of white evangelical Christians either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with QAnon beliefs. Comparative surveys have also shown a correlation between Christian nationalism and conspiratorial thinking, specifically a belief in QAnon. And it’s something members of the church have been sounding the alarm about for months.

While we’re still learning about the demographics of QAnon believers, surveys that look at evangelicals’ other beliefs can help explain why they may be susceptible to falling down this particular rabbit hole. A majority of evangelical Christians identify as Republicans — 56 percent according to the Pew Research Center’s 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study — and they are more likely than Democrats and the general public to express belief in QAnon. In a Morning Consult survey from late January, 24 percent of Republicans said the QAnon conspiracy was at least “somewhat accurate,” compared with 19 percent of Democrats. Republican belief in the conspiracy dropped noticeably after the attack on the Capitol, as a series of surveys months before, immediately after, and several weeks after the attack showed, but Republicans remained more likely to support the belief than the general public (18 percent).

Evangelicals are also significantly less trustful of news media, meaning journalists’ fact-checking and debunking of QAnon is less likely to be convincing.

“I’m actually not surprised that evangelicals are more likely to believe those kinds of things,” said Samuel Perry, a professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. “Evangelicals are not socially isolated, but they are informationally isolated.”

That dynamic is apparent in surveys as well. For instance, a Pew survey from 2019 found that 44 percent of the public believed journalists had high ethical standards, while only 27 percent of white evangelical Christians did. And 7 percent of white evangelical Christians said they had a “great deal” of confidence that journalists would act in the best interest of the public, compared with 15 percent of total respondents who felt that way.

[Related: How Marjorie Taylor Greene Won, And Why Someone Like Her Can Win Again]

While evangelical Christians are less likely to trust the news media, they have a lot of trust in, and enduring affection for, Trump. As recently as October, close to 80 percent of white evangelical Christians said they supported Trump, and they have been much more likely than the general public to call him “morally upstanding” and “honest”; in fact, 15 percent and 23 percent said those respective terms described Trump “very well,” compared with 8 percent and 12 percent of all respondents. Since Trump is cast as the protagonist in the QAnon narrative, the hero who will save us all from the evil cabal of baby-eaters, it’s understanding that those who support him the most could find that idea appealing.

“The narrative of QAnon, of Donald Trump as this lone warrior who nobody understands and nobody believes but who is fighting the good fight, I think they identify with that,” Perry said. “They feel themselves misunderstood and victimized and that they are fighting the good fight that nobody recognizes.”

But perhaps the biggest connection between the world of QAnon and the world of evangelical Christians is one that’s much harder to quantify and capture, but it seems obvious when talking to someone from either group. The QAnon movement has suffered multiple failed prophecies, predictions for events that never came to pass. To continue holding onto beliefs in spite of those disappointments, followers need something many evangelicals have in spades: faith.

“People of faith believe there is a divine plan — that there are forces of good and forces of evil at work in the world,” said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. “QAnon is a train that runs on the tracks that religion has already put in place.”

It’s no surprise that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cares more about the rich than the economically vulnerable. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis has not only downplayed the virus, but prioritized the health and safety of those he can profit from. 

While a majority of Florida’s eldest residents have struggled to not only sign up but receive their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, almost all wealthy people 65 years and older were vaccinated by mid-January, according to a community newsletter obtained by the Miami Herald. Additionally, those being vaccinated were ensured that despite most of the state being unable to receive their first dose, they would have access to both the first and second dose of the vaccine. 

“We are fortunate to have received enough vaccines to ensure both the first and second for those vaccinated. At this time, however, the majority of the State has not received an allocation of first doses of vaccines for this week and beyond, and the timing of any subsequent deliveries remains unclear,” management of Ocean Reef Club, located in north Key Largo, said in a Jan. 22 message to residents.

But that’s not all. After prioritizing vaccinating the white and rich, DeSantis’ political committee raised at least $2.7 million in the month of February alone. Records indicate this is the highest amount he has raised in a single month since he first ran for governor in 2018. After the community was vaccinated, former Republican governor of Illinois Bruce Rauner, who is also a resident of Ocean Reef, wrote the DeSantis campaign a check for $250,000.

While it is unclear where these communities got their vaccine doses from, according to the Florida Division of Elections, the only people from Key Largo who gave to DeSantis’ political committee live in Ocean Reef, the community that was prioritized for COVID-19 vaccines. 

A spokesperson for DeSantis’ office told the Miami Herald the governor was not involved in selecting the Ocean Reef Club for early vaccination distributions but did not explain how they received them. “Florida was the first state to prioritize seniors,’’ she said. “The state has utilized a variety of approaches including walk-up, drive-thru, and faith-based initiatives to ensure vaccine access to all eligible Floridians, particularly in underserved communities. These efforts have resulted in Florida vaccinating over 50% of our state’s senior population — the highest of any state in the nation.”

But while DeSantis’ office claims that they have been prioritizing vaccinating seniors, data indicates otherwise. The reality is DeSantis has been prioritizing wealthy and white seniors, with vaccinations meant for rural Black communities being given to wealthy white people. State records indicate that while 17% of the state’s population is Black, by the end of February only 5.6% of those vaccinated in the state were Black. Investigations into the racial disparities of vaccinations and DeSantis’ political selection process are being called for. 

But Ocean Reef isn’t the only example in which those vaccinated early in Florida were connected to DeSantis. Last month DeSantis set up a pop-up vaccine clinic for Manatee County residents. However, instead of offering the vaccinations to all those eligible in the county as advertised, the clinic was limited to people living in only two zip codes: 34202 and 34211. Those zip codes represent the most affluent areas in the county, with a majority white community. Additionally, it was noted that one of the communities with access to the vaccines DeSantis provided is home to the family of one of his biggest campaign donors.

Instead of apologizing and acknowledging his actions, DeSantis threatened to cancel the vaccine clinic after criticism from lawmakers that he was excluding some residents in the county and prioritizing the wealthy, Daily Kos reported. He then set up two other pop-up clinics with similar zip code restrictions in Charlotte and Sarasota counties, the Herald-Tribune reported. By selecting communities that get the vaccine, DeSantis not only makes political moves to his benefit but allows these residents to bypass state and local vaccine registration systems. 

According to the Miami Herald, reporters have consistently requested that the DeSantis administration provide locations and criteria used to distribute COVID-19 vaccines, to no avail. To date, the state has no written criteria to determine which communities receive the pop-up vaccine clinics and why. Florida Department of Health records indicate that one-fourth of all vaccines went to Publix supermarkets, but where the stores allocated their doses remains unaccounted for. 

DeSantis is clearly not only prioritizing the white and rich but profiting off of the craven move. Instead of working to vaccinate all residents in his state, DeSantis is playing political games in efforts to advance his career. Not only is he leaving out people of color and the most vulnerable in his efforts to vaccinate the rich, but DeSantis also refused to vaccinate teachers and educators under 50. As a result, CVS pharmacies in the state are taking matters into their own hands and vaccinating teachers despite age limits on vaccine recipients imposed by the state, the Associated Press reported.

CVS’s decision follows new guidance from the Biden administration on vaccinating educators and childcare workers. According to The Hill, Biden called on states to prioritize teachers for vaccinations, with a goal that every teacher get at least one dose of the vaccine by the end of March. While Florida claims it was prioritizing teachers, the state was only vaccinating K-12 school employees 50 years old and older.

With one of the highest rates of coronavirus infection, Florida still lags behind in its prevention and vaccination efforts. Since the start of the pandemic, DeSantis has actively ignored efforts to stop the spread of the virus and seems to have no intention of changing his motives. His actions need to be investigated and he must be held accountable. 

If the system were fair, they say, it would be unfair to us.

The House stayed in session late Wednesday to wrap up a critical week of work: passing H.R. 1, the sweeping voting and democracy reforms, and an expansive overhaul of American policing, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The House was shuttered Thursday, a result of the threat of violence against the Capitol bubbling up from those forces that, in part, make the legislation necessary: those with fascist and white supremacist instincts to impose their will over the majority, and particularly citizens of color, by keeping them out of the polls and under constant threat from law enforcement.

Each bill would restart the crucial work of racial justice, providing real and transformative changes to federal elections by ensuring equal access to the voting booth and federal representation, and in policing by creating national standards for law enforcement and constraints on the use of force, including the kind of force police used in killing George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Each bill faces the ridiculous hurdle of a Democratic majority in the Senate that could fail to pass them because of what former President Barack Obama calls a "Jim Crow relic," the filibuster.

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There's a depressingly long history of the use of the filibuster to stop civil rights, voting rights, immigrant rights and—since the ascendancy of Mitch McConnell to Republican leadership—any and all progressive priorities that majorities of Americans support (which doesn't need to be rehashed here). But the passage of these two laws comes at what could be a breaking point for the nation, and the convergence of the House work happening in the midst of another serious threat to the heart of democracy—we have to carry that history to this moment. The Senate, and specifically the eight Democratic senators who say they are opposed to abolishing the filibuster, have to reckon with it. They have to reckon with that and the fact that right now, 43 state legislatures have more than 250 new and proposed laws to restrict voting, which could mean the end of Democrats winning congressional majorities again for the foreseeable future.

That's not going to be corrected unless the Senate passes these bills. That's not going to happen unless those eight senators, but particularly Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have gone out of their way in vocal opposition to getting rid of the filibuster—relent. To that end, good government scholar Norm Ornstein has some ideas. He recommends taking Sinema's and Manchin's views at face value, that they want to preserve the rights of the minority and that they want to preserve the filibuster to "fully consider, debate, and reach compromise on legislative issues that will affect all Americans," in Sinema's words, and enacting reforms that would force that—debate and consideration. Do it by making the minority do the work, for once, of having that debate.

As it stands, 60 senators have to agree in order to get everything done, meaning a minority of 40 can stop everything just by having one senator object to moving forward on a bill and forcing a cloture vote. Turn that on its head and put the burden on the 40, Ornstein argues. Make those 40 be present and keep debating and keep voting to maintain their 40 votes—"including weekends and all-night sessions"—and once they couldn't sustain those 40 votes, debate would end with an up-or-down vote for final passage. Other options would be to go back to the idea of the "present and voting" standard; the Senate would have to have three-fifths of those senators present, or to narrow the supermajority to 55 rather than 60. Keep them on the floor debating, and force them to have all their members there, all the time, to debate and to share their views. To explain to the American public and their fellow senators why they are so opposed to ending police brutality, or why they believe every American citizen should not have equal access to the ballot.

The critical thing is to end the silent filibuster in which one senator can object to moving forward, force the Senate to halt all its work while "debate" time lapses, and then they can all swan off for a few days or a long weekend, then come back and kill the bill in the cloture vote. Make them stay in D.C. and stand on the floor for all those "debate" hours actually debating. If Manchin, Sinema and all really want to preserve the supposed tradition of the Senate filibuster, them they couldn't possibly object to making it like the "tradition" they saw in the old movie.

That's not the only possibility for restoring actual majority rule for the Senate and for the nation's democracy. Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, who has been working for filibuster reform his entire tenure in the Senate, is a lead sponsor of the Senate's version of the For the People Act. He told Ron Brownstein that representative government "slid over the cliff, and [it's as if] we caught a root, and we are just holding on by our fingertips" after the 2020 election and Trump's efforts to subvert it. "We must find a way to pass this bill. It is our responsibility in our majority […] to defend citizens' rights to participate in our democracy. There is no other acceptable outcome." He wants, at the very least, to reform the filibuster for democracy-reform legislation. His strategy "is to encourage an extended debate on the bill, both within the committee and on the Senate floor, and to allow any senator to offer amendments."

Once they got to the point of a cloture vote for final passage, if Republicans blocked it, the Democratic majority (with Vice President Harris) could vote then and there to "carve out" election reform or civil rights legislation from the filibuster, allowing it to pass with a simple majority. Or they could change the filibuster rules for this category of legislation, telling Republicans "you’d better be here day and night, because we are going to go for weeks and if you are not here, we are going to a final vote on the bill."

Merkley has a strong ally in this, particularly on H.R. 1. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Rules Committee, is fired up to get the For the People Act passed. She told Mother Jones' Ari Berman, "I would get rid of the filibuster. […] I have favored filibuster reform for a long time and now especially for this critical election bill." This is her most proactive stated reform position to date. "We have a raw exercise of political power going on where people are making it harder to vote and you just can't let that happen in a democracy because of some old rules in the Senate," she told Berman. She is planning to hold hearings on S. 1, the Senate's version of the bill, in Rules Committee this month and advance the bill to the floor, setting up this filibuster fight. It's the critical bill to have this fight for, filibuster scholar Adam Jentleson said. It would be "poetic justice," to do it. "You would be ending the filibuster on an issue of civil rights."

At the very least, the filibuster has to be reformed to make Republicans do the work and show their obstruction of progress before the whole nation. They have to stand on the Senate floor for hours on end, be forced to be at the Capitol to do it, and tell us why they believe whole swathes of Americans should be refused the vote and terrorized by police.